Staffer has Swaziland roots

While growing up, Jonathan Wideman came face-to-face with a cobra.
But since then he’s also come face-to-face with the convenience of a fast food burger joint.
For the 23-year-old, the transition from growing up in the small south-African nation of Swaziland to working in Portland hasn’t been so drastic. But working in small-town America may only be a temporary stop before the mission life he grew up in whisks him once more overseas.
“A lot of people I’ve talked to and hung out with from other cultures experience a large culture shock. And also a lot of people I’ve talked to, they think of Africa as kind of desolate … sparse, rural not very advanced,” said Wideman while on a short break from his web-programming job with MyFarms in Portland. “To that I always say I didn’t experience very much culture shock because the culture we were in was very much westernized.”
Wideman was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, while his parents were (and still are) serving as missionaries in Swaziland. While he would get to visit the U.S. about once every five years, he spent his youth in a small town in the landlocked African nation that is slightly larger than Connecticut.
And although a neighbor and a well-placed smack of a shovel saved a two-year-old Wideman from a cobra on the front porch, he characterized his experiences as more mild than wild.
“We don’t really get fast food out there. Can’t really get out to a McDonald’s or Burger King,” he said with a laugh.
“People will ask, ‘Did you see lions?’ Well, we can go to a game reserve and see lions.
“It’s not like grass huts everywhere, although in the rural areas there definitely are grass huts,” he said, dispelling a common stereotype of African communities. “We were living in like a standard, middle- to low-class home in the U.S., just built a little bit sturdier.”
The location, however, was able to give him a dual-view of the nation —one of a country plagued by some crippling social and economic factors.
“The first and major one being poverty and hunger,” Wideman said. “A lot of the country is poor, but you really don’t see that as much in the urban areas. There’s a very rapid shift from the rural, the farm life, to the urban city life and the difference in income and in sustenance is huge.
“The second issue … is the threat of HIV and AIDS is making a huge, huge impact on the population,” he said. “Swaziland has the highest prevalence rate per population in the world for HIV and AIDS and it’s decimating families. It’s making the poverty issue even worse. It’s really just a scourge on communities and families.”
Because of those two factors among others, Swaziland has one of the lowest life expectancies in the world.
And it’s there that his parents are still working. His father continues to teach in a Bible school training pastors, while his mother works in AIDS ministry, teaching life skills to students to help try to stem the epidemic.
But it was the mission life that helped him end up in Portland, as he heard about Taylor University in Upland from some friends, eventually making the commitment to attend school in east central Indiana.
From there he hooked up with MyFarms as part of an internship and has stayed on as a developer and programmer for the company.
However, it may be the mission life that once again takes him overseas.
While small-town life in Indiana is the plan for now, Wideman said he feels that missionary work for himself might be in his future.
Wideman and his girlfriend, who also grew up in a mission family in the Maldives, have talked about someday heading out to do God’s work.
“She is pretty strong on doing evangelism among Islamic cultures … that’s the setting she grew up with. And I think that’s a good thing to pursue,” Wideman said. “But for now, to raise a support base, I see myself staying here in the U.S. for several years and hopefully continuing here at MyFarms.”
Maybe that journey will lead back to Swaziland someday and maybe not.
“I definitely see myself visiting Swaziland again,” he said. “I don’t know whether I would live there. My vision is to go into missions myself with my girlfriend … and that really depends where God leads us.”[[In-content Ad]]