More than anything, Tjiyapana wants a Seventh-day Adventist church building to be constructed on his land. The nearest church building is located in town, and it takes seven hours to walk there. Tjiyapana, like many Himba people, doesn’t own a car. He has already offered a plot of land to the Adventist Church to build a church.
To Sabbath School teachers: This story is for Sabbath, August 30.
By Andrew McChesney
Deep in the desert of Namibia live a people who live like they have lived for hundreds of years. The Himba people are semi-nomadic, traveling with herds of cattle and goats from borehole to borehole to make sure that they have sufficient water during the long, hot months of the dry season. During the short rainy season, families return to their settlements of three or four huts, called homesteads, to grow maize to sustain them for the rest of the year.
Tjiyapana is the chief of Okoupawe village. The village is comprised of 15 families who live on 15 homesteads when they are not traveling with their animals in northern Namibia. He is learning about God through an evangelistic initiative that has its roots in a 1993 Thirteenth Sabbath project. This is his story.
Tiyapana isn’t sure about his age. His best guess is 82. He has four wives and more children and grandchildren than he can count.
Tjiyapana first heard about God from his parents. His parents, in turn, heard about God from the first Adventist missionary in the area, a white man from Portugal, who arrived three decades earlier as part of an outreach initiative co-funded by a 1993 Thirteenth Sabbath Offering.
“My parents told me that we need to give glory and honor to God,” Tjiyapana said. “I decided to listen to my parents.”
So, when he became village chief, he reached out to the Adventist Church to ask for someone to teach him and his people about God. A Bible worker came on Sabbaths and read under a tree from the Bible. Tjiyapana listened. Like many Himba people, he has never gone to school and cannot read.
Then the Bible worker organized two weeks of evangelistic meetings. He brought a projector and a generator, and he projected images on a screen in a tent set up just a short distance from the tree.
Tjiyapana went to the meetings. He was interested to learn more about God. But he also was distracted with worry. The area was caught up in an unusually dry summer. Rain had not fallen for many months.
The Bible worker saw Tjiyapana’s anxiety and prayed for rain. He pleaded with the Lord to open up His good treasure, the heavens, to give rain to the land in its season and to bless all the work of the Himba people’s hands. He prayed for a week.
At the start of the second week of meetings, rain began to fall. It was two months before the rainy season. Light showers watered the parched ground during the day and stopped just in time for the evangelistic meetings in the evenings. The rain continued for four months. It was a time of great rejoicing for the Himba people.
“We knew that God was with us,” Tjiyapana said. “He provides.”
The village chief saw God’s presence in other ways as well. After the meetings, he noticed a change come over the village. People stopped stealing. They stopped fighting. They stopped drinking. He was pleased.
More than anything, Tjiyapana wants a Seventh-day Adventist church building to be constructed on his land. The nearest church building is located in town, and it takes seven hours to walk there. Tjiyapana, like many Himba people, doesn’t own a car. He has already offered a plot of land to the Adventist Church to build a church.
“What I want is a church building,” he said. “I want a place to worship. That is the only thing that I request.”
In the meantime, 30 to 60 Himba children and adults gather under the tree on Sabbaths to sing songs of praise to God and to listen to the Bible worker teach from the Bible. During the week, the Bible worker also goes from hut to hut to teach the Bible.
Tjiyapana said he and his people want to know God better.
“We were created in the image of God, so He is the one we want,” he said. “We desire Him.”
Pray that the Himba people may know God in Namibia. Part of a 1993 Thirteenth Sabbath Offering initiated an outreach program to the Himba people that led to the worship services at Tjiyapana’s village. Just as the blessing of that offering is still being felt in the village, your contribution to this quarter’s Thirteenth Sabbath projects can also, with God’s blessing, have a long-lasting impact on Namibia and beyond. Thank you for your offering on September 27.
