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?

Comments

[Barb D.]

Thanks for sharing what your plans are. My thoughts and prayers go with you!!!

[Dara]

Lynn- Thanks for going. Thanks for caring and thanks for doing ALL you do! Please know I am praying for you! I sure miss everyone!