Following the example of friends of ours, Peter takes the boys on a special trip when they turn 8, 12, and 16 years. Jason, having met this milestone, was eager for his time alone with his dad. Peter arranged to take him to Kumasamba Lodge, on the banks of the Kafue River, near Kitwe. Peter’s assessment was that the lodge was like many places in Zambia where you pay a heck of a lot for a decaying, dilapidated set up with hints of its former glory days. But from Jason’s viewpoint, it was awesome. When asked why, it was because he got a Sprite with dinner. Guess it doesn’t take much to make him happy!
Sunday, April 24, 2011
The Lord is Risen! We had a very nice family worship time in the morning then set about getting ready to host an “Easter Eat Together” with ex-pat friends on the MEF campus. We had twelve adults and eight kids indulging in a variety of delicious dishes that were contributed by all present. Following lunch, we had an Easter egg hunt for the kids, with adults helping (and sometimes hindering) the efforts of the children. Then we came back inside to sing several Easter hymns together. We have found that Easter services here in Zambia are much like any other Sunday except that they take Communion. So ex-pats often miss the traditional songs of Lent and Easter. Wendy, a gifted musician, made my old out-of-tune piano sound good and we all joined our voices together. This was one of my favorite moments this Easter. It must have been a good day for others as well because the last guests left at 6:00, five hours after they came!
This Easter season we also need our refrigerator to be resurrected. It had supposedly been fixed while we were in southern province, but the “fixin” only lasted for one day. By Good Friday, we realized that it was no longer cooling. But of course, it was a holiday, and the repair shop would be closed Saturday, Easter Sunday, and Easter Monday. We called to have it taken back in on Tuesday but they couldn’t come get it until Wednesday. We were hopeful that we would not be without a fridge too much longer but I guess the repairman had a lot of work to do. We are told that perhaps it will come in the next day or two. So all week, Jenny has been gracious enough to let us store items in her fridge. It wasn’t so convenient for us or her, especially when we were letting ourselves into her place at 6:30 a.m. to fetch milk for the boys’ breakfast before they left for school at 7:00. We were back and forth all week, which allowed us to see Jenny more than usual which was nice, but it was also a pain in the posterior.
Sickness once again returned to our household with Jason continuing to complain about an earache. I had Georgi, our doctor friend, examine him in the school parking lot and was able to tell he needed drugs, because lymph nodes and sinuses were also badly inflamed. Once on those, he started to feel better. Peter had a low grade fever all week and was making frequent trips to the loo and finally realized he had giardia. With meds, he too quickly returned to normal. Brendan was bummed that he was no longer the giardia champion because he was now tied with Peter. He even threatened to drink some MEF water so he could pull ahead in the count but we discouraged that and disqualified Peter from the race somehow, making Brendan the “giardia champ” again.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Several months ago, I was invited to speak at a women’s conference. It was to be held at the end of March but was postponed to this weekend. Zambians have many gifts, but generally we have found that communication is not one of them. It was like pulling teeth to find out what topic to speak on, but eventually was told that the theme for the conference was “A Christian Woman of Purpose,” so basically I could talk about anything I wanted. I chose to talk about peace, as this is an emphasis that MCC is trying to insert into as many venues as possible. Just a few days ago, I was still trying to find out what day I would be speaking, as nothing had been communicated. I finally got the answer that it was Friday morning at 11:30 but my request for directions to the venue in Ndola must have been overlooked. By this time, I was feeling quite irritated. Finally, just before I was to leave the house on the morning I was to speak, I called yet again and received vague directions. Not knowing the city of Ndola very well (an hour away), I got lost countless times. It took me an hour, once I had reached the city, to find the stinkin’ place. I asked for directions more times than I could count and every answer probably had a kernel of truth but none contained the whole truth.
But I should have known that the conference wouldn’t have started in a timely manner anyway. In fact, when I arrived an hour late, a few choirs were singing but the official program had not yet begun. Official opening remarks were made an hour after I came and half an hour before I was to speak, but according to the program, there were two other speakers who were to precede me. I was getting a bit nervous that I wouldn’t be speaking until late afternoon. However, they altered the schedule and suddenly, I was being asked to stand and speak. I was up on an open air stage overlooking a small courtyard where over 300 women were sitting under tents. There was no podium so I held onto my notes with one hand and the microphone with the other. The wind was whipping through the stage area so I had to grip my notes tightly and use the microphone to hold it open so I could see the words. The microphone kept cutting in and out but most women were listening to the translator anyway so I think that didn’t matter much. It was a little chaotic to say the least. It is hard to say what impact my message had on the group. It didn’t disturb those who were sleeping, that is for sure. But others, during the question and answer time, indicated that they had been listening and trying to process the message. One woman asked how they as women could advocate for peace in their churches when the men insist that they should “be quiet” as Paul instructs. Oooh, boy, that is a can of worms. I tried to answer that diplomatically but there are fundamental gender beliefs that are difficult to change.
When I was finished, an older woman got up to speak her message, “A Christian Woman of Perseverance.” Within minutes, she had the women waving their arms and agreeing with her as she talked about the troubles we face in this world. I couldn’t quite understand much of what she said as she screamed into the microphone with the translator overlapping her screamed translation. But the one part I heard had me in muted hysterics for awhile (I couldn’t let loose with laughter as I was still up on stage). The speaker was saying that there is no room for being downcast or depressed when you are facing troubles. She screamed, “When you get up in the morning and sing dejected songs (she proceeded to sing a slow depressing song that was dueted by the translator), saying ‘woe is me,’ then the devil is crapping. That’s right, THE DEVIL IS CRAPPING.” It took me a minute to understand that she meant the devil was “clapping,” but you can guess the image that first sprang to mind.
Well, I must say the devil was “crapping” on my account quite a bit this week. Being fridge-less, Jason’s ear infection, Peter’s giardia, bad communication for this speaking event, extra hours of driving, plus the anxiety of not hearing anything about Peter’s possible job opportunities, all combined to make me irritated most of the week. Once again, I was challenged to remember that I am not entitled to a trouble-free life. There will be troubles, and the ones this week were just minor. It’s life. It’s messy. But God is right here with me in the midst of it all, big problems or small. I have determined that the devil will not be crapping on my account anymore. (Sorry to all those who were offended or confused by the blog’s title, not knowing to what it referred. But as soon as that phrase came out of the speaker’s mouth, I knew it had to be the heading of the next blog.)
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Having done without an operating fridge in our home for more than a week, we finally have a resurrected fridge. And this time they really fixed it. We’ve never had our fridge this cold. We keeping having to make it warmer. It has underperformed for the last four years but now it is an over achiever. I guess it is Murphy’s Law that we finally have an excellent cooling system but only have a month left to enjoy it. Not to mention the fact that cold season came quite suddenly, and we are donning sweatshirts in the mornings and evenings, and the thought of something so cold chills us further!
The day ended with Jason swinging from a tree branch, slipping off it and falling on a cinder block that was below him. He scraped up his back pretty badly and we were worried that he had landed directly on it, perhaps bruising his ribs as well. Georgi happened to be visiting at the time and she took a look and thought he would be alright, just very sore. She was right.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Sunday around noon, we piled into the car and headed off to the Northwestern Province of Zambia to return to Meheba Refugee Settlement Camp. This time the boys joined us because we wanted them to have the opportunity to see this place that we had talked about. We picked up Issa in Solwezi, arriving by bus an hour late due to the bus having a flat tire in Chingola. Once again, Shannon and Sirisha hosted us in the FORGE compound. Since they had cooked for us the two weeks of our trainings, I had brought soup and homemade bread that we shared together for dinner that night.
We spent all day Monday in a follow up meeting with the participants that attended our trainings in January. The purpose was for us to hear how they had been using the materials and skills we had given them in the refugee community. We spent the morning listening to reports and stories from these men and women who have become known as “Messengers of Peace” in the camp. And they have been kept very busy these last few months. The Refugee Officer, in charge of the camp, has been referring cases to this group to help mediate. They are called out of bed at night by their community to help resolve marital disputes, brought from the fields to settle disagreements between neighbors, and introduced to new refugees to educate them on peace issues. It was really exciting to hear about their success stories, and to commiserate with them on the issues that remain unresolved.
Here are a few of the stories we heard:
- One gentleman was brought into a sector of the camp to address the issue of alcoholism that was destroying many homes. The men were drinking from morning until night, neglecting their fields, and wasting what little money the family earned. Somehow in talking to several different parties, an agreement was made that the sellers of alcohol would limit the hours when they sold the beer, thus enabling the men to work in the fields during the day and only start drinking in the afternoon and evening. The wives were happy that their husbands were working a bit more and apparently the men had no complaints either. I was dumbfounded that the shopowners would agree to this, as they were probably enjoying a pretty profit off these men. But it was the sellers who had suggested the alternative timeframe rather than it being imposed on them, so therefore it worked. As an outsider, I may see several flaws with this situation still, but the people involved are the ones who decided this together and it seems to be working.
- Two participants were asked to address a group of new refugees from Somalia, transferred from another camp. These Somalis were from a different tribe than the resident Somalis and tensions were high. Another participant, a woman from Somalia, served as translator. Over the course of several Tuesdays, they met together and learned about peacebuilding and trauma healing. It was clear that they were taking in the information and benefiting from it but it was also the shared experience of having these workshops together that built trust and helped them to put aside their differences. From several accounts, there is a marked change in that sector and far fewer problems.
- I remember the moment in my Trauma Healing class when one of the participants made the connection that certain members of the camp who appeared to be “mad” may actually be traumatized. He followed up on this new awareness and approached one man who was named “Hopeless” by the community. The participant proceeded to share a bit of his own trauma and then asked Hopeless about his own story. Hopeless had witnessed both his parents being killed and had fled his country. There was healing for him in telling what happened to him, so much so that Hopeless no longer acted “mad.” The participant then actively pursued finding work for Hopeless, and now he is the man who collects the fee from each of the vendors at the market. He is a changed man and is now going by the name given him at birth, which is “Gift.” Others testified after the report that they too have seen this man and he seems to be a completely different person.
- Not only are the participants actively helping others but they continue to work at healing in their own lives. One participant shared how she had recently heard that her father, whom she had presumed dead, was very much alive and living in Angola. She elicited help from the other participants to figure out how to track him down since she only had a name and province but no phone number. As she works at finding him, she will also have to work at the healing needed to face him again, because he abandoned them in the camp when this woman was a young girl and was never heard from again.
In the afternoon, Peter and I took some time to teach a bit more, reminding them of the problem solving method and conducting a role play to help them learn further. Unfortunately, this was cut short due to time issues. We had started about an hour late, due to the driver picking up all the participants getting a very slow start. Of course, flexibility is the name of the game. Although lunch was to be served at 13:00, it didn’t happen until 15:00. This made for a long “morning” of listening and giving feedback. With an empty stomach, it was hard for me to concentrate and even stay awake at times but I managed. The chicken in the back of the room helped keep me awake when it fluttered around, it’s legs tied together so it wouldn’t escape. Peter and I had no idea why there was a chicken attending the workshop but stranger things have happened. Brendan and Jason entertained themselves while we were working by playing a game of football with the kids in the area. It was May Day so the kids were out of school. It is amazing how if someone produces a football, kids come out of nowhere and teams are formed!
At the end of the day, the participants gave us a very special show of gratitude. It turns out that the chicken in the back of the room was a gift for us. Giving a live chicken is the highest form of thanks and we accepted it graciously. I admit that I was a bit relieved that the chicken was handed to Peter instead of me. I accepted a big bag of groundnuts (peanuts) and potatoes, harvested from their fields. We were also given a bag of chapattis from the two Somalian participants. We were overwhelmed by their generosity, knowing they gave from the little they had. When we got back to the FORGE compound, Peter and I looked at each other in consternation, not knowing what to do with this flailing chicken. Issa saved the day once again, and agreed to take the chicken home with him. The following morning, when we were ready to depart, he took a plastic bag, put the chicken inside and tore a little hole so the chicken could stick it’s head out. That chicken sat between his legs in the front seat of our car the four hours to Kitwe. Then it journeyed the further five hours on the bus to Lusaka with Issa. How many of us in North America give or receive live chickens as gifts and then take them on public transport? Crazy. But tasty!
Sunday, May 8, 2011
With the women’s conference and the Meheba trip finished, I am now free to concentrate on sorting, packing and selling. Because we are not being replaced at MEF, we have been tasked with dissolving our household. Everything has got to go, since we will only have a car and van transporting our luggage, ourselves, and a few items that are better to keep than sell, to Lusaka in a month. I am up for the challenge and I have many willing buyers. I have many willing “takers” as well, with people coming to ask what I am going to give them when I leave. I have a nice excuse when I say that all of our household goods belong to MCC and therefore they will receive the money from the sale, not us. I can’t give away things that don’t belong to us. This seems to do the trick and it is true.
The past two weeks, I have returned to playing tennis. My Dutch friend, Katelejn, found me a better racket than the old wooden one that had surfaced and so my game has improved a bit. The court is still a bit of a hazard with huge cracks all over the place making the ball take an odd bounce right as you swing. But it is good for a lot of laughs!
Unfortunately for Peter, he has one last MCC assignment to complete. He boarded a bus early this morning to travel the eight hours to southern province where he will teach a two week course on peace at the BIC Sikalongo Bible Institute. It is a long time to be away (we are spoiled with how much time we get together so I shouldn’t complain – the devil might crap!). But he is a good teacher and the students will benefit from the time with him. In the meantime, I will hold down the fort as best as I can and prepare us for our departure in less than a month. Too bad that he will miss Mother’s Day, my birthday, and our anniversary, all of which happen during the time he is away. Jason got up early, as usual, and I suggested that he could help me make blueberry muffins as a Mother’s Day gift. He was very eager to do this. But when I asked if either of the boys wanted to wash up the dishes after breakfast, since it was Mother’s Day, they both were quick to say that was one thing they refused to do. One thing? ONE THING? Like they are falling all over themselves doing everything else for me today? Oh well. I’m not going to complain because you know what the devil would be doing then . . .
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