don’t die with your smiles

Well, I have less than two weeks left in Mongu. Although I knew this time would creep up on me, I’m still not prepared for it! Suddenly I shifted from telling people at church, “I still have a few months left yet – no worries, we’ll have plenty of time to hang out and get to know each other!” to hearing myself say, “I just have two Sundays left…” What do I say when friends ask me when I’ll be back to visit them in Africa? How do I respond when they ask me to stay longer? Although Skype and Facebook are (I can’t believe I’m saying this…) lifesavers when it comes to keeping in touch across oceans (literally), I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever be able to see my friends and my kids here in Mongu in person again. And that’s been hard to come to terms with.

It’s bizarre, this four-month-medium-term-intern thing. If you come for two weeks, great – you can run on adrenaline, make acquaintances with the locals knowing that they’re impacting you so much more than you could ever impact them, and go home on what we called in middle school a “camp high.” If you stay any longer than eight or nine months, you start to make some roots, dig your heels in, and truly be enveloped by the culture and the people. You find a rhythm (hopefully) that includes regular Sabbaths – you can develop a sense of how much you can take and when you need to hide from the world, and you’re in a place long enough that moderating work with rest is acceptable and, frankly, required. But four months? I’ve just started making friendships built on genuine trust. I finally have “How is your morning, My morning is good” (“Mu tozie chwanie, Mu tozie handi”) and a few other essential siLozi phrases perfected, and I’ve dropped all my direct objects and prepositions like a true Zambian. I just figured out how to walk to church from any elementary and secondary school in Mongu, for crying out loud. And now we leave?

After church this past Sunday, Felix, the owner of the restaurant at Hope Church that I wrote about a few weeks ago, told Bryan and me something that has really helped get me through the spiritual and emotional funk of trying to tear myself mentally away from the kids and friends I’ve made in Mongu. He simply said, “It helps to remember that we’re all family – we’re all connected in Spirit. We never really say goodbye.” Amen to that!

most of us interns at our house :)

Aside from mentally weaning myself away from Mongu and, of course, making plans for seeing Victoria Falls and a few churches in Capetown after we leave, it’s been tough for me to find joy recently. Apart from the consistent destitute poverty and shocking immorality all around us (which is frankly enough to bring anyone to tears), these past few weeks have just seemed extra-hard. Chuma’s (a VOH student’s) mashasha house, which is just outside the compound, burned down last week because her dad came home drunk one night, started beating her mom, and knocked hot charcoal into the walls of their hut. The teachers of VOH have yet to find where she’s now staying. I also just found out that a stray dog I made friends with on the way home from Shoprite got beaten to death just outside Mutoya’s gate. Not nearly as upsetting as just plain annoying, I got my fifth and sixth proposal today from guys who said they’d just “love to marry a makua.” As of this past weekend, Bukolo, a malnourished six-year-old child whose family is now staying at the Save-a-Life Malnourishment Center so she can get enough food at hourly intervals, hadn’t smiled since she’d been admitted to the program a month ago. And we also just found out that Gift, one of the babies on the weekly feeding program at VOH Clinic, died yesterday morning from fever at his home. Baaaah – all so close to home.

But it hasn’t been just an external battle that’s pulled me down recently. (Confession #1 – yet another “duh, Stephanie” moment – here we come.) In all the bustle of trying to find ways that I can be of tangible help here, I think I fell into busyness and into the trap of sharing God’s love so frantically that I forgot to remind myself that fundamentally, first, and foremost, I am loved. That I love because God first loved me. That I can’t possibly love all those around me with my own love – it just ain’t gonna work! – but that it’s God’s love for me which naturally overflows onto everyone I meet. Theoretically and theologically, I understood that concept years ago. Mentally, yes, I know that God loves me as his beloved and I’m simply a conduit of his love. Yet truly believing it in my heart as I do in my head is the difficult part, especially in a place where there’s so much to do and (seemingly) so little time to sit down and reflect on where that love gets its start.

Ethan, Elijah, Bryan and me at Hope Church

Confession #2: In the process of discovering how I’d misplaced my joy, I also realized how results-oriented I am. A couple weeks ago, this guy Enoch and I spent about four hours scrubbing and washing 15 kids’ tables and 60 little plastic chairs, all begrimed and dusty from being in the Village of Hope orphan school tent at the top of the hill for the last couple of months. Our job was to have them clean so they’d be ready to move into the new school building when it was finished. We started out just great with a couple of clean buckets of water, soap, an old sponge, and three or four rags. About an hour in, though, the tank at the top of the hill ran out of water (a more and more frequent occurrence nowadays). We soon found ourselves remarkably dirty, scrubbing dirty tables and dirty chairs with a dirty sponge and dirty rags, working just as hard as before but now essentially just moving dirt around. We rinsed the tables and chairs off and allowed them to dry before we covered them with plastic, but we knew it would only be a matter of minutes before dirt would cover them again, possibly making them even blacker than before since they were all still wet. I just remember thinking, “Why are we doing this…why even bother?”

I’ve felt that way about a lot of things in Mongu while I’ve been here. Things are just harder in so many ways, and I sometimes spend ten times the amount of energy, effort, and time than I budget only to achieve the same, or worse, result than I initially expected. At times I feel like I’m hitting a brick wall when I’m teaching kids who don’t understand my accent or when I’m waiting for construction materials for the school, clinic, and Malnutrition Center so they can finally get up and running. For the first few weeks with Bukolo, she moaned constantly and looked absolutely miserable – she had maybe a 50/50 chance of surviving through the month. There are so many factors against us here – broken communities, families, and homes, and of course, the incredible poverty that affects all parts of life. Where are the results of all our pain and effort? Where’s that quick fix you look and hope for when you know good people are doing good things?

 Bukolo one month ago, body swollen and skin breaking from malnourishment

Bukolo (6 years old), Bukolo's ima (mom), and her two younger brothers, Timothy (2) and Tutu (4), taken a few weeks ago

I think I’d started to feel a little bit like that dirty rag I used to clean those tables and chairs. What was I doing here? What possible good could I, an intern who was going to leave in just a few months, give to a town so broken and in need? Each time I scrubbed, I dunked myself back into dirty water, all to come out ready to scrub again, even blacker and dirtier than before. And the tables and chairs weren’t getting clean.

Again (always…), I realized in my heart that I desperately needed to remember God’s love for me – to dunk myself into a clean bucket of suds, if you will. I need God to recharge me rather than me try to recharge myself. As far as what I’m doing here, my work is not nearly as important as my consciously dedicating it to God. It doesn’t matter that what I do doesn’t yield instant results. This is Africa…microwave solutions just don’t happen here. It’s okay that the kids didn’t understand all of my lessons last term. It’s okay that Bukolo hadn’t responded to my efforts to make her smile and feel welcome at the clinic, her new home. It’s okay that those tables and chairs went right back to being as grimy as before. What matters is that I taught God’s children, I’m loving on Bukolo, and I’m not forgetting that God’s kingdom is on its way – it’s here! When we legitimately believe in our hearts that Jesus has already conquered the world AND God doesn’t judge worthiness based on what we accomplish, then we find that we are his beloved.

Reminds me of a fav C.S. Lewis quote from the Screwtape Letters:

“It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be…Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

Yet even while there’s still brokenness here that makes it hard for me to see that I’m not truly forsaken, God does show that his kingdom is already here in huge ways! He built a school for orphans (the first two of four new classrooms for VOH are finally finished – praise God! – and those tables and chairs look beautiful in them!), is finishing up the VOH Clinic, and opened the Malnutrition Centers so it can begin to host feeding programs.

I’ve also learned, though, that even when we don’t see the instant and perfect results that we pray for, God still gives us tiny glimpses of his glory and love along the way to encourage us in our service, energize us to be kingdom people, and so we can experience and appreciate every small success. For me, the most recent series of small joys have been with Bukolo and her brothers at the Save-a-Life Malnutrition Center over the past week. Three days ago, Bukolo didn’t let me get within a foot of her, she was constantly moaning, had poor appetite, glared at everyone, and was lethargic. Now she reaches for me to pick her up, snuggles close to my chest for warmth and safety when we walk down to the showers at the base, giggles as I tickle her all over, plays house with me as I feed her paper food on paper plates with a paper fork, learns patty cake, lets me hold her arms to teach her how to walk again, climbs with me on the jungle gym, eats well, and gives me daily haircuts. It’s miraculous.

One of Bukolo's first smiles since she's been admitted to the Clinic

Tutu, also all smiles!

 Bukolo's appetite has gone way up since she's been here

Bukolo still has a long ways to go, as do the school buildings, the center, and the clinic – but it’s been these small glimpses of joy over the past week that have allowed me to rediscover God’s love working through me. When I hold Bukolo, I feel so much love for her that it’s overwhelming. I’ve never felt so much love surge through me as when she first let me pick her up. There was no way that was all mine – it was God’s love Bukolo her working through me, reminding me along the way that God loves me just as much as he loves her. It’s a giddy, supernatural kind of joy. Outrageous, contagious, out of control – yep, that’s God’s love for us.

 

Bukolo cutting out pictures from old magazines for her collage

 

Tutu trying on his new hat

What pictures should we pretend with now?

So if I’ve learned anything in Africa, it’s technically what I’ve already known: that God’s love is the absolute source for everything, this joy bubbling up inside me is a natural consequence of his love for me, and life is about people, not results. Read out of context, that sentence is just another “duh, Stephanie” moment…but experiencing it daily is life-giving. So I encourage you to remember that God’s love is where everything get its start and to find that joy too.

For the remainder of my time here, I’ll continue hanging out with Bukolo, her brothers Tutu and Timo, and her mom at the Malnutrition Clinic, preparing food every 2 hours, cutting out pictures for collages, drawing each other with crayons, coloring Little Mermaid coloring book pages, and strengthening Bukolo’s legs and arms at the playground. Bryan, Catherine, Wes, four translators, and I plan to head out to the floodplains for the last time this weekend, hopefully for the whole week. We’re traveling by boat to Liloyello, and there’s been quite a bit of friction with Christians coming there in the past…so prayers for softening their hearts and having the Holy Spirit speak through all of us when we’re there, please! On August 30^th, Bryan and I will head out from Mongu for Livingstone, to Capetown soon after, and finally back to the States on September 13^th.

Bryan and me gettin tourist-y

To quote Felix once again (I can never do it enough), “Don’t die with your smiles.” I hope and pray that yall are all doing beautifully and that this summer’s been as wonderful, challenging, and stretching for you as it’s been for me. All my love and in his peace,

Stephanie