AFRICA TRIP BLOG #7: Spending the Day in Homes…

Today was a bit more difficult in some ways than other days…and we saw what daily life looks like for many Zambian families as we spent several hours with them…

Life is very hard for many people in this wonderful country…life means being uncertain about where your next meal comes from, having great difficulty finding a job, having to walk miles to get to high school which is often priced far higher than you can afford, struggling with gender roles and traditions, having many children and taking care of others when your family members get ill or pass away, and even as a Christian struggling to figure out how you can meet all the needs of others around you while providing a life for your own family…

We first went to the community market to buy some cooking supplies for the meal we were going to cook with our Zambian families (a very lively place)…and then 5 groups of team members paired with a Zambian friend went to the homes of 5 different typical Zambian families…the gals from CU helped cook a traditional Zambian meal with nshima (the staple food) and vegetables and some chicken…cooking was done over open fires started with charcoal that we purchased…the guys from CU helped make axes, split logs for firewood, drew water up from wells, and stayed away from the kitchen…

The homes we went into are typically 3 small rooms with a sitting area, eating area, and sleeping space for families typically with 5-9 children…the bathroom is a pit latrine outside and the kitchen is an outside shelter as well…

In some ways, I always struggle on days like these…I love meeting these families and I love playing with their kids and watching the remarkable care and time they put into serving us and making a truly authentic and beautiful meal…and yet as you spend more than a few minutes driving or walking through neighborhoods and sit and talk at their homes, the curtain is pulled back on the vastness of need and the impact of extreme poverty on lives in so many dimensions…

A local pastor who I spent the day with took me across the road to meet a woman from his church to show me the impact of some feeding programs they were running…she is a young mom who is suffering from the impact of the HIV/AIDS virus…before she was given these food supplements she could not walk…it is quite obvious that she is very sick she limps out to meet me from her bedroom…

And as we walked in there was a young baby just lying on a mat on the ground next to their house…the pastor told me that the child is also HIV positive as the virus was transmitted from his mother to him…he too looks very sick as I reached down to pick him up…as I was holding him and walking with him I was reminded that this virus is why I first came to Africa…because I along with a group of high school kids decided that we had to respond to what HIV was doing to African children, families, and communities…

I’ve met many people dying from AIDS, I’ve attended funerals for its victims, and I’ve seen the devastating impact on a whole community…but my heart is still broken as I hold a little boy named Patrick on a dusty path in a place practically no one in America knows exists…I immediately thought of some of my good friends back in the states who rescued and eventually adopted a little boy named Patrick who was dying from AIDS in an orphanage in Uganda…and I was overwhelmed with the story I was seeing before my eyes today…

Later on that day Jubilee Ministries tried to film me talking about my day and I ended up sobbing on camera…which I hate…especially when I am supposed to be the one who communicates the remarkable things God is doing in Zambia…I tell myself all the time that I’ve seen this before and that I know this is reality for millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa…but when you see it and hold this beautiful little boy as he coughs and struggles to live you can’t help but weep…and plead with God again to do something only He can do to save this child and restore his mother to health…

It’s easy to walk away from a day like today with a loss of hope…but that isn’t why we came here…we came here because we believe God wanted to invite us into deeper relationship with Him and all His people here in Zambia…to know what life is really like in our global community, to share our stories about life in our homes as we did today, and to come away convinced that because there is so much need in our world we have to become people of greater compassion, greater resolve, and greater love as followers of the One who told us that anything and everything we do for the least in our world we actually do to Him…because He is present in this place…perhaps even more than other places in our world I somehow must believe…

Thanks for reading and thanks for praying as our hearts are broken,

CHIP