Hypocrite-in-process

           In the past week I've spent time teaching at Mercy and working at Chikumbuso. I cannot even begin to tell you how much I love this place, and the people. I have so much to learn about Zambia, and everyone here is so kind and gracious! I wish you could meet all of these people. During one of the lunch breaks at Mercy, I sat with with a co-teacher friend of mine and we simply talked for hours and ate (quite possibly the largest plate of rice I've ever encountered; they feed the students well!).  And Beauty, one of the widows at Chikumbuso, invited me to her house as she told me her life story. A widowed friend of mine and I prayed that she would feel less ill, and a few of us laughed about my first nshima meal. Serah, a student in my sixth grade class, gave me a lovely drawing she made in our craft class...pretty much in spite of me, I'm horrible at art and can only sort of handle stick people!...and wrote along the bottom "I love you so much." Tiny snippets don't do them justice, but I hope you can get to know and love these people at least a little bit!

         I've spent some time trying to truly think and understand the profound hopelessness found in a lot of these slums; it is a victory to make it past five as a child, and kids literally grow up without dreams because they don't anticipate living long enough to grow into any aspirations. They have seen siblings and parents die, and I really don't know how to grasp what it's like to believe you won't survive to the age in which most dreams can be realized. And the fact that these are real human beings, not categories or statistics or just pictures, is a problem for me. Today at Chikumbuso the teacher asked all the students of the class to introduce themselves and say what they would like to be when they grow up. I'm not kidding when I say I almost cried with excitement seeing these children who live in the slum and who were receiving the gift of education, food, and healthcare, stand up and say they want to be pilots or nurses or teachers or pastors, to hear them giggle when others spoke, and to see their joy about completing their education. These kids have hope. I still really, really don't understand why there is a lot of difficulty in life. But I do understand a little better why God says these three remain: faith, hope, and love. And why He says the greatest of these is love. (See verse 13). Without these three, life collapses. With them, life can be possible, even beautiful.
         I  would love to just sit here and write, after spending time here, that I'm utterly remade and compassionate and "good" (I mean, that'd be a nice thing to be) and that I will forever love well and love completely--with the kind of love that actually gets you off your butt and your mind off yourself--and that now I know how to live simply so others can, well, simply live. But it isn't true. The real truth is that I'm a huge hypocrite-in-process. I care about these people, but I spend a lot of time thinking about the way I look. I want to help them, but I'm also really lazy and the thought of actually being able to do something makes me just tired sometimes. I love being in Zambia, but I find myself thinking of ways to fit service into a more comfortable, easy lifestyle and crafting eloquent justifications for selfish behavior. And mostly, it's really scary to think of caring about real human beings, instead of simply causes from which I can justify walking away. Because if I actually try, actually meet, actually see, I'm vulnerable and responsible. I remember sitting in my dorm room in winter at Northwestern feeling so frustrated and upset and angry because the homeless shelters close by were overflowing. I knew my homeless friend Jeff would be sleeping outside in the wet snow. Jeff is a real person I love, poorly at times, and he's not a cause or a group. He's somebody that I know! And I know these people now, Beauty and David and Ruthie and Agness and Edna, but I still find that I'm pretty stuck on myself. So I'm a hypocrite-in-process. Donald Miller in his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years said "when we live [our story], we are telling the people around us what we think is important."  I'm really trying to figure out how to re-mold what I think is important, and how to actually live it.

You may not see many pictures of people or children on this blog, at least not for a while! I hope to be very, very careful about maintaining the dignity of the people here, and I never want them to feel on display or an object for pity or minimization and marginalization. In fact, my hope in serving in Zambia is to do the exact opposite: to care for these people and show them that they are valued and loved...even though I know I'll make lots of huge mistakes. Picture-taking can be done in an appropriate fashion, and I hope the opportunity will arise for me to share these people I love with you in snapshots, because I'd love for you to meet them "face-to-face!" But that's not the end goal, so please forgive the lack of pictures for the time being. Here is just one snapshot of a time when the widows and I were celebrating the delivery of a soy bean donation. It was a very fun time for all of us!
Thank you so much for reading!