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.

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.

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

“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.

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 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.

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...