OSMOND — The Osmond Senior Citizens had some talented visitors last week. Rev. Tim Beckendorf and his wife, Lisa, and son, Andrew stopped in to play some music and visit with Osmond’s seniors on Wednesday, Sept. 18.
Pastor Beckendorf served as a vicar at Immanuel Lutheran from 2001 to 2002 and was ordained at Immanuel in 2003.
Tim, who now serves with Lutheran Bible Translators among the Khwe people of Botswana, played guitar while Andrew played a couple differ- ent types of flutes.
“I play Irish whistle — similar to the recorder - and Irish flute," Andrew said. “So they’re in different keys, and I’ll switch it to match the song [we’re playing].”
The songs they play are all traditional Irish folk songs, according to Tim - whatever they can find the music for.
“[Andrew] can just pick it up by ear, but I need music,” the pastor said.
Lisa home schools her boys, and takes care of some of the correspondence, contacting people back home.
When she first found out they would be moving to Botswana, she said she was fine with it. Her parents were mis sionaries and she grew up overseas, so she was used to the lifestyle. Her father was actually a Bible translator in Papua, New Guinea. The couple has another son, Aaron, who just began studies at the University of Michigan Tech., and Andrew is a junior.
The family was in Osmond just through Wednesday, and then were leaving to go to Minnesota. They planned to stay in the United States through April of next year so they could be here for Aaron's first year of college. Aaron had grown up in Botswana and spent his whole life there, so they wanted to be at least on the same continent for his first school year, and be supportive.
MISSIONARIES FROM AFRICA ENTERTAIN
Rev. Beckendorf explained that Botswana is the country just north of South Africa. The family has been there 19 years, since 2005. They live “in the bush,” not in the city, but live in a normal concrete block house.
“It’s not made of mud. It’s not made of grass,” Tim laughed.
They live on a farm — but not like a farm around here, he said. It’s a piece of land designated for agriculture, but not much goes on there, he explained.
“We’re on the back corner of it, and our nearest neighbor is the lady who owns the farm. We live on a lagoon — we’re on the back side away from the lagoon and she’s right on the lagoon. Her daughter and her family live right next door to her.”
“And the whole thing is enclosed by an elephant fence,” Lisa added. “So it’s not like things can just come through.”
That’s not to say they don’t have some wildlife come through. Pastor Tim said they have bush buck, which is like a smaller version of a white-tail deer, and they have some elephants that are able to “circumvent” the fence. And hippos come up and graze.
“And monkeys,” Lisa said. “Yeah, monkeys,” Tim added, “They’re kind of a nuisance. But yeah, we have lots of wildlife there. It’s beautiful.”
When asked if anything dangerous has bothered them — imagining something big and scary — Pastor Tim said, “Snakes.” He said the other, bigger animals, they just give them lots of room.
Tim did say that, for the people he works with, where they live the lions are a big problem for them. Sometimes they won’t come to the office to work, or they'll be late, and they’ll say, “Well, there were lions on the road, so we couldn’t come.” And those people walk everywhere, so they don’t have the protection of a vehicle.
As a Bible translator, Tim has been working since 2005 with a project which is a sign language, so they have “clicks” as part of the alphabet. And he has been doing panoramic Bible, so parts of the Old Testament and parts of the New Testament, giving the whole salvation story, he explained. They completed that two years ago, and it has been in the typesetting process, and right now it’s at the printers, “so that’s great news,” he said.
Now Lutheran Bible Translators is wanting to complete the Bible, so they are starting with completing the four Gospels, and then they’ll go from there. Tim also works with three other projects: one in Tanzania, one in Sierra Leone, and another in Botswana, as a consultant.
Pastor Tim talked about the people who live in Botswana. The men he works with are in the bottom of the social scale; their tribe has been pushed to the perimeter, he said, so they’re a minority. A lot of them do live in poverty, and live in grass huts and mud huts, he said, but more and more of them are getting jobs and becoming able to build regular concrete houses. This is the first generation to have traditional jobs, he added, “So that’s really good.”
“You think of Africa as being remote with mud huts and so forth, but you go to the city and it looks like any city here,” he continued.
Tim's office is in the village, which is about 30 minutes away, and they can get groceries there. When they first moved to Botswana, they couldn't get much of anything there, including fuel, he said.
Now they can get fuel there “most of the time,” he said, and groceries all the time. “It’s changed a lot!”
But the family still goes down south to get most of their supplies, because there are still things they can’t get in the village, and the city is 4½ miles south of them.
Tim doesn’t just work with the people over there. He interacts with the families of the people he works with, and goes back into the village where he did language learning.
Every Sunday, he does Bible study for about 10 to 12, mostly ex-patriots from South Africa. And he does literacy work in the villages, both in Botswana and Nimibia, because they live right on the border of the two countries.
He has also done recordings with the people there. “They’ve created songs based on scripture translations, so I’ve recorded that for them,” he explained.
From translating the Bible and playing songs of scripture with the people of Botswana to playing Irish folk songs for Osmond senior citizens, Pastor Beckendorf has shown himself to be a man of many talents.
