A nice kind of offering

Since I am staying with the priests while I am working at MUA Hospital, I have enjoyed getting the opportunities to go to several masses in the rural community. It is a really beautiful experience. Since the services are in Chichewa, it can be difficult to follow what is going on at times.

Since most of Malawi is rural (something like 85% of the population lives in rural areas), a lot of the population engages in subsistence agriculture (meaning that they grow food for themselves and their families). With this knowledge it makes sense that many people don't have any money to give during the offering at church. So what they do in many churches in the area is bring an offering of some type of food. This usually takes the form of maize (the primary staple food) or groundnuts (peanuts). However, many other things can be brought such as tomatoes, bananas, other fruit. The priest blesses the offering that each person brings and then passes them to the alter boys to be put on the alter.


Children outside of a village church.



A picture of the offering. It was sort-of dark so the picture didn't turn out that well, but you get the idea of how beautiful the offering is.