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 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?

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.