Malawi - Love That Costs A Life

Tam with Hands at Work member, Roy

I had been sitting outside their home, a hut in a rural Malawian community, for a few minutes, distracted by a boy opposite us playing with a toy of his own invention – a block of wood carved into a point at one end and a thin piece of rope tied to a stick, which he used to whip the block of wood and make it spin like a spinning top. That ingenious resourcefulness and creativity instilled in those born into poverty is never more perfectly put to use than by a child designing a toy to pass the hours. The toys these kids make out of milk cartons and maize husks never fail to captivate me.

There were a few of us sitting outside the home, watching the boy play with his spinning block; Hands at Work staff, a couple of international volunteers, some local ladies who care for the orphans and widows in the community, and them. Them: Layla, a 40-something woman sitting on the ground outside her house, and Tam, a silent and unsmiling boy huddled in her lap. Their hut was one amidst a thousand others, each seeming to tell as desperate a story as the next. But their story, and the hope of which it spoke, was not ordinary, and nor were this pair one amidst a thousand. They were extraordinary, uncommon, and precious – as precious as diamonds in the dust. Their story was about to bring me to silence.

I had arrived in Malawi a week before, my first step into the Warm Heart of Africa. It’s a far cry from the Congo, that place I’ve written so much about. There, poverty is born so much of humanity and of human greed. You see it in everything, from the government office to the grocery seller – a culture conceived in violence and corruption, “Africa’s broken heart.” But here, in her Warm Heart, what struck me as soon as I arrived was that the poverty feels of a different kind. A poverty almost born of the earth. The landscape isn’t marked by old and dilapidated buildings, the stripped skeletons of colonialism that overrun Congo’s cities. It is marked by beautiful mountains, by the shimmering great lake that gave Malawi her name, and everywhere by mud huts that seem more to rise out of the dirt than be built on top of it. A warm and a beautiful heart in every way, but so poor. People here have so little. I met children who sleep in the same windowless house as the family’s goats, suffocating in the unvented stench and huddled together by night under a roof with holes. I was brought so many times to silence.

And it was into that silence that Layla spoke her story. Better said – spoke their story, for you could no more tell the story of the boy in her lap without mentioning Layla than you could tell Layla’s without mentioning him. His name was Tam, and he was five years old. He had lost his mother shortly after he was born, and when his father abandoned the family, Tam’s older sisters were taken into the care of their aunt. When Layla met Tam for the first time, he was little more than a baby, stripped of his mother and therefore stripped of his world. Layla was a ‘care worker’ at the time – one of the local people visiting orphans and widows daily in their homes. Care workers are the foundation of all that we do in Hands at Work – serving and supporting them as best we can, creating relationship between them and people all across the world as they live to be mothers and fathers to those who have none, “beautiful feet bringing good news” to the poorest. But to become a mother, to become a father, most especially to children who have lost their own, is not an easy work. And never since being here and having the privilege of walking with such as these have I seen it so purely, so simply and sincerely, as in Layla. When Tam’s mother died and father left, Layla took him in as her own. In an instant, she went back 5, 10, 20 years to the time when she first became a mother. She had to work harder than ever to raise enough money to feed him whilst juggling the weight of caring for her own children, and all the while still continuing to visit other orphans and widows daily in their homes.

It would be so easy to miss the depth of pain and sacrifice it took for Layla to do what she did. Few of us will ever meet with a decision that demands so much of us. Few will ever know what it is to encounter such a crossroad; to see our plans, our aspirations, our dreams leading one way while someone else's desperate call for love lies the other. Layla changed everything in an instant, gave up her entire life, for Tam. I don’t know how that feels, but I imagine it is a crossroad reserved for everyone who truly understands, or is at least willing to discover, the depth of commitment that love demands of you. And that is just what Layla understood, or what she discovered. Call it what you will: the clutch of fate, the hidden hand of Providence, I only know that these things are not an accident. That in one instant the direction of your entire life will change when God invites you to discover the depth of what it truly means to love. As for me, I’m discovering more and more with every person I meet like Layla that love equals commitment, nothing more or less. Love is not charity, or sympathy, it is not pity or well-wishing. It isn’t throwing a coin to the beggar who asks you for one. Love is giving the very last coin you have to live on because you know that it belongs to them just as your entire life belongs to theirs. Love costs your life. Mother Teresa wrote of such a thing when she said “love is proved by deeds, the more they cost us the greater the proof of our love.” At the cost of her own life Layla paid for Tam’s. Her life is not her own. She doesn’t claim it for herself. At some point 5 years ago she gave it up, a gift to the silent and unsmiling boy in her lap who has since become in every way her son, she in every way his mother, the two of them the most extraordinary pair, and theirs a most impossible story of hope amidst a thousand unlike it. A precious and an extraordinary love. I hope I will meet such a crossroads and choose the road less traveled. It costs much, but Layla tells me that you have to walk the way of sacrifice to meet the joy at its end; joy akin to a mother gaining a son, and a son discovering his mother. 

Discovering Home

A year has passed since I first stepped off a plane onto South African soil, carrying my granddad’s red leather suitcase, a tatty old Bible, 3 sets of sunglasses and a fedora that only in hindsight can I admit looked ridiculous. I was every inch a missionary, with 12 months to kill. Now, those months are gone and with them the fedora, suitcase and sunnies (lost, bust and stolen), though my Bible’s with me still and tattier than ever. And against all plans and priorities to the contrary, I’m still here. I don’t remember some pivotal or decisive moment, I only know that at some point, and I don’t think I could tell you when, I realised that I wasn’t quite ready to leave. That’s how I find myself sitting in the living room of the Zambian farmhouse I’ve come to call home, batting the flies away from my face on a long and a stinking hot Friday, wondering for the life of me what happened.

I know how I got here; that much at least is definite. It was a heart for adventure, a longing for discovery, that ancient appeal of the obscure that compels you to experiment in life in another culture. It was the allure of the bizarre that got me eating bat wings that I only later found out was just misnamed beef. The law of trying everything once that threw me off a cliff face over a hundred metre gorge (or the person tied to the same cord as me that dragged us both off.) It was the mystery of a calling written on my heart, the longing to discover why God would lead me to such a place at such a time as this. But now the problem I’m faced with is what to make of this time and place when it becomes more than just an experience, when it demands more of me than I at first planned to give. Because it’s still adventure that drives me. A life with Christ, no matter where that life finds you, is nothing if not the most impossible adventure. But I’ve since been met by something deeper.

You see, experience fades like the photos in which you try to capture it or the memory with which you long to keep it. The great unknown becomes the commonplace. The sights, sounds and smells that at first serve the exotic unfamiliarity of it all become familiar, and you find yourself reclining into normality in what ought to be the most abnormal of places. The stench of the dried market-fish with the glamorous name becomes unobtrusive, and the fish itself becomes just ‘dinner.’

And there is a part of you, perhaps the part that drew you here in the first place, that calls it tragic. The explorer in you mourns. But for those longing to truly dig deep into the heart of a strange place, it’s the greatest discovery there is. Discovering that more than the holiday encounter of this exotic, beautiful, fierce, untamed place, there is something deeper. Discovering the heart of why you were ever here in the first place. Discovering the heart of the Father from which that calling first compelled you, the depths of why Christ bids you here, for such a time as this. Discovering in the midst of obscurity a sense of belonging. In other words: Discovering home.

And so I ask again: What happened? The only answer I can hope to give, in the most fitting words I can hope to give it, is that somehow I ended up here, and by ways higher than mine it so happens that here is just where Jesus wants me. Before I left the UK, heading out for the first time on this African adventure, I was barraged by words of advice, many wise, many more not so wise. But few went so deep or have gone with me so long as those of an old housemate of mine. He told me that wherever you find yourself, that is your home. That wherever Christ leads you, whether for a moment or a lifetime, at least for such a time as this, it is exactly where you are supposed to be, and the place and the time in which you find yourself deserve everything that you have. Home is where your rump rests, they say.

That’s answer enough for why I’m here, in the scorching October of Central Africa. There are so many other places I could have been. So many other adventures I could have lived. But the only one worth my life is the reckless and radical adventure of a life spent with God. Above and beyond every longing of my own, it was Him who brought me here. And so here I am, just where I’m supposed to be, for such a time as this, dumbfounded by His ways, and at home.

Something is Rising (Or, a Really Good Party)

It was one of those days that you just know from the very beginning is going to be beautiful. And by the end, that was really the only word to describe it. Everything about it gave me a feeling as if this were a day God had crafted with extra special care and attention in the hopeful chance that someone, somewhere, might be taking notice. As it so happens, it fell not on any old box of the calendar, but on Congo Independence Day. And as it so happens, I was there! For just a week I was back on the red soil of DRC, and we squeezed so much into that short spell that it’s not worth me trying to recount the whole thing. But the highlight is easy to spot. It was leaving the house just as the sun rose over Congo Independence, it was getting back exhausted but exhilarated after the sun had set, and it was everything that happened in between. That day, deep in the bush, a party was coming together, a party in and for the most enchanting community I know.

Kisunka is a community comprised of five different villages built around a huge lake called Changalele (don’t worry about the pronunciation, I don’t). The few thousand people who have for centuries lived in this lost and untouched world are some of the poorest we support. They have so little. Many starve the whole year round, holding on only for the couple of months that mangoes grow on the otherwise fruitless trees rising up between their mud huts. The lake provides all their water with which they drink, wash, cook, clean, the lot. So you can imagine, sickness is rife. The nearest clinic (in the nearest town) is so far away that pregnant women end up giving birth by the roadside. Many more sick and weary people simply never finish the journey at all. I have stayed in the villages of Kisunka community a number of times and met some of the most beautiful, genuine, compassionate and caring people I’m ever likely to know. I’ve also met there in the shadows of those fruitless trees some of the most hopeless and helpless situations to which I’ve been exposed. I’ve found miracles there too, miracles born of broken and burnt out hearts infused with a most relentless and stubborn faith. An old man within an inch of death one day striding toward us the next pointing his finger to the sky and wearing a smile as if he’s about to burst into tears of laughter any moment. Babies whose lives were almost stolen before they had a chance to realise it had been given, growing happy, healthy and whole. Hearts healed, souls restored, and all that jazz! It was to celebrate the miracles happening in that lost and lonely place that we gathered on Congo Independence Day, 200 of us from across the communities; young, old, village chiefs and village prostitutes, the highest and the lowest and the most forgotten, all of us together to celebrate in the loud and proud way that the Congo do best what God is doing here. And not only what God is doing but what he is doing through these people. Because it is here in Kisunka that, with nothing more than a vision to make a difference, people arose and established the first schools the community has ever known. They’d never had a school before, now there’s one within a couple of kilometres of every orphan and vulnerable child supported by the care workers. It is here that out of the little they have the community started providing food, daily food, for the children that needed it the most. It was for such miracles as these that a party was coming together in the Congo bush, on the shores of that long lost lake. There I listened as the head of all the chiefs, the most respected and wealthy and important person within a 20 kilometre radius, looked at the leaders gathered and with pointed finger told them, “We think that we are at the top and the children are at the bottom. But they are the important ones, and we are their servants.” You hope that in your lifetime you’ll see one or two such miracles. If you don’t, you’ve probably been walking around with your eyes closed.

You see this place shows no memory of a more glorious, fruitful, prosperous, healthy time. Perhaps the village was born in ashes. But on that God-crafted, hot and humid Congo Independence Day we came together to sing and dance and speak and shout about one truth, with one voice: that it will not end in ashes. These children’s lives will not go up in flame. Something is rising. It’s really hard to put your finger on it. It’s hard to sum it up in nice words, as it always is when you’re talking about what God is doing, because he tends to do things that are so unexpected and impossible that the only reaction left for the world that watches is the one I had sitting in that chair watching that celebration take place; the unexpected tear in your eye, the commotion of nerves in your heart that tell you you’re seeing something breathtaking, unimaginable, indescribable and good. 

Loveness, The Story of a Friend

Three days staying in the home of a family deep in the Zambian bush; three days eating what they eat, sleeping where they sleep, doing whatever they do wherever they go to do it. I have stayed in communities just like this before, but this time was different. And it wasn’t because of the unusual size of the rats scuttling along the beams of the thatched roof above my head. It wasn’t that beautiful early morning frost or the unbearably hot sun that soon melted it. It wasn’t trying to squeeze down ground nut porridge and a guava after the ten lumps of nshema and cabbage they tried to feed me every meal. It was a ten year old girl named Loveness; and it was all of it the fruit of a moment two weeks before.

I’d been walking with some of our care workers in the community, a village marked by a single dirt track cutting its way 40 kilometres through the grass with everything else built around it. We saw her in the distance long before we came close enough to greet, strolling toward us in her tattered school uniform. She was with an older woman and the pair of them walked with the archetypal African pace, slow and without purpose. I’ve never liked walking slowly. I figure if you want to get somewhere might as well get there as quickly as you can. But I’ve long since learnt that here you’ll dehydrate quicker rushing to find shade than you will walking slowly, even in the blazing sun. Here people move so slowly you might have cause to think they’re not walking to any place in particular, as if they’re saying, “Why rush? It doesn’t matter what time we arrive.” What matters is the way you spend the time getting there. Because in Africa life isn’t the sum of its events but the space in between them. So a journey is not an arbitrary link between A and B, it’s an occasion for life to happen. Conversation, silence, sharing, laughing, talking; it’s not about “passing the time”, it’s about making of even the most insignificant time something sacred, because relationship is formed as much in the space between significant moments as in the moments themselves. So it was after walking toward each other for 10 minutes on that long dirt track that we finally met. Her name was Loveness. She was 10 years old. That’s as much as I’d been told when I walked over to her to say hello. She smiled at me shyly and took my hand and right then, in that passing moment, something strange happened. I was caught off guard; something from somewhere in my head or my heart telling me that I was going to have a real, deep connection with this girl. I didn’t know what to make of it, but it was so clear. It turned out the lady she was walking with was her grandmother and also a care worker in the community. The two of them turned around and walked with us the other way, back the few kilometres they had just crossed (which really made me wonder whether they had ever been going anywhere in the first place). Some of the team walked ahead of us, some behind, but Loveness and I walked together, hand in hand. Every now and then she’d let go, look at the glisten of sweat that has appeared on her palm, then show it to me with a disapproving expression before wiping it on her skirt, which embarrassed me every time. But then she would take my hand all over again anyway, until the next break. Every now and then as we walked she’d squeeze my hand more tightly for just a moment. Sometimes she would look up at me and say my name, to which I’d ask, ‘yes?’, before she would just turn back. All I could make of it was that she was checking, as often as she needed to, that I was still there. Perhaps checking that I wasn’t about to leave. I can’t read a lot from people’s behaviour, from first introductions, but I could have guessed at least a shadow of the story that her grandmother told me when I asked. I’ve heard stories just like it so many times now. Her father had died four or five years earlier after being bitten by a snake. Loveness and her sisters had been kept in her mother’s care, until she lost her mind and was unfit to keep them. Now, her sisters are scattered across the homes of various aunties and uncles, and Loveness is left with her grandmother. Despite that, the family remains closer than any I have ever met. Every one of them is the responsibility of them all. None of them claims anything for themselves. Perhaps that is why when, two weeks after meeting this mismatched pair, I turned up to invade their home for 3 days with nothing more than a bag of groceries and a backpack, I wasn’t a stranger but a son, a big brother, a friend of the kind that can leave for years and return as if only a day had passed since parting. As for Loveness and me, the language barrier was really no barrier at all. It turned out that she was, even without speaking English, one of the funniest girls of her age I’ve ever met. She took care of her younger and older sister beautifully. She took care of me too, making sure I was safe and well fed, taking my hand when we walked past groups of drunk teens. It all seemed pretty backwards. But then, in a village I don’t know amongst I people I don’t understand with a language I don’t speak, Loveness figured that of the two of us I was the more vulnerable.

Whatever measure you use to define genuine relationship, whatever it is that makes friends of people with nothing else in common but the tie that binds them, I made a friend in Loveness. As unlikely and unfounded a friendship as any I’m likely to have the privilege of knowing! And it was of such a friendship that the voice in my head and my heart spoke two weeks before. God brought us together, whether for her or for me I’m still not sure. But then that’s what makes friendship beautiful, it's the kind of relationship that has no more purpose than the relationship itself. God’s desire was that we meet, and no doubt that we keep meeting. That tells me nothing more than that God laughs when two strangers, across all the spatial and cultural distance that lies between them, become the most improbable of friends.

Building Upon Foundations

April 2012

Today I met Chatty for the very first time, and Godfrey for the second. Both of them four years old, both of them stripped too soon of the love and care and security of their parents, and both of them possessors of arrestingly disarming smiles, if not only because they are so rare a thing. It struck me as surreal to see these children face to face, to hold them as closely as I did, after knowing their stories so intimately and for so long. Since April of last year, when a team from our church in the UK returned from a short trip to Zambia having spent time in this community we support, Chatty and Godfrey have been spoken of much. The impact they made upon our team, Chatty upon my own Dad in particular, reached beyond the hearts of only those who met them in the flesh; upon the heart of a church and a family that miles and culture keep far distant from this place. Back then these two young men, both of them wounded in heart and memory, allowed not a corner of their lips the faintest flicker of a smile. But today I saw different children than those of whom I’d heard so much. Welcoming. Loving. Even happy. How fairer the countenance swept with a smile. I started thinking about the way we lay foundations in the lives of others. We first entered this little rural community, obscured deep in the Zambian bush, in 2010 to meet a crowd of children too afraid to approach us except to see the magic of bubbles blown from a little tub of soapy water. Now it’s difficult to walk for fear of trampling on children so happy and so proud to hold us as friends. And this time, Godfrey can be loved in his joy and in his healing, because once upon a time someone else loved him in his pain and poverty. Chatty, this misnamed child as my Dad called him a year before, can know something of safety and security in the presence of strangers such as us because he remembers a stranger who once upon a time walked into his home, and exited it all the same, only leaving behind him the faint aroma of deep and lasting love that can pierce the stench of loneliness, despair and death. We like to think of ourselves as independent and autonomous creatures, only affected by others in as much as we allow ourselves the vulnerability to be affected. I remember sitting in a pub in England listening to the fiery exchange between one woman and a much younger girl, apparently her granddaughter, who was bombarding the older lady with verbal and emotional abuse. Her reply to all of this was something about having very thick skin and not letting insults affect her, particularly from a snotty little brat who should know better. But I thought: what must have affected her in the past, and to what extent, that she would now not allow herself to be hurt by the sting of a well aimed insult, even from a voice as precious as that of her own granddaughter? And I realised, no matter how independent we like to think ourselves, no matter how we may like to believe that we live in a vacuum, only being affected by that which we allow close enough to affect us, the truth of the matter is: we are all of us architects of one another.

One lays the foundation, and another builds upon it. A mother speaks a cruel word to her little girl and the foundation is laid for a lifetime of cynicism and mistrust. Another child loses a father to alcohol and a chasm is ripped in that boy’s heart that no closeness or intimacy will ever be permitted to bridge. They stay with us like a foul taste stuck in the mouth, these bitter memories. But another child, with every reason to give up on life and the world and whichever god had the insanity to make that world and then the audacity to call it ‘good’, against all odds grows up into a happy and healthy child. Why? Because where once he knew only hurt and pain someone loved him into healing, and upon a broken and bent foundation something beautiful was raised. We have the choice, all of us, as to whether we let our past determine our future or allow our future to redeem the past. No pain is beyond redemption. Someone once said that every child comes with the message that God has not yet given up on the world. That must be followed shortly by the message that no child is born to be given up on. If only we could see how much of the healing power of God himself was embedded in our DNA when he gave us the capacity to love one another. Then the quiet word, the passing smile, the tear lent to someone who has used up all their own would never be underestimated in its might to heal. All of us are in either the business of construction or demolition, building trust, hope and love into the lives of those around us or tearing it down. In Godfrey, in that misnamed child Chatty too, people are continuing to build from a broken and a bent foundation something truly beautiful. And few things are as beautiful, few things at once so simple and yet so profound, as a face once etched with pain now swept with a smile.

Goma, How Deserted Lies the City

Three days ago, sometime on the 30 April, rebel troops under the command of former Congolese army general Bosco “Terminator” Ntaganda, marched upon the villages surrounding Goma, a large city in north-eastern Congo. The Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which Goma is the largest city, has played host to a dozen or more wars in only the last couple of decades and boasts history’s largest refugee camps, some numbering more than 1.5 million people. At the hands of warlords and forces descending upon Congo’s communities like starved locusts, the people of Kivu and its surrounding villages have become some of the poorest in the world. A billion people worldwide live on less than $1 a day; in Goma countless families live on less than $1 a week. In such an environment in which healthcare is so essential, it is missing; sanitation is simply not a facet of life. Every man, woman and child in Goma knows too familiarly the sound that heralds their exodus: marching on the mountains, gunfire in the hills, screaming in the homes. They know what it means to decide between fleeing into the bush with children slung over their back, where they will have no food, water, shelter or security, or staying where they are and waiting for the soldiers to arrive, young men with Kalashnikovs in hand, whose only wage is as much food as they can pillage, as many women as they can get their hands on. The troops always invade the villages first. This is life in Goma.

And so, when we hear that the soldiers are marching again, again, what are we to do? From the beautiful farmhouse in which I find myself in Zambia, gathered together with all my Hands at Work family for a time of celebration and thanking God and discovering His vision for what is next, what am I to do? It is difficult even to pray. But then, such are the occasions when prayer is most important. When it seems so trite as to be even a joke. This thing we do before we throw the first forkful of dinner into our mouths, and do more earnestly with clenched fists before an exam or interview, this thing we fall asleep doing as we lay our heads down at night, are we really to do that now? 1,000 kilometres away in Zambia, or 3,000 kilometres away in Europe, or 6,000 kilometres away in North America, what more can we do?

How deserted lies the city, once so full of people. Her children have gone into exile, captive before the foe. Our pursuers were swifter than eagles in the sky; they chased us over the mountains and lay in wait for us in the desert. Those who pursue us are at our heels; we are weary and find no rest.

- Lamentations -

Sometimes a broken heart isn’t enough. Walking amidst the smouldering ruins of the once great city he called home, the poet of Lamentations “pours out” his heart upon the ground. Broken, beat, smashed into little more than a puddle on the floor. A prayer like the one above rises from the devastation of a heart as spent as his. He can do no other. My heart is utterly sold out for the Congo. That’s no secret. When I heard about Goma, standing in our Zambian farmhouse as my friend recounts the news he has just received from one of our guys in Congo, I can only describe what I felt as something akin to getting a phone call telling you that your home has been hit by a bomb. And what could I do? Only pray, and pray more. I slept outside that night, because sometimes words aren’t as articulate a prayer as the actions that follow them, and it seemed wrong to crawl under my mosquito net into bed as I finish praying for the safety of thousands sleeping in the bush. I even had the audacity to be a little frightened of some of the sounds filling the night, birds and other unrecognisable animal calls. I was scared because I didn’t know which animals were making the noise. Gunfire is much more distinguishable a sound. And so this is me doing the little more that I can do: asking you to pray also. Even if you're not the kind of person to pray much or at all. Some things are more important than the theological standpoint in which you find yourself in this very moment. Please pray. We can do little more. And as you pray know that God has designs and dreams and visions and promises for Goma, that long forgotten city in some abstract corner of the African jungle. If you don’t know that, then your prayers will go little further than asking God how in His name or in the name of fate or destiny or bad luck or anything else something like this could happen in a world that for all intents and purposes would actually be pretty much perfect were it not for that great slip-up of His in making a creature with the capacity to ruin the place in ways so horrifying as to be unimaginable. Praying like that won’t get you or the children lost in the hills of Goma anywhere. That’s how my prayers seem to always start these days. But that mustn’t be where they end. Wading in an ocean of hearts unreservedly poured out for these children, these women, many of them pregnant, these grandfathers and grandmothers too tired to run again, let us take our lead from the poet, his heart wasted before him on the ground:

I remember my affliction and my wandering

the bitterness and the fall,

I well remember them,

and my soul is downcast within me.

Yet this I call to mind

and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed

for his compassions never fail.

- Lamentations -

Hard to look and listen, hard to turn away

Someone once wrote upon leaving the Congo, “Oh Congo, what a wreck. It’s hard to look and listen. It’s hard to turn away.” I can’t tell you how truly that resonates.

These last two months I have spent being touched by the lives and stories of children living in a nation the UN recognises as the least developing in all the world. The statistics are bleak; home to 4 and a half million orphans, host to a dozen international wars in only the last two decades, consequentially making it the world capital of rape, torture and war crimes. But statistics offer a distant and disaffected view of a situation that can only hope to be understood at a closer look; like standing back to view a whole work of art while missing the brushstrokes that make up its beauty. No matter how long I’ve been in Africa now, seeking His heart with everything I have and am, I never cease to be reminded that His heart is only found when you stand close enough to be caught by the story, and the face, of just one child.

Statistics will never show you what is going on beneath the surface. You have to come and see for yourself. You have to allow yourself the courage to see with the eyes of Jesus. He sees the depths of poverty and pain, as no one has ever seen or felt them before. But he sees, more deeply written into the lives of “the least of these” even than their pain and poverty, a true and a lasting hope. The Scriptures say, “Hope that is seen is no hope at all.” If that’s true, then God’s eyes are most attentively fixed upon the places in which nothing will change unless He is the One to change it. Sometimes it’s a whole region, like Goma in the eastern Congo; sometimes it’s just one person, like my friend Dancel dying alone, leprous and arthritic, in his sweltering and smelly mud hut. Encountering such people and places, it would be easy to give up hope, as do so many. It is their greatest loss, this dying hope. The human heart seems able to endure just about anything but that. Because the strength to endure is in knowing that there is yet a more beautiful future, so it is when that future is crushed beneath a numbed heart and a beat spirit that a life born of hope is lost. But we stand on a promise, written upon the heart of the nation and all the hearts of all God’s children in it;

...hope that is seen is no hope at all...

And there is hope. Of that I’m convinced.

As for me, I think I’ve been caught in the spell that the Congo casts over most people who visit it. It caught me before I ever stepped foot here, and has only gotten stronger the longer I’ve stayed. Only now it has a face. Actually lots of faces; kids who it’ll be tough to leave behind, some just because they’re great kids, others because I’ll leave them in just the same state in which I first met them. It’s hard to look and listen; it’s hard to turn away. Hard to turn away from people in whose stories I have had the honour of sharing; people with whom I’ve discovered a relationship strong enough to penetrate language, culture and background. It feels like I’m standing on an axis moment upon which my life is going to turn, one of those “there’s no going back after this” moments. I’ve seen and heard things that God won’t soon allow me to forget. Because Dancel is still laid up on the floor of his mud hut, dying and alone, and the thousand other faces burnt onto my heart are still bearing the same broken expressions, betraying the deep and lasting wounds they hold. It’s hard to turn away, even impossible, because to do that would be to miss not only the honour of sharing in the life of such as these, but the inexpressible privilege of playing a part in changing it.

...to make the hope that is unseen visible

...to afford freedom to those from whom it has been taken

...to reawaken life where it has been lost, more and better life than we ever dreamed of.

To let that pass me by would be to miss the gift for which God put me here. But I won’t let it pass. No way.

Answering the Cry of a Broken Heart

I made a thousand excuses. I was tired. I needed a break, some alone time, after one of those mornings where the simplest work feels like trudging through syrup. I’d just spent a weekend in the community – early mornings and late nights and everything in between physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausting. My arsenal was loaded – “Here you are God, here’s a bunch of excuses, all of them as good as the next, pick one!” But it didn’t matter; the boy I walked past with nothing but a smiling glance was going to follow me whether I liked it or not. When I noticed he was tracking my steps I cast him the vague, polite pleasantries in the hope that it would be all he wanted from the token white man. But he kept following. Soon he was shoulder to shoulder with me, a cheeky but strikingly childlike smile stretching across his adolescent face. He started rambling to me in French, but the only thing I could translate was that whatever it was he was asking, he was genuinely interested in getting to know me. But I was tired, so I walked past and walked on. But he followed. When we came to some crossroads I asked him in slow, slightly elevated English which way he was going. He just smiled, and said he didn’t understand. So I carried on walking, as did he. Eventually, having trawled about town lying every time he asked if I spoke any French at all, we got to the bakery I was going to for lunch. Though he was clearly hungry, he didn’t ask for any food. It wasn’t what he wanted. Nevertheless I bought him a nice bit of bread and a bit for the boy begging on the street outside, to massage that pesky ache in my conscience. I continued to walk and he continued to talk. Approaching the little shop I was going into to buy a Coke I prepared to say a not-so-fond farewell to the young man, when I picked out a single word in his hurried French. Orphan. I felt like I’d been hit by a freight train. Not knowing what to do with myself, I invited him into the shop, sat him on a chair and bought him some proper lunch. We sat there in silence, him smiling that broad and beautiful grin, me feeling like Dr. Jekyll looking in the mirror and discovering that he’s Mr. Hyde. I asked him to pray for the food, but he was too shy and instead the lady who owned the shop came over and, placing her hands on our Cokes, thanked God. He was excited to discover that I was a Christian. What a tragedy that sometimes it is not our character that distinguishes us as Christians, but our little religiosities. He pulled out of his pocket a tattered little French Bible. It was the only thing he carried.  Throwing it open he clumsily thumbed through the pages then stopped and pushed it across the table to me. Pointing at a verse on the page he kept repeating: “my favourite”, and though I didn’t understand the language, I recognised the verse.

– Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you –

The train hit me for the second time. I thought, what if this morning when he got out of bed, this young boy asked of his Father in heaven that today, somehow, he would meet someone who cared? What if this morning he simply asked for his daily bread and as he did so, opened up that tattered little Bible and read the promise of Jesus: Ask and it will be given to you? What if today I was God’s messy, flesh-and-blood answer to the cry of a boy’s heart, longing for love? And I almost missed it. I almost missed Him – Jesus disguised in the face of an orphaned boy named Francois, walking the streets of Likasi in search of a smile. I thought: how often we walk past? How often in the noise of the madding crowd do we miss the Father’s voice, calling us to stop and look around? How often do we miss that little gift of God – that invitation to the inexplicable privilege of being the answer to someone’s prayer? Even today someone cries out to a God they aren’t sure they believe in and he says: I am coming; I am sending my son, my daughter, to be the light of life to you who are lost in darkness. And what shall we do? Walk on? Or stop and say ‘Yes’ to the invitation of Jesus, compelling us to give of ourselves. Such is the mystery of his presence in us, letters from Christ to a broken world, signed and sealed in love, not written on paper and with ink but on human hearts and with the blood of Jesus. Today God invites me to answer the cry of just one heart. And what does he ask of me? Only that I act justly, that I love mercy, and that I walk humbly with my God. Or perhaps you could say – only that I never carry on walking when God stoops down to touch a heart in love.

The Legacy of a Father

Porfela was laid up in bed dying, so weak he couldn’t even stand up to watch out the window of his one-room hut as his children played outside. I walked into his home, knelt by his bedside and held his hand as I listened to his story and told him how much he is loved by God his Father. It seemed bizarrely inappropriate to be there supporting him, trying as best I could to encourage and inspire him, when I was the one who went away the most transformed from our meeting one another. That was April 2010, and I will remember Porfela forever – his was the first home visit I ever went on in Africa, all those months ago on a two week trip to Zambia. Fast forward to just before Christmas, 2011. Having been hurried out of the Congo during the country’s volatile presidential elections I’d found myself back on the soil of my first African love – Zambia. I had since learnt that a few months ago Porfela had passed away. That big slum in which I visited him was just up the road, and so I was absolutely set on going back. I hoped to return and spend a night staying in the community. Preparations were made, few of them by me, and soon my Swazi friend Sibusiso and I were being driven into the huge slum-compound under the cover of darkness, so as not to draw attention to our presence. Having no idea with whom I was going to stay I trekked through the buzzing slum, amidst crowds of drunk youngsters and echoes of “mzungu!” (white man!) all around me, following a care worker to the home in which I would sleep. As we turned into the yard of the tiny decrepit hut I knew instantaneously where I was; it wasn’t my first time there. I don’t know how I recognised Porfela’s home so quickly, having only made a brief visit there over a year before and now returning in the dark. I guess the experience was etched on my memory, the face of that dying man and the feel of his hand etched on my heart, more profoundly than I had ever realised. His wife, a big mother-hen type woman who seemed to carry the weight of all her family’s pain alone, and yet bear it with joy, came out of the house to greet us. I was so overwhelmed, so overawed that God should arrange it that I stay in the home of a family that touched my heart over a year before, that I couldn’t contain my excitement. It seemed I didn’t need to ask if she remembered me, but I did anyway. She told me through the care worker’s translation that she remembered, and giving me a motherly hug she pulled me into her home. There I met Porfela’s children for the first time, the three boys: Akim (14), Renard (12) and Mwenya (9), and a beautiful little girl with an incredible attitude called Naomi (3). Akim, the man of the house, spoke the best English of them all and was gracious enough to translate for me so that I could speak to the family. We spent the evening playing games, sharing a meal, chasing and tickling Naomi until she screamed, drawing in my notebook and trying to pack more and more visitors into the one-room hut as they arrived hour by hour throughout the evening. I learnt that Renard was suffering badly with malaria. Too weak to stand up, he laid in the corner of the room, sitting up every now and then so I could put my arm around him. Akim took care of him with all the love of a father. Porfela had suffered bitterly for a long time, and so Akim had become the man of house long before his father passed away, and long before his childhood came to its end. But he bore the weight of responsibility with such unnatural maturity. 

That night I lay down to sleep in the exact spot where I had found Porfela over a year previous. Renard laid beside me, tucked together under a single sheet on the cold muddy ground. Every time he turned over and his arm touched mine I felt the scorching heat of fever that was taking its toll on his young body. How does so young a heart bear such a season of pain? His hollow gaze betrayed a hurt deeper than sickness. The whole family bore the same wound - they missed their father, Salome missed her husband; and though Akim carried with courage so much of what his Dad left behind, the family’s pain spoke even to a stranger like me of something unmistakeable: that Porfela was a good father. In Africa, where so many are left fatherless at the hands of disease and death and so many more left behind by fathers walking out the door, a good Dad is a precious and prized thing. To leave behind you a family so tightly bound, so knitted in love and faithfulness that even without you they continue to grow closer – that is a legacy to be desired by every man. Porfela was such a father. I wish I had met him earlier, and yet I think to see what he left behind – a family bound by such incredible intimacy – is a greater testament than anything I could have seen whilst he was alive.

I left Salome’s home the following day. We prayed together for Renard and Salome, I said my goodbyes to the family (and about a thousand neighbours), and headed off. I had to leave Zambia just a couple of days later, but couldn’t go without wrapping and sending a few little Christmas gifts for the family. I understand they liked them very much, but I’ll have to see for myself when I go back, which will be very soon. I’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, pray for Akim, for Renard, for Mwenya, for Naomi and for Salome. And know that if anywhere the hope of Africa is shining, like sunlight streaming through a clouded sky, it is in the lives of such as these – a family that bears, in the midst of terrible agony, an unshakeable and extravagant love.