The Sundanese People:A Quilting Village by Patrick R. Anderson

Essays by Pat

Quilting Bees are part of American Heritage. Perhaps you have the same mental images as I of early American colonial women sitting around a quilting frame, or perhaps you have seen the Amish quilts which sell for big bucks to fascinated tourists seeking a link to the workmanship of a bygone era. In our home we have quilts surviving my grandmother's handicraft and that of Carolyn's mother. Indeed, one of the treasures of our family is the small quilt made by my grandmother, "Granny" to us, out of pieces of worn-out dresses and other clothes belonging to our daughter, Amy. The quilt is a life story, a collection of familiar clothes worn by Amy at various stages of her young childhood, each with its own set of memories.

So, when I was introduced to Nunu Arientonus and his wife, Lena, I was especially susceptible to their story. Nunu became a believer a few years ago, shortly after his wife accepted Jesus. They immediately became serious students of the Bible, and as Sundanese, members of that 30-35,000,000 people group in Indonesia with only a few known believers, they developed a burden for their own ethnic group.

The Sundanese are officially listed as Muslims in this part of the world, and each village has Islamic leader who wields enormous influence and power in that culture. Village life is the normal life for Sundanese. The mountains and valleys are filled with successive villages difficult to reach by automobile but linked by trails walked for uncounted centuries by members of the people group. Their language and culture is distinct, different from the dominant Indonesian culture or any of the hundreds of people groups which populate the Indonesian archepelago. They are an unreached people group, UPG in the lingo of those who seek to devise ways to introduce the Gospel in culturally appropriate ways.

Our CBF workers in the region who are assigned to the Sundanese are constantly on the lookout for believers among them. Our strategy is to network, empower, and mobilize local Christian groups and other missions groups to effectively leverage our influence to reach a people group. So Nunu and Lena are well known by our people and those from other organizations focusing on the Sundanese. Nunu and Lena are independent, unattached from any parent organization, and they are an inspiration to us all.

Anyone seeking to take the Gospel to Sundanese faces enormous obstacles. Geography, language, and the insensitivity of those who made earlier attempts to take the Gospel into this people groups comprise huge barriers. The isolation and the close-knit social structure of the village are formidable. Not only the language, but the terminology is problematic. For instance, if one describes oneself as a Christian, communication immediately stopped. The term stands for all sorts of historic, political, and social barriers. We do not invite people to "become Christians," since that signifies a surrender of culture to an outside, often Western, culture.

If one uses the name of Jesus Christ, the villager immediately will dismiss any further discussion since Jesus is understood as a proponent of a false religions at odds with the message of Islam. So, one uses a term which sounds like "Eesah Amahsee," the name found in the Koran and used by Muslims for the respected person of Jesus who is recognized as a great historical and religious teacher. If this term is used, no offense is taken by the Sundanese, even the village's religious leader.

Nunu and Lena have managed to win a few people to Christ through their personal witnessing and their great enthusiasm and courage. But, it is not possible for them to travel into villages for the sole purpose of evangelism or discipleship training without evoking the ire of religious and political leaders.
This can be literally life threatening. They need another reason to come and go.
Even these Sundanese who already know the language and the culture face these obstacles. Imagine the barriers put up between the Sundanese and folks like us.

While wrestling with the various obstacles they faced in reaching their own people, Nunu and Lena also became burdened for the poor economic plight of the Sundanese villages they know. The people are very poor. They do not have balanced diets, and they struggle in subsistence agriculture on small plots of rice and spices, their water is impure and their health care is primitive. After much thought and prayer, Nunu used his business acumen to devise a strategy of establishing cottage industries to make quilts to be sold in the city of Bandung. He learned the trade himself in 1993, purchased a quilting frame, secured the raw materials, and then taught a small group of women in a village to make quilts.

I visited this village with Gainesville pastor, Enoch Booth, and two laymen from First Pensacola, Andy White and Gene Langston. We drove for an hour and a half from Bandung, a city of about 2 million which is a 3 hour train ride from Jakarta. By our standards Bandung itself is remote, but we headed out from the city and snaked our way through the thick and dangerous traffic. We turned off the main road and took a pig trail through beautiful mountainous rice paddies and villages. When we finally arrived at our destination village, we were greeted by smiling children and friendly adults.

We were ushered around one house, ducking under a clothes line filled with wet clothes, and toward another where we immediately saw a small group of four ladies sitting around a quilting frame suspended from the ceiling of the porch of a house. They smiled and continued their work as we stood around and watched. Nunu explained quietly that three of the women ere believers, but they had included a fourth who is not a believer. Throughout the long days of social club sewing, the believing ladies talk among themselves and to the unbeliever of Jesus. Sometimes they play tapes of Christian music set to Sundanese rhythms and sounds. Nunu told us that several people have become believers in this village and others where this process is at work.

As we wandered around the village, mother hens with their chicks scurried around our feet, we heard the sound of water running from one rice paddy to another through an intricate gravity-flow method, and we returned the smiles and nods of young villagers and old. In front of one house we saw a water pond, about 20feet by 30 feet, with a bamboo chicken coop standing on poles in the middle of the pond, connected to shore by a rickety-looking bamboo walk bridge. In the coop were hens, their droppings feeding algae in the pond, which fed the fish, which also ate the mosquito larvae. What a scene. Some village men climbed a tree to fetch some coconuts which they whacked open with a machetes for us to eat and drink. The smell of a wood fire under a large pot of food cooking in one house, the cock-a-doodle-doos of roosters, the sight of people far out in the rice paddies conducting their work, and the view of the far-off mountains provided a skyline to the pastoral setting, all provided a symphony of sensory pleasure. I loved it. No traffic sounds here, no phones ringing, no sense of rush. The pace was slow, the breeze was cool, and the unsanitary quality of the surroundings was unnoticed.

The handicraft itself is remarkable. It takes eight women approximately 160 hours to make one quilt. Nunu and Lena keep intricate records and pay each woman on a by-the-piece basis. The income is very much needed to supplement the family income, especially in this very difficult in Indonesia. Nunu said, "When those without Christ begin working with me, they have an opportunity to witness brothers and sisters working side by side for the cause of Christ. In this country family ties are often severed after one receives Jesus as Savior so the quilt-making skill becomes even more important."

As we watched the women sew, not only on this porch but also in another house nearby, I was moved by the obvious simplicity and relevance of the strategy. People's lives are changed, a new family of believers is nurtured, and the basic material needs of families are met. Nunu and Lena have a good thing going. They do not take a profit from the business, working in a job during the day and conducting this ministry during the nights and weekends.

It is a beautiful story. The quilts are a poignant symbol of sewing together the whole body of Christ. When we got back to Nunu's house, I bought two quilts myself.