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Our Practicum students begin arriving today! Are you interested in becoming a part of their experience here? Read more below in the article that appears in the Summer 2010 Journal, which will be mailed this week.
Each year, community leaders from developing countries come to the SIFAT campus in rural Alabama for 10 intensive weeks to learn appropriate technologies and self-help skills to make a difference in their villages and cities. We refer to them as students, but their ages range from early 20s to late 60s. Some are pastors, while others run nonprofit organizations. All of our students care deeply about their communities and want to learn ways to foster community development and self-help.
During the Practicum, students learn to purify water, make rooftop gardens, build simple water pumps, make low-cost reading glasses for literacy programs, preserve foods, improve child survival, promote safe motherhood, foster microenterprise and small loans, build fuel-efficient cookstoves, prevent tropical diseases and much more. They also learn how to organize communities for action and write project proposals. We need your help! Would you give or raise a $500 scholarship to enable a student to be trained from Vietnam, the Philippines, India, Thailand, Zambia, the Congo (DRC) and other countries? We have several potential students hoping and praying to be able to come this year to be empowered to return and help others. Your $500 is a long-term investment in a community leader who returns home to share all that he or she has learned. It is a blessing to see the results and fruit continue to bear from SIFAT alumni through the years. Please contact Kathy at brysonk@sifat.org for more information. Please designate your gift “scholarship fund”. The 2009 Practicum has begun! This marks our second week of classes. Most of last week was spent learning “the basics” – computer and Internet training, cross cultural studies and learning important Southern words/phrases, such as y’all. This fall, one of our American students, Katherine Harrison, will be writing about her experiences for our blog. Below is one of her reflections from last week, introducing herself and why she is participating in the Practicum. Katherine is a member of Brookhaven UMC (Brookhaven, Miss.) and was a member of their SIFAT mission team to Ecuador in July 2009. Katherine is also keeping a personal blog here. Through more tears than I can count and a strange meandering path, God has brought me here to the SIFAT campus. I say He brought me here because I was unsure I would be able to attend. In fact, by the middle of last week, I had begun making plans not to attend and to continue on this spiritual journey at home (for the moment). But God and Kathy Bryson had other plans and the SIFAT door kept opening back up even though I was steady trying to close it. I have an image of me leveraging my weight against a door to close it and there’s this big God-sized foot lodged in there to keep it open. So here I am and I can honestly tell you I have no idea why or where it may lead. That’s not to say I am not focused or enthusiastic about being here. I am! I feel so blessed! I also feel a bit unworthy. I am not a community leader, a pastor, the head of some organization or a full-time missionary. These people are established and they know their place in God’s kingdom. They have specific missions to carry out. God may change those plans mid-stream, I know, but they at least have a stream. I don’t. Yet. We have asked Practicum student Becky Forrest to let us publicly post the recaps e-mails to friends and family. Becky is an American and has just begun full-time missions after 29 years as an accountant. Through her posts, we hope you will understand a little more about what the Practicum is and what students are learning. Below is her most recent e-mail. Thanks for sharing with us, Becky! Last week. Wow, I can’t believe the last week of training is here. It is bittersweet. I look forward to returning home, but I will miss my new family I have made here so very much. All 16 of us have gotten so close, and we realize most of us will not meet again until we see the pearly gates. I have gotten very close to two of the Nigerians, and maybe one day I will get to visit with them. I plan to stay in touch with email. The internet is a great tool for keeping in touch. Friday night we have our graduation ceremony, and it will be very special for all of us. One of the biggest lessons I have learned is we are all brothers and sisters in Christ and regardless of the color of our skin or the language we speak we are all God’s children. We have asked Practicum student Becky Forrest to let us publicly post the recaps e-mails to friends and family. Becky is an American and has just begun full-time missions after 29 years as an accountant. Through her posts, we hope you will understand a little more about what the Practicum is and what students are learning. Below is her most recent e-mail. Thanks for sharing with us, Becky!
I can’t believe I have been gone 2 months today. The time has just flown by. My brain is trying hard to retain all the information we have been learning. We have covered such a variety of subjects.
This past week we spent most of the time learning about microenterprise and microfinance. Our instructor was from the Chalmers Center at Covenant College at Lookout Mtn., Ga. He was a wonderful teacher and had spent 20 years in Africa helping to set up MFI’s. We learned about the premiere example, The Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. It is a fascinating story of how it has helped bring people out of poverty by making small loans for starting micro enterprise. If you have time Google it and find out more.
We also picked up again with Christian leadership. We worked out of a book the 3 Colors of Ministry. We answered 180 questions to determine our top 5 gifts out of 30. My top 2 were Missionary and Voluntary poverty. Can you believe that? I guess I am finally in the right field. God has been really confirming that I am doing his will in many different ways lately. I knew my life was never going to be the same after I came here, but it is really hard to explain how different my life seems now.
We cooked street foods on our cookstoves we made several weeks ago to show how money could be made from selling foods cooked over an open fire on the street. It was our lunch, and we all thought we would starve before we finally got everything cooked.
Thursday came food preservation, canning, it had been many years since I have done that but it is such a good way to preserve foods. Many things I have learned in my past have been very valuable with some of our lessons.
We had Friday off, so I learned how to blog on SIFAT’s website, so when I get to Bolivia everyone can keep up with me by reading the blog.
God Bless, We have asked Practicum student Becky Forrest to let us publicly post the recaps e-mails to friends and family. Becky is an American and has just begun full-time missions after 29 years as an accountant. Through her posts, we hope you will understand a little more about what the Practicum is and what students are learning. Below is her most recent e-mail. Thanks for sharing with us, Becky!
I can’t believe we only have three more weeks of training. The students all miss home, but we have become one big happy family. We share our problems and unite in prayer together. My friend Raphael from Nigeria received a call from him wife last night to tell him that her sisters were in an auto accident yesterday. One sister died, and the other is in serious condition. He was greatly troubled because he cannot be there for his wife, so we all prayed with him for her and her family. It is very hard for our international students being so far from home. The American students will be experiencing much the same when we travel to our various mission fields. This week we have continued in water and sanitation. Monday, we built a sand filter for cleaning and sanitizing water with sand. It is a very simple design perfect for people to use in their homes to have safe drinking water, which is one of the biggest problems in the developing countries. Living here in the U.S., we don’t realize the importance of clean water and just going to the tap whenever we want. One of our students said he walked 3 hours to get water from one of the villages where he works as a missionary. Tuesday, our class was on latrines with a visit in the afternoon to the water treatment in the big city of Wedowee. Wednesday came the fun part of the week. Well drilling!!!!!! We tried 3 holes and hit rock every time. The system we used was the one Addison learned in Bolivia and drilled 2 wells in Ixiamas, where I will be interning next year. Manpower does all the work. We all were covered in mud by the end of the day Wednesday and Thursday. Friday was our big outing to Auburn University. We met with one of the professors there and learned about Water Watch. They are teaching communities all over the world how to take care of their watersheds. We had lunch at Auburn UMC, a very mission minded church with 4000 members. They have been having mission teams since the 90’s and raised the money to help SIFAT build a bridge in Bolivia. On our way home we stopped in at Auburn’s fisheries and learned about fish farms. Many tropical communities have ponds of tilapia for cash crops. Auburn fisheries are the best in the world. The international students are going to Ft. Walton Beach for the weekend to speak at the First UMC there. A couple of the U.S. students are going to take the weekend off and maybe go hiking or to a movie – for sure out to dinner. We are supposed to get hooked up to DSL next week. We have been praying that would happen because out internet service is really slow. My seedlings in my tire gardens (my class project) are really growing and I’ll post some pictures on Facebook when we get DSL. Love to all, Becky |
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