Africa can be cruel. I learned that a long time ago. I love this continent; I love these people –
but to be honest, sometimes I don’t always like
how hard life can get here. It’s
tough. One of my former pastors in
California used to travel to India regularly, and his description of the
feeling he experienced upon his arrivals always made me laugh. He would say, “Every time I land in India, I
have two simultaneous thoughts. Number
one: I’m home. Number two:
$#!%!” I can relate to the
feeling. For nearly three weeks now,
I’ve been battling some bizarre African mystery illness, and the temptation to
give up has crept into my mind far too many times. It’s been frustrating, painful, isolating,
and at times downright hopeless.
Africa is a place where
hopelessness can be experienced tangibly.
There are so many people suffering that it can be overwhelming. A few weeks ago, I met several families who
were the embodiment of hopelessness.
These people were literally starving, wasting away from malnutrition,
possessing nothing – no food, no money, no hope. I knew they were hopeless the moment I laid
eyes on them. I knew they’d given
up. I could see it in their eyes and
hear it in their exhausted words. And I
didn’t blame them. I tried to look for
hope in their circumstances, but I found none.
I couldn’t lie to them. I
couldn’t tell them things would be fine.
What do you say to someone who has completely, utterly lost all hope?
I suppose sometimes when we don’t
know what to say, all God asks us to do is listen. So that’s what I did. And fortunately, hopelessness is not the end
of this story.
Let me rewind. At the start of May, my roommates Christie
and Ashley accompanied me on a journey to a village about seven hours outside
Kampala called Soroti. I asked them to come
with me to visit a dear friend of mine, Pastor Robert, one of the men who I
worked with in Kampala during 2006 and 2007.
Pastor Robert was raised in Soroti, came to Kampala as an adult, spent
several years in the capital, and returned to Soroti a few years ago. We’ve kept up with one another’s journeys
throughout the last eight years, and I was curious to see his home. I had little expectations about my time in
Soroti; I simply wanted to visit Robert and see what ministry he was up to in
his village. Our time was limited, so we
only had one full day together…but it’s amazing what can happen in just one
day.
Pastor Robert and some friends
took Christie, Ashley, and me into the villages deep inside Soroti. Our city life in Kampala does not look like
the stereotypical picture of Africa, but these remote villages match it
perfectly. We drove through wild dirt
roads, weaving between patches of lush vegetation, gorgeous trees towering over
us as we got deeper and deeper into the bush.
Every time it seemed as if we were in the middle of nowhere, we’d reach
clearings in the bush – purposely carved out patches of dirt where several mud
huts had been erected. Each family had
its own mini-compound with huts to sleep in and cook in.
Pastor Robert explained that we
would visit five families and that we could ask any questions we wanted through
the help of his translation. I didn’t
know what we were really supposed to be doing or what we would ask. However, when we reached the families, I
quickly found that I didn’t need to say much of anything. The families had plenty to say and just
wanted someone to listen and to care.
Each family was suffering from
desperation of a different need. Without
asking a thing, the heads of each household offered us seats and began to spill
their guts. The first family was an old
grandmother raising six children. She
explained how she tried to dig and garden to support the family, but she was
old and her whole body was full of pain.
Despite her old age, she looked strong – yet somehow defeated. She was trying to hold things together for
her family, but she knew it was only a matter of time before she would no
longer be able to provide – whether she became too weak or passed away.
At the next compound, we were
greeted by another elderly lady who was missing one leg and was sitting in the
dirt in front of a mud hut. Upon our
arrival, she looked quite surprised at a visit from three young, white ladies
and began to speak excitedly in her local language. Pastor Robert explained that the old woman
thought God had forgotten her. She felt
overlooked and abandoned by people and by God.
She asked us to look inside the mud hut where she slept, explaining that
her dismal living conditions were unbearable.
An old mosquito net was draped over a barren dirt floor. We looked up to see that the roof of the hut
was broken, a large hole atop the building that let in constant rain. The woman went on to explain the difficulties
of being lame within a village where she had no access to healthcare and no way
to move around. Unable to transport
herself, she was forced to sit in the compound all day, every day, feeling
forgotten and alone. Sadly, the woman
explained that she’d never married and regretted the fact that she didn’t have
any children. Yet, when she looked at
us, we told her that she could adopt the three of us as her daughters, and the
look of disappointment seemed to melt away.
“You have three white daughters now!” we joked, as the woman’s face lit
up. We sat with her, Christie holding
her hand and smiling into the woman’s eyes.
The woman smiled back, with genuine joy as she said, “I finally have
daughters now. God hasn’t forgotten
me.”
At our third household, we met a
young woman named Stella who had a two-week-old baby and several other
children. She’d been recently widowed
and had no money or energy to provide food for her children. She was attempting to breastfeed her new baby
but had no nutrients inside her own body to pass on to the infant. Her face was the personification of
hopelessness. I didn’t know what to say
to this poor woman, so I didn’t really say anything. I just listened and prayed.
The fourth household was another
elderly woman raising several young children who had run completely dry on
hope, and the fifth and final compound simply undid me. Perhaps thirty or forty people gathered
around and put us visitors in seats in front of them. Though feeling awkwardly positioned, I soon
forgot about awkwardness and became engrossed in the story shared with me. A young girl bravely spoke up, sharing the
situation with her family. The girl,
just twenty years old, was the oldest in her family and had taken on all
responsibility to provide for the younger ones.
With tears in her eyes, she explained that she had sickle cell and was
in constant pain but needed to work to provide for the family. The next sister was seventeen and desperately
needed money for school books but couldn’t afford them. The girl with sickle cell talked for a long
time, tears pouring from her eyes. I am
thirty and sometimes feel like I can barely take care of myself. I can’t imagine being ten years younger and
carrying the burden of taking care of countless younger siblings – with no job,
no money, and terrible health. The girl
removed us from the crowd and brought us to the hut where she slept as she
continued to cry. I looked up to see
another broken roof that allowed rain to pour through. I wanted to help all the families, but this
weeping girl gave me an added sense of urgency.
“I will find a way to pay for and repair your roof,” I blurted out. I’d been afraid to promise too much to all of
these families, but I knew I had to start somewhere. The girl thanked me but still looked
completely despondent.
In Kampala, I see needy people
all the time, and poverty is rampant.
But still, Soroti was different.
This was worse. At least in
Kampala, there are NGOs and doctors and people who will throw a few hundred
shillings on the street as they pass by beggars. But there in the bush, there was NO help, NO
healthcare, NO nothing. The people were absolutely
desperate.
Christie, Ashley, and I rode back
to town with Pastor Robert and took some time to digest what we’d seen. We knew we couldn’t go back to Kampala
without doing anything; we also knew handouts would be temporary acts of
charity that would quickly disappear.
Unsure of what to do, we spoke with Pastor Robert and formulated a
plan. Christie had some donations from
her church, and I had some tithe money I needed to give away, so we decided to
divvy up the cash and see how we could stretch it. We listed all of the short-term needs:
feeding the young mother Stella until she got her strength back, repairing the
two broken roofs, getting books for the seventeen year old, etc. We then picked Pastor Robert’s brain on how
we could provide long-term food for the families. If we hired people to plant gardens at each
compound, food would be abundant within two to three months of growing. And harvesting these crops (labor included)
would only be about sixty U.S. dollars per family – a harvest that would feed
them for a full year! We crunched the
numbers and figured out a way to feed the families long-term and take care of
their short-term needs while the seeds were still growing.
The next morning, Christie,
Ashley, and I headed back to Kampala and left Pastor Robert to carry out our
plan. Since we’ve gotten back to the
capital, Robert has reported that he’s visited each family regularly and
explained to them that they will be given help getting a farm started for the
next year. He relayed to us that the
families were completely shocked and incredibly relieved to know they will be
provided for. He’s been visiting Stella,
who has been eating well now and excitedly showed Robert her new garden. He said that she is walking around with
strength and energy, very different from the barely-moving woman who
apathetically sat beside us as she tried to breastfeed a baby without any
nutrients in her own body. He said the
old woman with one leg has said she is missing her white daughters, but she is
smiley and happy. Her roof is scheduled
to be repaired, and she believes God finally answered her prayers and didn’t
abandon her after all.
With these reports, I was filled
with joy and excitement at how quickly and easily some major issues could be
remedied. It was simply a matter of
being connected with them at the right time and having an amazing local friend
willing to carry out the legwork needed to help these people. Shortly after returning from Soroti, a random
man stumbled upon some of Christie’s pictures online and contacted her to let
her know he has a ministry that feeds hungry people around the world – for life.
He asked how he could get connected to Soroti and said he might be able
to provide a nutritious diet for these families for the rest of their
lives. I was blown away. We were only in the village for ONE DAY,
really just a few hours. Yet, after sharing
the stories, offering a tiny bit of money, and getting connected to the right
people, there are now several families who are going to be taken care of
forever. That’s crazy, right?! Honestly, we hardly did anything. We just
followed Pastor Robert around, listened to a few desperate stories, and asked
what we could do. And God is just
knitting the details together and blowing these families away with His
provision.
It made me think of a pastor in L.A.
who I once heard say, “Christians are the answers to other peoples’ unanswered
prayers.” Even though we often ask God
to provide for people in miraculous ways (which He definitely does), perhaps
God is actually asking us to be the
answer to others’ prayers. God could do it all Himself, but often He
chooses not to. Instead, He invites us
to be a part of the answer and a part of His story. He could have rained food down from heaven onto
those families in Soroti and miraculously fixed their leaky roofs, but instead
He let us get to do it. He let us be a
part of those families’ lives and be the answer to their prayers. The old woman with one leg had been praying
to be noticed, to have children, and to have her roof fixed. I don’t how we got so lucky, but God sent
Christie, Ashley, and me to that sweet old woman. We got
to see the look on her face when she realized God hadn’t forgotten her; we got to
see her smile when she adopted us as her daughters; we got the satisfaction of
knowing her roof will soon be fixed. God
didn’t need us to be the answer to this woman’s prayers, but he let us be the answer to her prayers.
I am willing to bet there are
hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of people around the world who are
praying right now – with thoughts and worries on their hearts about which they
are desperately awaiting answers. And
perhaps Jesus will zap these worries away, as He often does. But maybe, just maybe, we are the ones God is
asking to answer those prayers – to visit the sick, to feed the hungry, to sit
with the lonely. I say this not to
burden you with attempting to fix the problems of the world; of course we
cannot manage such a thing. However, I
want to challenge you and myself to keep our eyes open for opportunities where
we can be the hands and feet of God and where we can take part in the blessing
in being the answers to others’ prayers.
“Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours; yours are the eyes through which to look at Christ's compassion to the world, yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good, and yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now." - St. Teresa of Avila
