I’ve just walked another group of Canadians through slums in Zambia. This morning we met 3 women, all single mothers without any formal income, who have been feeding 25 orphaned kids who live in various conditions in their community and teaching them in the back yard of a shack rented by one of the women. None of ladies owns a home, nor owns much of anything.

As we listen to their story, and watch them interact with such vulnerable children, we wonder how and why they do this.

I know one thing: they don’t do it because they have a few extra bucks lying around, or because they have nothing better to do, or because they have so much more than they need and think it is probably the right thing to share from their excess.  

They do it because they believe passionately that those children who watched their parents fall ill and painfully die deserve love and care as much as their own children. And they have committed to living their lives with radical generosity built into their very fibre. That’s compassion. And the beauty of it is (trust me) enough to make you weep.

All of us are inspired by such selfless love. And today, after leaving these women, we sat around a table, drank coke and admired and praised them.

But after many such trips and many such conversations over the past few years, I am left asking myself the question: if we think what they do is so great, why don’t we do it ourselves? We say such people “inspire” us. But inspire us to do what exactly?

Despite our genuine tears and sincere admiration at such selfless love, some barrier keeps us separate from such a way of living. But what is it?

Do we think it’s easier for them to give so much than it would be for us to do it? Do we think we have a greater need for our things than these ladies do? Do we think our lives bear circumstances that make such sacrifice impossible, unrealistic? If we do, I promise you these ladies have more and better reasons. Thinking otherwise is just a convenient illusion.

Maybe the barrier really is just an illusion: the illusion that I am my number one priority. Over the course of my life, I have learned to live with both eyes firmly fixed on myself: my needs, my safety, my comfort. To do anything else, to live any other way just seems wrong and unhealthy. To deprive myself in order to advance someone else just isn’t natural. I think we all think this way.

Surely, we presume, it’s not realistic for me to skip a meal once in a while and instead give that food away; surely it’s not wise to, once in a while, pick out some of my nicest clothes (rather than the oldest, ugliest ones) and give them away; surely it’s just irresponsible planning to spend some of my retirement nest on feeding or educating a child (or 25 children) whose stomach always has hunger pains or has zero chance of even attending elementary school. That’s just not the way the world works. People don’t live like that.

But, in fact, it’s not true. People do live this way. I’ve seen it. And in spite of the sacrifices they make, they thrive and most of them would never choose to live any other way.

This is hard to understand because somehow we either don’t understand or don’t believe this simple truth: ‘It’s more blessed to give than to receive.” Or, as it might apply to most of us, ‘We’ll actually find more joy and life by radically sharing the stuff we have than by hording it and fawning over it.’

Though they challenge me to my very core, such women as the three we’ve met this morning are an incredible gift to me. I am blessed just to meet them, as well as the dozens of others I now know (and some I work with daily).

They demonstrate the real existence of a way of life that never seemed possible.

In June, I travelled for a month with a film crew making videos about Hands' work in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. It was a hectic month, full of late night conversations with the crew's producer and cameramen about why the hell I would volunteer and, in fact, pay to do what I'm doing. There's really no answer to that question, hence the undending, circular nature of the discussion!

On the last day, as they were considering what final content they'd need to complete the 3 films they were making, they asked if they could interview me about my job. It was over breakfast, and I was still chewing my 3rd hardboiled egg of the meal (It's an addiction.). I said, why not. They asked me to put on a clean shirt and we did the interview under a tree outside.

That was the first time I'd ever actually said it: I'm here because I get to be part of a group of people from around the world trying to learn what it means to live by faith by actually doing it. It just sort of popped out. And it seemed like it was about as close to an answer to our circular conversation as we were going to get.

That month we'd been travelling also with my colleague, Carlos, who quit working at a book factory years ago to start a community-based care program with Hands in Mozambique. The film crew had heard how people walk miles to knock on Carlos' door, often in the middle of the night, because they know he'll find someway to help them. And they watched him firsthand jump into people's lives to help, however imperfectly, with just compassion and love. He himself has 2 natural children and 2 adopted ones.

In light of what they'd seen in Carlos' life, the film crew seemed to understand what I was trying to say.

The last of those films aired this week in Canada. I haven't seen them yet, but someone wrote to me this week to say they didn't include my interview. It's for the best; I'm sure I had egg white stuck in my teeth.

Yesterday Jayme and I found out that a friend died. It was AIDS. She had been taking treatment, but didn't have enough food to keep the harsh pills in her stomach. She died because she didn't have enough food. She lives about 10 miles from us. We didn't even know.

She was 23 and had been taking care of her brothers and sisters for years since both her own parents had died.

I was surprised how many people feared for me after reading my last post. It’s interesting because the question I meant to ask in it was “how far is too far?”

“What is reasonable?”

Some felt I crossed the line, and to those people I say thanks for your concern.

Sorry I left the conversation in suspension the past 3 weeks. I landed back in South Africa and immediately had to prepare a sermon series, and to deal with regular work.

I have arrived in Lagos. I didn’t really want to come. I have been sick for weeks: coughing, tired, headaches. A doctor said it’s just bronchitis, nothing serious.

But when I’m feeling sick like this, I’m very aware of myself: aware of what I want and what makes me comfortable, aware of what I think will help me or hurt me, very aware of avoiding whatever makes me uncomfortable. I guess it’s a natural survival mechanism.

The last thing in the world I felt like doing this week was coming to Lagos and spending my limited precious energy surviving in a sweltering, chaotic, foreign place.

Hands at Work is partnered with people working in 5 slums in the city and a trip was badly needed for training, planning and encouraging. For various reasons, I was the one to do it. Everything in me wanted to say no.

Even once I was inside the shuttle bus riding into the city to catch my plane, I was overwhelmed with a feeling that this is crazy. It’s too much. I’ve spent the past year in various states of discomfort. I’m out of control of my life.

What about me?

I can’t answer that. But what’s the alternative? To do what I feel like doing? For most of my life, I’ve done that. The reality is that I’m not just like this when I’m sick, but my wants and self-interest drive most of my life. And such self-centred living didn’t give me much of the “life that is really life.”

Part of being here with Hands at Work is trying another way. Trying to learn to live beyond myself, to test if it’s really true: Jesus said if you try to save your life you’ll lose it. But if you give your life away, you’ll find it. Whatever you think of Jesus, that’s a compelling challenge.

I’m not sure yet if it’s true. As I discovered again in coming on this trip, it hasn’t worked out in my life yet. How about you?

I’m not sure if I’ve ever explained this. The real reason that we’re here in Africa is that we’re trying to learn how to live. I mean really live.

It’s good to help children who are alone, who are vulnerable; it’s worthwhile to speak up for desperate widows or women stuck in sex slave work; it’s important to be with people about to die alone and to touch them and remind them they are loveable and human.

I get to be part of all these things. But I’m too selfish to really be here for any of that. I’m mostly here to save my own skin. I’m here to learn how to live.

The Torah, with its brilliantly simple language, says people have a choice in how to live: it’s a choice between living for “life and death, or blessing and curse.”  Sounds simple, but then why did the writer still feel the need to give us the right answer in the next sentence? “Choose life,” he says.  

I’ve learned, in recent years, that I am naturally inclined to choose something a little less than true life. It’s too much to call my natural way the way of “death”, but I know it’s not what the Torah calls true life.

Naturally, my instincts are madly driven by the erratic, fickle opinions of people, they are driven by the need to attain security and independence (mostly in the form of money, position, and control), and they are driven by my desperation to be happy. These things naturally drive me and guide my choices in life.

The life such choices created for me, wasn’t impressive. It was marked mostly by anxiety (people never seemed happy enough with me) and the draining of my energy toward getting (money), consuming (anything good), comforting (myself). Others have also experienced something similar and named it a Rat Race.

It’s a life, but it’s not really life.

We saw something different here and so we took a chance. True, we didn’t need to come to Africa to do this. But here we are anyway! We’ve been successful in some ways. We’ve failed in others.

I’ve been a bit shy to write about this search in a public forum. But it’s what’s on my mind, so maybe writing about it here will help me make some sense of it. I’ll try to write more about this.

The world seems confused about the state of South Africa today. When visitors see paved roads and restaraunts in the towns, they become blind to the deeply broken social structure of black communities in city slums and rural villages. They say the real story of suffering in Africa is happening outside South Africa, in what people call "the real Africa," whatever that means.

I've spent time in a number of African countries in the past 3 years, in each country spending time in people's homes, walking the roads and getting to know people. People in many of these countries suffer from disastrous economies and shocking corruption, but none, in my experience, suffer social breakdown (family, morality) like South Africa, where people suffer but do it silently and hidden.

An article this week in the Globe and Mail gives one glimpse of what's happening in South Africa.

A notable quote in the story: "In a recent survey, 28 per cent of South African men admitted they had raped someone at least once in their lives. Almost three-quarters of them had committed their first rape before the age of 20."

Read on to see the full article.

Click to read more ...

...continued from Part 1 below.

After the filming I flew to Zambia to meet Jayme and a team from Saskatoon, Canada. They were arranged by Jayme's sister Crystaland her husband Richard. With them we travelled across Zambia, visiting Hands at Work communities at their initial, medium and mature stages of development. We trained local volunteers in a community near the Congo border on orphaned child care; after the training, the Canadian team arranged to wash the volunteers’ feet as a gesture of respect and honor.

I washed the feet of an old, mostly blind man named Nkosi, who lives in a closet-sized concrete room (he calls it “my office,” but says that after 7pm rats attack the room and he has to chase them off his bed at night). Later, we were sitting together and eating from the same bowl of nuts, and Nkosi said: “I’ve lived a long time and seen a lot things in my life; but I’ve never eaten like this with a white man.” The next day he gave me a pair of his pants. It was a gift, and he was very serious. I thought, ‘ I can’t accept these.’ But how could I turn him down? The navy dress pants are neatly folded now in my suitcase.

The ‘initial’ stage village we worked at with the team was in deep rural eastern Zambia. The village was thrilled about the visit but had nowhere for us to stay: so they built two small, round, mud huts side by side and painted “Welcome Home” by the door. We slept there three nights.

The team left on June 29; Jayme continued on to film and produce a video about the work happening in Congo; I travelled into central Malawi to do some training and other work in another very rural village. The place was in the mountains and so cold that I thought at one point I might have to leave. I remember shivering late one afternoon in a house wearing all 3 of my sweaters and 2 pairs of pants and a toddler walked in the door wearing no pants and a drool-soaked, torn t-shirt; he stood in the middle of the room and peed straight down onto the mud floor.

It wasn’t the pee that shocked me, but rather seeing another small child nearly naked and somehow oblivious to the cold that was freezing me, a Canadian. Somehow I survived the visit and even the 18km walk back to town to catch the bus to Zambia, where I am now in a hotel writing this letter to you.

Sometimes I wonder at this life I’m living. I wonder how I’ve ended up so far (literally) from how I’d imagined myself as I was growing up. I think I’m only wondering because I’m feeling a bit homesick. At one point on the 8-hour bus ride this morning through east Zambia the driver actually slipped a Don Williams tape into the screeching sound system. I nearly wept while “Lord, I Hope This Day is Good” played, picturing my mom standing in her kitchen and listening to the same song on her old grey tape player. But the scene outside my bus window was only green hills dotted with little brown huts releasing smoke curls up to the grey sky. Definitely a long way from home.

Last time I wrote I was also in Lusaka, Zambia.

I’m here again on the final day of a marathon seven-week tour across southern Africa. I started in Zimbabwe, where I was scouting stories in a city slum for a TV crew. I met a woman on the first day who had just returned after running away from her husband, who was very near death from AIDS and TB, and also left her 8-year old son, whose eyes were strangely swollen and had TB also.

The father and son had eaten only leaves boiled in water for 10 days. The mother was overwhelmed with what seemed like a mix of fear of anger (the husband had obviously been cheating on her), and said she couldn’t stay to care for them. When I left, volunteers from one of our partner projects were trying to support and convince her to stay. That was seven weeks ago; I wonder where they are now.

I scouted then also in Mozambique, and a week later the TV crew arrived to film stories of the families we’d chosen in both Moz and Zim. I’ve done this kind of thing before, in fact with some of the same TV people, but I can’t describe the discomfort of taking TV cameras and microphones into homes with walls caving in, homes without even a blanket or chair, homes full of kids who quite literally don’t know how they will eat their next meal.

On the other hand, I’ve seen the money raised from TV programs feed and educate hundreds of very desperate children. So I guess we all do what we have to do. I know people who spend years at jobs they despise in order to feed their families in Canada. This isn’t so different.

Of course Zimbabwe is a political/social firestorm, and police literally lurked around most corners. I remember once being pulled over in a vehicle and the police officer saying he had noticed us the day earlier and had spent today looking for us; now he planned to get in and have a “chat with these white people.” We gave him a can of Coke to go away.

Read on in Part 2 above...

I am catching a flight from Johannesburg to Lusaka, Zambia. My cell phone and laptop are plugged into one of those dirty, rusted plugs you only find in African airports, and both batteries feel like they’re about to burst into flames. I am typing out my schedule: five days, five communities, sleeping in four places, travelling through a Cholera outbreak.

I’ve done this a lot over the past two years. It beats my old job: picking seismic data reflections on a computer screen 9 hours a day for an oil company in western Canada. On a trip like this one I’ll meet people who’ve sacrificed their lives to care for some of the world’s poorest children; I’ll eat in mud huts with thatched straw roofs; I’ll sit with grandmothers who’ve lost 5, 6, or 7 children and now care for a dozen or more grandchildren. This is adventure. This is a privilege.

But it’s work, too. I am not there to shake hands and hug babies, though I’d like to be. I have goals to meet, budgets to write, strategies to plan. I am there to challenge people, to stir them up, to provide enough guidance to erase the excuse of not knowing what to do. And I need to do it all in urgency.

I bear witness to the message that the house is on fire. 6000 people (people who shouldn’t) die every day in Africa. Orphaned children are living alone. Girls are selling their bodies to get food for their brothers and sisters. There is no luxury to relax and get around to lending a hand when we feel like it. This applies to the people I speak to; it also applies to me.

So this trip, an adventure I never dreamed five years ago I’d experience, will exhilarate and terrify me at once. I can’t imagine being less prepared for the job. But if no one else is going to do it, what choice do I have?

I had always heard that things move slowly in Africa. But they don’t, at least not for us. For us things have raced at breakneck speed: a good thing, since we’re here to be part of Hands at Work reaching 100,000 children by 2010. But sometimes it feels too fast, too much to take in. There are so few of us trying to manage this thing, we can barely comprehend it.

At the end of ’08 we were taking on new villages monthly. That means mobilizing, training, supporting, constructing, communicating with local people in those villages as they start caring for widows, orphans and the dying. And the pace keeps rising: through ’09 and ’10 it’ll grow to almost two new villages per week. We’re like the skin of a balloon getting pumped with too much air: stretching, but get ready for the big bang.

I feel that way now because I’m tired. It sounds melodramatic, but I feel like we’ve passed through a battle. Now we’re resting, preparing to get back in. But I’m worried. I did what I had to do or at least I did all I could do to get through 2008. It felt like survival. I’ve seen it in the Congo: for years people did what they had to do just to get through the disgusting war. And when the opportunity for peace came, they couldn’t adjust. Enough of the wrong people failed to make the transition to a new time and so war continues on.

I know 2009 is a new year. I know much of the work we did in 2008 was more than survival, was laying a ground work to prepare for 2009. 2009 will be different. But I wonder if I can make the transition. I was barely strong enough to make it through 2008. My thinking and my way of working are still back there. If they don’t transition, I’ll be the one holding us back.

In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus said this: No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. 17Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.

Thursday Jayme and I are off to Nigeria.

The last time I was there, the poverty overwhelmed me: it was the first African country outside South Africa I had visited. Of course at that time I had seen tremendous poverty in South Africa (I thought, ‘how much worse can it get than AIDS patients dying alone in shacks?’), but the difference in Nigeria was the omnipresence: poverty was everywhere—open sewers in the streets, dozens of people living together in small shacks, prostitutes held up like prisoners, and children running everywhere barely any in school. It was hard to take it all in.

Since then, both Jayme and I have travelled a lot around Africa, so I think I know better what to expect. Still, Nigeria is daunting to me.

As some of you know, with Hands at Work we are trying to care for 100,000 orphaned and vulnerable children by 2010. 30,000 of those kids are planned to be reached in Nigeria alone (1/4 of Africa’s population lives in Nigeria). That means that over the next 24 months we’ll be stirring new projects in 75 Nigerian communities: 3 per month.

When we say “care for” these kids, what we mean is to provide three basic services: health, food security, and education. And we can do that for about $15/child. Simple math says we’ll need $450,000 per month by the end of 2010 to care for that pile of kids.

As many of you likely don’t know, the Hands at Work goal is to see the international church providing 80% of the money to care for these kids, because we believe it’s the church’s job to do that. The church has the money to do it, and they ought to have the will to do it. So it certainly can be done. And I believe it will be done.

But, still, Nigeria is daunting to me. So, if you can, remember us for the next couple weeks. We’ll need your prayers.

Time for an update.

First, the Personal one: Jayme and I are great. We've stretched our two seasons of Corner Gas DVDs to last the nine months we've been in Africa since returning this year. And that TV reminder of rural Saskatchewan has been enough to keep us very satisfied so far away from home. Of course I was actually in Calgary for two weeks in middle-August, but, searching my memory now, it’s hard to believe that visit actually happened...it’s like a dream. Somewhere between my time in Mozambique’s dusty villages full of hungry children and time in South Africa amid thousands of AIDS orphans, there is this blip of tall, shiny Canadian buildings and fast food. Very surreal.

Still, it was great to see friends and family, and both of us are excited to be home again for the Christmas visit. But the transition between worlds was hard on me. I’m mentally preparing for the Christmas experience now.

Surprisingly, we are both quite healthy for once. Jayme continues to jog on regular occasion. I, however, am continuing my downward spiral of body shape, which has quickened since my 30^th birthday in August. The only thing keeping me from total imitation of a pear’s shape is my occasional bouts of Typhoid and worms, which keeps me trim. Africa changes your perspective of things.

Next, the Work Update: Of course, Jayme has built up a team around her (designers, videographers, etc) and is churning out products to tell stories of the work here like never before. But I’ll let her elaborate on that.

For me, I’m mostly focused on what we call the “Roadmap” to reaching 100,000. Hands at Work’s goal is to reach 100,000 orphaned and vulnerable children by 2010, and to do it in areas where HIV and poverty are highest and support structure is very low. My job is to make sure the plan to reach these kids is in place. Hands at Work doesn’t actually deliver services to children: we mobilize local villages (via the church) to care for the poorest among them, and then we provide training, structures, support to help them do it well.

So that means that as we go deeper into rural or slum Africa, where our above criteria are found, the job of mobilizing, training, supporting gets tougher and tougher, because the capacity in place gets lower and lower. All of that means plans get fuzzier and fuzzier.

But it’s happening. In each of our countries—Nigeria, South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique, Congo, Zambia are our current ones, and we are starting up now in Malawi and Zimbabwe—the plan for expanding the work in existing villages and stirring up new villages is taking a shape. In particular, I am focused on Democratic Republic of Congo, where we plan to reach 10,000 children by 2010, and Nigeria, where we plan to reach 30,000 by 2010.

Jayme and I will be in Nigeria just before returning to Canada in November. The last time I was there we paddled on canoes to feed children living on stilts-houses on the water; up to 30 people lived in one house together and slept in rotating shifts to fit inside at once. Perhaps the transition from Nigeria to Canada is something I should start worrying about now.