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 -