The Valley Of Weeping?

I’ve just returned from Nigeria and I have to say it was the best visit of my many over the past 4.5 years.

I always find my time there a bit overwhelming, especially the Badia community: it’s the place you’ve heard about that’s filled with prostitutes.  We walked through the community on these skinny, cracked wooden planks built about 1 metre off the ground above the stinking mess of rubbish and black flood water that literally fills every patch of ground in the entire community. We were going to see the school, which is run by the government, where we send our CBO kids.

There are 835 registered kids, with 29 registered teachers. When we finally reached the place there were 4 teachers physically present and one of them is actually a security guard. It took us awhile to reach the school because it rained the night before and so the flood was higher than the 1 metre planks. We stepped into the black water but were warned about the broken glass and needles sitting amid the rubbish at the bottom of the stinking black water. It hit me then that this is what our barefoot children walk through every day. In fact, their “playground”(a patch of about 5 square metres) is also flooded with the same water and debris.

At the school, we walked into a classroom and as we stepped in the door we heard a girl screaming and found the teacher beating her with a wood stick. I just saw him throw her notebook across the room as Chris, the CBO leader, ran and stopped him. Chris sat him down and I heard him remind the teacher about their many past conversations about not beating the children. The girl was screaming in pain on the other side of the room; she was about 10. The other children seemed barely to notice anything was going on. It was a bit surreal. I later learned that our CBO is propping up this government school. Regular days have 4 or 5 government teachers in the school. The CBO provides an additional 3 teachers from among their volunteers. They try to gather our most vulnerable kids in some classrooms where they teach them separately every day. The other kids try to sneak into our classes. Outside the door of every classroom is more black water.

There is literally no space for our children to gather for activities. After the school was closed we gathered some of the kids at the CBO’s “office”, a 2 square meter room squeezed between shops. One little girl about 4 years old was sitting on my lap for some time and we were kind of playing together. She was laughing and enjoying herself and then suddenly her whole mood changed and she began punching my legs and my hands and actually bent down and bit my hand twice before just crumpling in my lap.

We followed her to her home.We walked a series of very shaky wooden planks among shacks over the water and shifting garbage mounds to reach the wooden building where the rent one tiny room. Groups of men drinking and smoking were hanging around watching us. Her mother (about 30, I guess) stood in the doorway wearing a towel. Her skinny legs were covered in sores. She either brings men to their one room at night or else goes out and leaves the girl at home. The girl's name is Miracle. Life is causing serious wounds for this little girl.

Miracle’s care worker is an old man named Sylvanus. He is a small, gentle, and obviously caring man. We were discussing the challenge of how to raise up care workers from within a place like this. When the CBO was first formed, they had tried to generate volunteers from the nearby communities (all of them slums in their own right, but nothing like Badia) who could come into Badia to care for the children and then return home. It didn’t work.They simply couldn’t get enough volunteers.

This year they focused on the very small number of Christians living within Badia. It has worked! There is much more to be done, and these care workers require much discipleship, but they are committed and they are passionate. In commenting on the volunteer challenges and the need to use local people, Sylvanus said to me, “This environment scares people away. You can’t come in unless you have the love.” Indeed. Perhaps the same applies to donors: on January 1 there is no funding for even 1 of the 100 OVC we’re caring for in Badia, not to mention funds to get some land.

Prostitutes’ children are one very peculiar type of wounded child we’re caring for in Nigeria. But there’s another emerging situation arising in all of our 5 cbos from Lagos and Ibadan. I saw it immediately on our first day in Lagos. We were in Ago Okota community. We started by just walking the streets that first morning, and we passed a woman frying fish in a pot of oil over a wood fire. There was a young girl (about 13) working with the woman; the girl had a baby tied onto her back. We talked to them, and I asked why the girl wasn’t in school. Very simply the woman explained that this girl had been sold to her by the girls’ parents, a very poor family living in a distant rural village. “She doesn’t go to school,” the woman said, “she works.”

Of course I know this is the situation for THOUSANDS of children in Nigeria (often they are not sold but just given away to release the burden of having to feed them), but I wasn’t ready for it and her simple explanation shocked me. That girl’s name is Mansa. The Ago Okota CBO coordinator, Papa Phillip (as he’s called), began immediately working on the woman to let Mansa to join the CBO and come to our school. Phillip has done this many times. It’s very tough to convince someone to release a child like Mansa from her work to be educated: it’s literally convincing someone to give up their slave.It can take months of relationship building and negotiating.

Often, a few weeks after the person allows the child to go to school, they realise the child is still eating their food and taking up space in the home but is no longer able to spend enough hours working. The child is then dumped into the street, and the CBO has to find a place for them. Standing up for the rights of a girl like Mansa becomes a huge burden for these care workers. But, they say, that’s what they’re called to do. And they’re doing it!

I’m sure these stories sound a bit heavy! And I assure you the need level in Nigeria is indeed heavy. But that wasn’t the full story of what I saw there.

Psalm 84 says (vv 5,6) “What joy for those whose strength comes from the Lord, who have set their minds on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When they walk through the Valley of Weeping, it will become a place of refreshing springs.”

Well, we definitely work in something very close the Valley of Weeping. And I’m telling you this: although our CBOs have MUCH work to do, they are something close to refreshing springs in these places of weeping! I saw it most clearly when I was in our school in Ilaje. We have to wear rain boots to even reach the school, but when we got to the door, I looked in and saw 60+ children staring at Mayowa (the CBO leader who is also being mentored in Walking With Wounded Children), who stood at the front of the class teaching them on Christian virtues. They took a break and one little girl started leading all the others in some fun, silly kids song. When we walked in, the singing really erupted, and then the “official” school choir came out and performed about 6 songs with matching dance.

We spent a day in the school. There was lots more singing and dancing, poem reciting, etc. We tested them on math and English (Children here generally speak only their local dialect language, and, usually, it’s nearly impossible to communicate with them. But these kids are fluently speaking, reading and writing English!). One child lectured me on the virtue of humility! Seeing these kids in their uniforms and with their note books at school, you’d never know how tough their lives are at home.

We followed one of our boys, named Fortune, to his house. At his house, we found only Fortune’s 6-month-old brother lying on the bed alone in their one-room shack. The baby’s ribs were showing and his stomach severely distended. Fortune is the only one watching him. They have a mother, but she goes out hawking in the streets, literally to make less than a dollar a day. As Jackie was with Fortune, he just spoke out of the silence and said: “There is a man that comes and beats my mother.”

The contrast between the atmosphere in Fortune’s home (representative of most of our kids) and the atmosphere in the Ilaje school now is like night and day. At the school Fortune gets to sing songs, recite poems, learn scripture, eat hot food. It struck me that day that it’s like a holiday for Fortune to get to go to school.

I have to say that after the 4.5 years that I’ve been personally coming to these CBOs, I have never seen the team as strong as they are now! Ilaje is a case in point: This is a very broken community, and that means that even the care workers (who of course also live in the community) are broken themselves. And I’ve seen the care workers struggle with their own personal issues of death, sickness, fear, lack of income, lack of education. But something is different now. The circumstances in the community around them haven’t changed. In fact, if anything they’ve become worse with the recent destruction of every home built over the water and the subsequent displacement of around 60 of our children. A few of the displaced kids are just gone and we can’t track them down, while others have had to be placed temporarily in churches and in makeshift rooms.

And yet the unity and vision and purpose of the CBO team have never been stronger. Even despite the delays of IGA support to help sustain them, their focus is solidly on their goals of building stronger, transformational relationships with every child they care for. I’ll admit that there have been tough times in the past when I’ve wondered how the Hands dream can become a reality in such broken communities. But it’s happening, in its own way, in front of our eyes! A place of refreshing amid a valley of tears.

This is what’s possible when the model really works. It starts with good care workers, and the next step is to develop some kind of safe place or care centre model in each community where they can give the kids some kind of reprieve, some glimpse of something “different”, a feeling of acceptance, safety, love. They need a place to be “separate” from the mess around them. Care centres are top priority for 2012 in Nigeria. But that’s a huge faith statement: as of Jan 1 only one CBO has any funds even for the most basic operations.

That’s an update for now.

A Peculiar Work

What a peculiar work we’re a part of!

A new group of international volunteers has arrived with us at the Hub in South Africa and yesterday I heard how one of them struggled to raise funds to come here: he sold his few possessions to pay for himself to come serve the poor in Africa. Of course it had been scandalous to his friends and family, but he was convinced it was part of God’s calling for his life.

That conversation came after I’d spent the morning with a team of care workers in a Bushbuckridge village near the South African border with Mozambique. Sitting with the care workers, one of them a woman in her mid-forties, had explained to me the impact that her husband’s death had on her life: she was left to care for six children (only four were her own), she has no job and she’s battling serious health issues herself.

In her community poverty is considered a curse, something to run away from. In her community everyone seizes every opportunity to get out and away from the poor. Yet, she had decided her calling from God was to seek out the poor, to enter into the chaos of those suffering even more than her and to find a way to help. In the eyes of her community she’s foolish and should be rejected.

I was deeply challenged by both stories, because they bring to life God’s definition of His people: "Thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself to the Israelites." (Duet 14:2, KJV)

God’s way is a peculiar way. The Bible tells us that if we follow God’s way we will be misunderstood. We will be rejected. We will become foolish in the eyes of many friends and family. Paul advised his readers, "Become fools so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God." (1 Cor 3:18,19)

At the end of the day I was humbled and filled with gratitude to be part of this community. It is a strange way of life indeed: people around the world (divergent cultures, languages, ages, denominations) bound together in foregoing all they’ve ever been taught for the sake of radically displaying the good news of Christ among the poor!

But, of course, you and I are called to nothing less! I’m blessed to be part of a community that takes this seriously. How about you?

I am my number one priority

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.

 

Interviews

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.

Cause of death

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.

Crossed the line?

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.

 

To give or to save

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?

It's about learning to live

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.

 

South Africa - the real Africa?

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 ...

Back In Lusaka - Part 2

...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.

Back In Lusaka - Part 1

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...

My Twitter: zim 2 moz n back

24-MAY-09

6:19pm            We made it in to Zim safely! Ferrai was an expert in getting us thru. Couldn’t have done it w/o him. God gave him to us!

2:43pm            Should hit zim border in 1.5 hrs. Carolyn forgot yellow card! Pray.

11:13am            Sitting at moz care center watching filming. Bored.

23-MAY-09

8:18pm            To zim tomorrow aft. Not sure what to think about it. Should be ok, but never know with this place. Have my own room tonite, so I can read and rest. Only start at 8 tomorrow.

6:47pm            Am finally done driving for the day! Sleeping w tv crew in Chimoio tonite instead of driving back to mission. So will rest well.

1:02pm            Now at Amelia’s house. Things r really better here then last year. Still huge problems, but at least going in the right direction. V hot 2day. Got sunburned yday.

8:58am            Car is broke down again…running since 7 to get fixed. We are very late on a tight schedule…maybe God is delaying us for a reason.

22-MAY-09

8:48pm            I am sweating my arse off spending an hour trying to calculate guesthouse bill! So hot and humid today. Took gr8 photos of the kids today. Tired, but good day.

2:19pm            Am filming with the kids again. So nice to hear luisa laugh…a beautiful laugh!

11:03am            Going well. Both cars were dead this morning. But we made it eventually. Now at care center site with Luisa and Jaos…in new school uniform! Very cute.

21-MAY-09

10:39pm            So tired…but Carlos and I still talking. The man really makes me laugh, even about deadly serious issues. But now to bed.

8:11pm            Had a good day all in all. Still meeting with Carolyn. Very tired. Will be up before six again tomorrow…gotta get some sleep!

3:49pm            Shooting two needs stories. Tough ones, but they r doing well. I’m finding it difficult to be here.

11:55am            First day of filming. Very interesting.

20-MAY-09

9:27pm            What a day! Poor Carlos…the man works like a dog. He must think all white pple r nuts!

8:15pm            Phew! Just finished 3 hour meeting w tv crew…dropped them at ghouse. About to crash. Have a decent room 4 just carlos and I in place being turned into ghouse.

12:49pm            I can see the tv crew on the other side of the customs door…they’re here!

11:59pm            What a hassle! But thank God, we are getting a place to stay. Crew arrives in one hour!

7:51pm            Still no guesthouse. Got here super early, but offices are not yet open.  So having breakfast.

7:00am            I am standing next to the beautiful ocean right now.

19-MAY-09

9:55pm            Was with family 2day, boy 15 n sister Tabita 12. No father and mom died last week. They were looking up at me, asking with their eyes What do we do now, mister?

9:29pm            Luisa was very very tough to me when I first saw her. We r building them a house.

9:27pm            We r in bed now. Early morn 2 try n find guesthouse!

9:19pm            Our day was good. Tough stories, of course. Still don’t have guesthouse for tv crew n they arrive 2mrw!

12:33pm            In the bush with the Joas n Luisa now. Very hot sun. The father is here now.

18-MAY-09

4:40pm            Phone in Portuguese language! Very slow. Driving around w carlos securing car, guest house, cash…quite interesting.

12:52pm            I am in moz now. No problems at the border. Praise God.

17-MAY-09

10:33pm            Work here is ready for tv crew.

9:12pm            We are watching very loud very strange zim tv tonigt.

2:36pm            Church was long! Going around visiting families now. Very bad situations. Not much hope. Pray for wisdom.

16-MAY-09

9:43pm            Ferrai’s 3 little girls sang n prayd 4 me. Phone is expensive but sms ok. Trip was long, but easy. Thank God!

9:01pm            I made it safe.

10:12am            On plane now to zim. Got bumped to business class! Thank God!

Joburg to Lusaka

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?

Joshua: The Story

I believe stories are our greatest teachers, and I especially love the biblical stories. I can think of only one relevant text to my earlier post: the books of Joshua and Judges. In the biblical story up to the point of the Joshua and Judges books, the land God promised that Israel would enter was only that, a promised land, it wasn’t real land. Their actual entry into the land, which is told in the great stories of Joshua and Judges, turns out not to be as clean and neat as Israel thought it would be. Other people are already living on the land, people with their own ideas who don’t just yield to Israel’s claim. So to do what they feel they have to do the Israelites need to choose between dealing with conflict or accommodating/compromising. Either choice is far from simple. Thus Joshua and Judges can be read as the entry that faith must always make into the complexities of life.

Read the books. They’re worth the time. If you don’t like Bible language, read it from The Message translation.

An outstanding commentary on this is in Brueggemann et.al’s Theological Introduction to the Old Testament.

Biz and Buzz

In case you didn’t know, there is an entire industry dedicated to those who say they’ve dedicated themselves to helping others. It’s called Development, and its world is comprised of charities, foundations, schools, NGOs, churches, research bodies, government councils, individuals. It’s a strange, surprising world that I knew nothing about until I came to Hands at Work.

The book The Bottom Billion (it’s great) helped me understand a few things about this world. To understand it, he said, you have to understand Development “Biz” and Development “Buzz”.

Development Bizz is basically the internal, administrative, bureaucratic, institutional layers of the Development world; it’s the internal wheels of the big Development machine that need to be greased to keep the thing going. That topic’s a book itself, but it’s not what I want to talk about here.

Development Buzz is something like trends or ideas that become popular in these circles. I guess there have been many over the years, but a few current Buzz concepts would be “sustainability,” “local ownership” or even “income-generating activity.” Once an idea becomes Buzz it’s nearly impossible to operate within the Development world without associating yourself with it.

Nearly every idea that eventually becomes Buzz begins as a good one with great effects, but once it becomes buzz it’s by definition applied unthinkingly to any and every situation and inevitably results in some measure of its failure. So it is cyclical and ever-changing. But if you want to operate in this Development world, if you want to access its undeniable experience, its nearly limitless resources, then you need to speak its language and prove that you adhere and belong.

So what’s my point?

Hands at Work fits awkwardly with this world. Hands’ true identity, from its initial vision to today’s battle to maintain it, is one of servanthood, of sacrificial compassion by individuals not institutions, of commitment to the poorest of the poor; it is a challenge to the dominant way of our societies; it believes the church is the chosen means of God to embody a radical way of life bringing justice and love to the poor and the broken. This identity is often a strong departure from the Buzz.

Yet we overlap in ways too: our concern for the health, education, and nutritional needs of African children, our desire to engage the Western world. The Development world has technical ability(like surveying water wells in the Nigerian desert, or conducting multi-year research trials on the effectiveness of Phase 3 vaccine in keeping HIV+ mothers alive) that we’ll never have, but to which we need access. They even recognize that we bring something to the table, especially as people mobilizing the church to care for children and in catalysing community ownership to care for children.

So we can’t just avoid the Development world, but neither can we exactly be part of it. There are people around us pushing us both closer and farther from it. This is part of finding our way.

New Wineskin Needed

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.

Landing at 3am

For those of you who've never had to chance to land in an African city in the middle of the night, here is a short description of Hands at Work CEO George Snyman's recent arrival in Dakar, Senegal.

"Arrived at 3 am this morning trying to find my guest house. Took a broken old taxi with a owner called Kebe. A long story short I ended up alone in the middle of a suburb sitting next to the road at 3h30am hoping someone will help me. My faithful taxi man left as his back tyre blew out it’s last breath. As I sat there I met Ebe a security guard who offered me a chair to sit on. We had a nice chat although we didn’t understand a word the other one said. I phoned the owner of the guest house and it sounded like he was on drugs or 110 years old. It came out later he was on an outreach in some remote village... and I was still sitting in the middle of nowhere speaking to Ebe about deep and personal issues... he was very patient and understanding. Eventually a car stopped and showed me where this mysterious guest house that nobody else in the neighbourhood knew about was."

Peace, not pieces.

We have arrived in Nigeria, and as they say in Lagos, ‘We thank God that we arrived here in peace, not in pieces,’ a saying with particular relevance in Lagos, given the generally psychotic state of its traffic. Each day on the road, while we are jammed in one 3 km knot of trucks, taxis and motorbikes or another, our Nigerian leader, Rex, comments: ‘today the traffic is worse than usual than usual’ and gives some excuse or another. But he has said this everyday now for seven days and the traffic never gets better.

The reason we’re constantly on the road here is that we’re visiting the communities in which local leaders have begun caring among the poor. Each one of them was stirred into action by the training done by Rex over the past year. Just to get started, Rex has chosen to focus on five of these people: two of them are well-trained nurses and the other three are pastors and their wives. I can honestly say you would all love each one: their passion and generosity is inspiring and overwhelming at the same time. We have felt ourselves shrinking a bit over the past month under the weight of Hands’ huge goal for 2010, and we have been praying desperately for encouragement. Seeing that God has already stirred such miraculous people as this is a clear reminder for us that He is working far beyond what we can see or do from our little ASM campus office by the pool.

In just the past few months, these leaders have started schools, home-based cares and clinics, all of it done with their local resources. Each one is located in a typical Lagos slum infested with Malaria (whole neighborhoods flood here in the rainy season) and suffering severe lack of education. One particular community, called Orile, runs along an abandoned railroad line and straddles a canal that is plugged solid with garbage and rats and dirt and constantly overflows.

For as far as you can see down the rail line, the community has brothel after brothel after brothel. The commercial sex workers line the doorways and hallways. The whole place is owned by a handful of village “elders” who receive weekly payments from the women for their rent. And the place is full of children. Many are abandoned immediately after birth, being the children of prostitution, and stay alive by bouncing from place to place in the community. Others are literally dumped in gutters to die.

Pastor Chris and his young wife, Faith live in Orile and have passionately and urgently stood up to say they will take responsibility for these children. It will be like a journey through hell for them, and there’s not much we can do to ease their burden. But Hands at Work exists to stand with people like this and to fight beside them. We can’t imagine a battle closer to the Father’s heart.

This morning we leave Lagos to meet Dave in the ancient city of Ibadan where he is establishing a Nigerian Service Centre and mobilizing several new CBOs.

Overwhelming Nigeria

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.

Updating

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.