I guess it is time for some testimonies.
Papi is a man in his late thirties notorious for his drunkenness. He has such a bad reputation that he has never been able to find anyone willing to marry him. Somehow he found out about us and showed up at church one Sunday in Shituru. God just got a hold of him and he realized his life was messed up and he could change. He came again the next week and declared to us that he was giving up drinking and the Holy Spirit helped him and he hasn’t had a drink since that day! The next week he came he laid his whole life before Jesus and declared he wasn’t going to live for himself any more but would live for God. He said he hated his sins and was leaving them behind. He was just so passionate and serious. Everyone who knew him dropped their jaws. It isn’t just some emotional experience it has been over a month now and he is still following Jesus ready to serve in any capacity we ask him too!
I was walking around like I always do and we went to a new house I had never been too. Grace, a total stranger to me and my team, had requested that we show up so we did. She introduced us to her 2 daughters and then began to tell us her story. When she was in high school she met a boy who said he would marry her even though he refused to meet her parents or do anything formally that would imply such. As soon as she got pregnant he took off leaving her with a baby and stopping her chance at an education. To make matters worse her daughter has some sort of mental disorder. So a few years go by and she starts up an affair with a married man and gets pregnant again. He denies everything and refuses to take care of his daughter much less her and her other daughter. She looks at us with eyes filled with shame and says “I know I sinned and I need to repent.” So Pastor Kabamba asked her what she wanted from us. I was expecting her to say money for her kids but she looked at us and said “I heard that people who meet with you can change their lives and get a second chance. I heard people who meet with her get healed.” It is such a privilege to represent Jesus and to know that my work here is giving Him the reputation he deserves to have. She got saved right then and there and is ready for her second chance this time as a child of God.
Seven months ago Phani’s husband out of the blue wrote down on a piece of scrap paper we are divorced and handed the paper to her. She was crushed and the marriage was over. He then kicked her and her children out of his house in Lubumbashi and she moved to a cousin’s house in Likasi. He had a girl friend and they started making plans to get married. I was in the US at the time but Pastor Kabamba knew her and began to encourage her. She started coming to our church. She first talked to me about her situation in August. She said she needed a miracle. She needed a huband to support her but if she remarried her new husband wouldn’t accept her children and they would always suffer. We told her she was in luck because we actual serve a miracle working God. We all began to pray several times a week. Phani was always in church and eager to learn anything she could. Last week I went to her cousin’s house to visit and she told me her ex-husband left his girlfriend came crawling back and begged her to forgive him and come back. I was skeptical at first and wondered if she should give him a second chance but when he came to talk to her it became obvious he had repented and was changing his life. In all the months I’ve known Phani I’ve never seen her so happy! She says she prayed and God gave her a miracle against all odds. Now her and her kids will be taken care of and the God of restoration prevails again.
Divine is a 5 year old girl who is all about being the center of attention. But when I saw her one day she wouldn’t come near me or anyone else. She bad a terrible fever and just wanted to be held by her mom as she cried softly to herself because of the headache and stomachache and body aches. She had malaria. I’ve had malaria 8 times so I knew just how much she was hurting even if she hadn’t been crying. We gathered around her and cried out for God to touch her. She stopped crying while we were praying but the fever was still present. We got word the next day that she was much better! Yes she was also taking malaria medicine but the recovery was much quicker than usual. Although malaria is common and curable people die from it all the time. I just saw her today and she was dancing around her living room competing with her little brother for my attention talking about how excited she was to go to church tomorrow and pray!
I went into a Belgian grocery store in Lubumbashi and the owner happened to be there. He asked me what I was doing in Congo (thankfully he spoke English because although my Swahili is getting better by the day my French is rusty). I told him I help orphans and he loaded me up with food for them. So this Saturday I got the 60 orphans we are trying to help in Shituru together and taught them some praise songs (a lot of these kids have never been to church) then taught them a lesson from the Bible and gave them some food. You could tell those kids felt so special. Normally if they are ever singled out it is because they get less than the other kids. Now I have no doubt they all know just how much they mean to Jesus. I am looking forward to helping them more in the future. Please pray for everything to go well as I continue to search for information and government approvals to help those kids.
28 October 2009
13 October 2009
Hissing and Kissing
Hissing and Kissing
As I walk through Congo I constantly hear hissing and kissing noises. The hissing sound is a way to get someone’s attention used in many parts of Africa. They hiss at you like a snake and you are supposed to turn around and go talk to the hisser. Hundreds of people hiss at me and there is simply no way I could talk to them all. They are curious about the strange white girl who lives among them. Of course in Congo they are more curious about how much money they can convince me to give them. So if I acknowledged their hissing it would be this everyday conversation
“Muzungu unipe cent francs” (white person give me 100 francs)
“apana” (no)
“Ju ya nini?” (why?) as if they are flabbergasted I turned them down.
To which I don’t respond as it needs no explanation to me.
To which they respond by following me and asking me 100 questions half of which I understand.
And then I ask them to please stop bothering me
to which they respond “no I’m not bothering you.”
That one really gets me. But eventually ignoring them works either that or I enter a shop or stop to talk to a friend and they get bored and leave me alone.
So I ignore all hissing sounds. My friends in Zambia know this and instead use my name. In Congo my name is big problem. I discovered this problem in college when I became friends with a guy from Mauritius named Kevin. He laughed when I old him my name and never used it. We were friends for 4 years and he never called me Sheri. It was always hey you, her, Zambia, Jones, or just pointing at me. I didn’t care because he told me my name means Sweetheart. So I hear my name constantly. Often by half drunk men or daydreaming school boys trying to get me to marry them as they yell out “Cherie, ma cherie!” So I’ve worked hard with my friends here to try to pronounce it in a more American way so I will know the difference. It usually comes out like Shayreen but at least I know they know me.
Which leads me to the kissing noises. Again this has been a common experience for me in many parts of Africa. As I walk by men make kissing noises. How they expect me to respond to that I have no idea because I always just ignore it.
So everyday as I walk around I hear hissing and kissing. The difference in Congo is that I’ve never lived in such a large city before in Africa so I get it more here. The other difference is the persistency from the youngest to the oldest to follow me around asking ridiculous questions I only half understand and not begging for money but demanding it. I find it funny hopefully some of you do too.
As I walk through Congo I constantly hear hissing and kissing noises. The hissing sound is a way to get someone’s attention used in many parts of Africa. They hiss at you like a snake and you are supposed to turn around and go talk to the hisser. Hundreds of people hiss at me and there is simply no way I could talk to them all. They are curious about the strange white girl who lives among them. Of course in Congo they are more curious about how much money they can convince me to give them. So if I acknowledged their hissing it would be this everyday conversation
“Muzungu unipe cent francs” (white person give me 100 francs)
“apana” (no)
“Ju ya nini?” (why?) as if they are flabbergasted I turned them down.
To which I don’t respond as it needs no explanation to me.
To which they respond by following me and asking me 100 questions half of which I understand.
And then I ask them to please stop bothering me
to which they respond “no I’m not bothering you.”
That one really gets me. But eventually ignoring them works either that or I enter a shop or stop to talk to a friend and they get bored and leave me alone.
So I ignore all hissing sounds. My friends in Zambia know this and instead use my name. In Congo my name is big problem. I discovered this problem in college when I became friends with a guy from Mauritius named Kevin. He laughed when I old him my name and never used it. We were friends for 4 years and he never called me Sheri. It was always hey you, her, Zambia, Jones, or just pointing at me. I didn’t care because he told me my name means Sweetheart. So I hear my name constantly. Often by half drunk men or daydreaming school boys trying to get me to marry them as they yell out “Cherie, ma cherie!” So I’ve worked hard with my friends here to try to pronounce it in a more American way so I will know the difference. It usually comes out like Shayreen but at least I know they know me.
Which leads me to the kissing noises. Again this has been a common experience for me in many parts of Africa. As I walk by men make kissing noises. How they expect me to respond to that I have no idea because I always just ignore it.
So everyday as I walk around I hear hissing and kissing. The difference in Congo is that I’ve never lived in such a large city before in Africa so I get it more here. The other difference is the persistency from the youngest to the oldest to follow me around asking ridiculous questions I only half understand and not begging for money but demanding it. I find it funny hopefully some of you do too.
06 October 2009
Starving
I went to Shituru as usual. I went to a lady’s house who I had seen a month before. At that time she had been very thin because she had been sick. When I saw her on Sunday she wasn’t just thin she was starving. You could tell her body was attacking itself eating away at what little muscle she had. I’ve seen it a thousand times. When she saw us she struggled with what tiny bit of energy she could muster to stand up and move inside to sit down. You could tell every movement even breathing was a challenge. She smiled at first then when we asked her what was going on in her life she could no longer hold back her tears. She cried as if it were shameful to cry trying her best to hold it back and hide her tears from our view but her grief overwhelmed her and she bawled. “Chakula inaisha. Hakuna chakula ku nyumba.” The food is finished, she said. There is no food in the house she cried. Had the story ended there I might not have written about it in my blog. This is Africa people are hungry some are even starving and I see them constantly. In fact I have always seen them.
The point is not to make you all feel guilty about throwing away food and over indulging at times nor is it to convince you to give money to the starving Africans. I think the world had its fill of the “aid porn” poured over the television during the famines in Ethiopia and war torn Sudan. I write this to explain what happened next which as you will see is also typical of Africa. I do not wish to explain this merely for your benefit to understand this culture or to give you a moving story but to explain my thought process and what I am going through at this time.
At that point her husband walked in. He was by no means fat but he was healthy. He was no where near starving. In fact I had just past him and he was eating some bread. Of course the bread had been given to him by someone else and to take it to his wife would have been rude but I think if my spouse were starving I would have just been rude. Because in fact his wife is maybe a month away from starving to death depending on what little she is able to ingest during that time. I burned with anger towards her husband. So much so that I couldn’t look at him.
In African you generally find that people have a survival mentality especially the poor. This means if you have only a small amount of food give it to the strongest person and the weaker can go without. The idea is the weaker may die anyway so cut your losses and let one person live. In less dramatic circumstances it means the husband is the bread winner so he has to remain strong in order to continue his job and bring home what little amount of money he can. I understand the mentality and the logic enough to realize it is logical. But she is starving…
A thousand thoughts run through my mind. First, how many houses have a visited that day alone that have offered me something to eat? Several. Why did no one see this woman’s pain and offered her some food? Africa the “communal society” didn’t seem very communal all of a sudden. Where was her family when she needed their help?
Then I thought if it were me months ago I would have moved out to the village. I could have built my own hut to live in on nearly free land given to me by the chief and I could have grown food. Congo doesn’t have droughts so likely they would be poor but at least not starving. I wondered why the husband who works as a street vender didn’t do something else. Why didn’t he go out and make bricks to sell? Its hard back breaking work with little profit and at times hard to find a buyer but desperate times call for desperate measures. There are thousands of ways that Congolese people create jobs even where there is seemingly no demand. Why hadn’t he done more? At that exact moment there were men working tirelessly in the river next to where we were searching for gold. Why wasn’t he out there searching? The economy is bad in the mineral driven Likasi. Jobs are few and money is hard to come by but when your wife is starving to death how can you do so little to prevent it?
Of course there are a hundred reasons why. None of my options would have been instantaneous and none of them were sure things. He already has little energy and likely wouldn’t have the strength to do much more. More than likely he had lost hope. But still I will never understand how he could justify to himself not doing more to save his wife.
So I bought her some food and I will keep buying her food because it is impossible to not help her. She is genuinely starving with no hope but the food I am giving her will save her life. I can’t save everyone but I will save her. As I hand the bag of food to her husband I pray in my head asking God to take away my burning anger for this man who would have let his wife starve to death. To him it isn’t as black and white as it is to me. To him he was behaving honorably in the only way he knew how. And God answers my prayer.
The wheels in my head refuse to stop turning. How did “we” as the whole world get to this place? A place where so many go hungry. Was it the Europeans and their colonization that caused the hunger? Was it the evil dictators their blatant theft backward economics and policies of corruption? Perhaps the war lords with their greed for wealth and power, their false promise of freedom through the loss of countless lives and millions of dollars in infrastructure? Or was it the rich nations in the world their stinginess and lack of consideration for the rest of the world or even their methods of giving so that the majority of the money is stolen by corrupt officials? Was it the UN who spends millions of dollars on expensive luxuries for their officials who sit around getting drunk pretending to talk about the world’s problems? Was it the Africans themselves and their poor work ethic, sin, witchcraft and refusal to help each other? Perhaps it was the climate the unavoidable diseases the terrain its proximity to other places hindering its ability to trade? Am I the problem possibly I do too little and too often turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to their situations? Was the situation any better 20 years ago? 50? 100? 1000? Perhaps it’s a cruel combination. Perhaps it’s something I haven’t yet thought of. Perhaps… and the wheels keep spinning in my head.
The only conclusion I have and the only hope I cling to is found in one of my favorite stories in the bible. Read 2 Kings 6. It’s a great story. The answer to starvation is not to blame God. It’s not to give up hope and live in unbelief. The answer is Philippians 4:6-7. In all things through prayer. God is mighty. He sees them he hears their cries and he is able to do exceedingly and abundantly above all we could ask or even think. In one days time he can transform even the direst of situations. Church let us pray. And please pray for me as I daily deal with these kinds of situations to not become weary or discouraged but to be a light and salt to the world I live in.
The point is not to make you all feel guilty about throwing away food and over indulging at times nor is it to convince you to give money to the starving Africans. I think the world had its fill of the “aid porn” poured over the television during the famines in Ethiopia and war torn Sudan. I write this to explain what happened next which as you will see is also typical of Africa. I do not wish to explain this merely for your benefit to understand this culture or to give you a moving story but to explain my thought process and what I am going through at this time.
At that point her husband walked in. He was by no means fat but he was healthy. He was no where near starving. In fact I had just past him and he was eating some bread. Of course the bread had been given to him by someone else and to take it to his wife would have been rude but I think if my spouse were starving I would have just been rude. Because in fact his wife is maybe a month away from starving to death depending on what little she is able to ingest during that time. I burned with anger towards her husband. So much so that I couldn’t look at him.
In African you generally find that people have a survival mentality especially the poor. This means if you have only a small amount of food give it to the strongest person and the weaker can go without. The idea is the weaker may die anyway so cut your losses and let one person live. In less dramatic circumstances it means the husband is the bread winner so he has to remain strong in order to continue his job and bring home what little amount of money he can. I understand the mentality and the logic enough to realize it is logical. But she is starving…
A thousand thoughts run through my mind. First, how many houses have a visited that day alone that have offered me something to eat? Several. Why did no one see this woman’s pain and offered her some food? Africa the “communal society” didn’t seem very communal all of a sudden. Where was her family when she needed their help?
Then I thought if it were me months ago I would have moved out to the village. I could have built my own hut to live in on nearly free land given to me by the chief and I could have grown food. Congo doesn’t have droughts so likely they would be poor but at least not starving. I wondered why the husband who works as a street vender didn’t do something else. Why didn’t he go out and make bricks to sell? Its hard back breaking work with little profit and at times hard to find a buyer but desperate times call for desperate measures. There are thousands of ways that Congolese people create jobs even where there is seemingly no demand. Why hadn’t he done more? At that exact moment there were men working tirelessly in the river next to where we were searching for gold. Why wasn’t he out there searching? The economy is bad in the mineral driven Likasi. Jobs are few and money is hard to come by but when your wife is starving to death how can you do so little to prevent it?
Of course there are a hundred reasons why. None of my options would have been instantaneous and none of them were sure things. He already has little energy and likely wouldn’t have the strength to do much more. More than likely he had lost hope. But still I will never understand how he could justify to himself not doing more to save his wife.
So I bought her some food and I will keep buying her food because it is impossible to not help her. She is genuinely starving with no hope but the food I am giving her will save her life. I can’t save everyone but I will save her. As I hand the bag of food to her husband I pray in my head asking God to take away my burning anger for this man who would have let his wife starve to death. To him it isn’t as black and white as it is to me. To him he was behaving honorably in the only way he knew how. And God answers my prayer.
The wheels in my head refuse to stop turning. How did “we” as the whole world get to this place? A place where so many go hungry. Was it the Europeans and their colonization that caused the hunger? Was it the evil dictators their blatant theft backward economics and policies of corruption? Perhaps the war lords with their greed for wealth and power, their false promise of freedom through the loss of countless lives and millions of dollars in infrastructure? Or was it the rich nations in the world their stinginess and lack of consideration for the rest of the world or even their methods of giving so that the majority of the money is stolen by corrupt officials? Was it the UN who spends millions of dollars on expensive luxuries for their officials who sit around getting drunk pretending to talk about the world’s problems? Was it the Africans themselves and their poor work ethic, sin, witchcraft and refusal to help each other? Perhaps it was the climate the unavoidable diseases the terrain its proximity to other places hindering its ability to trade? Am I the problem possibly I do too little and too often turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to their situations? Was the situation any better 20 years ago? 50? 100? 1000? Perhaps it’s a cruel combination. Perhaps it’s something I haven’t yet thought of. Perhaps… and the wheels keep spinning in my head.
The only conclusion I have and the only hope I cling to is found in one of my favorite stories in the bible. Read 2 Kings 6. It’s a great story. The answer to starvation is not to blame God. It’s not to give up hope and live in unbelief. The answer is Philippians 4:6-7. In all things through prayer. God is mighty. He sees them he hears their cries and he is able to do exceedingly and abundantly above all we could ask or even think. In one days time he can transform even the direst of situations. Church let us pray. And please pray for me as I daily deal with these kinds of situations to not become weary or discouraged but to be a light and salt to the world I live in.
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