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...