...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.