About two weeks ago it all started. I left my home of 24 years, my closest friends and my loving family to go on an eleven-month missions trip all across the globe, accompanied by 45 people that I’ve known for just a few short months.
The drive to the airport is a time where I experienced the biggest conflict of emotion in my life. I was about to leave my family behind and step into the unknown that is the next year of my life. I don’t think I was regretting my decision as much as I was just facing the end of a chapter in my life. I have so many great memories over the past couple years, working at the school and helping with the youth group and watching my nieces grow. This feeling of loss didn’t get any smaller until I got to Africa, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
After I left Grand Junction and my family I was headed to Atlanta, Georgia to meet up with the people that I will be traveling with for the next year. After a day or two it is easy to see that they are more than just random acquaintances or brief training camp friends, but are all brothers and sisters united under love for Christ and a strong passion to live in relationship with Him.
In Atlanta I received training for my logistics role as well as safety training, health lessons, and spiritual conditioning. Then on Thursday at 10:30 I started the first test for me as one of the logistics leaders, the first day of travel. Wait, I mean the first couple days of travel. Hold on, I meant to say the first five days of travel!
After 4 flights, two of which were close to ten hours long, and a twelve-hour overnight layover in Nairobi, Kenya we arrived in Lilongwe, Malawi. In Malawi we got to use our tents and spent our first night in Africa at a small camping hostel. From there, half of us were supposed to head to Lusaka, Zambia which is about a nine hour bus ride. Unfortunately, the buses that run between Lilongwe and Lusaka only run three times a week and the next bus was three days away. This presented a challenge.
So for the sake of moving forward we headed to Chapata, which is just on the other side of the Zambian border. In order to get there, we crammed 45 people into about 25 seats in a way that would never live up to safety standards back in the states but is somewhat fair game here in Malawi. The buses took us to the border where we packed into 4 mini vans to get to Chapatam where we spent another night camping out under the African sky. By the end of these travel days the squad was very good at cramming into vehicles.
Here is where I truly got to receive a great blessing. We arrived in Chapata and our ministry contacts there had a great place for us to stay, awesome food for us to eat, and had already arranged our bus ride to Lusaka. This was so great for me, especially after 4 days of travel. All we had to do was eat, sleep and wake up at 3:30 in the morning to catch our bus. Unfortunately, I was not able to tell everyone that before they went to sleep. Nothing like a surprise 3:30 wake up call!
So, after five days and somewhere around 10,000 miles of travel my team made it to our ministry location in one of the fastest growing cities in southern Africa, Lusaka. Here we met our contact Collins, who is part of Campus Crusade for Christ. He has let us stay in his house for the month while we do ministry with him and his church.
Finally it was time for what we came here for, our first day of ministry. We started out walking to a school for orphans. The school is funded by sponsors and is for kids that are being cared for by people in the community, but the people they are staying with don’t have the money to send them to school. While there we got to meet the orphans, talk with them, serve them food, and play games with them. It was incredible to see the joy that overflowed from all these beautiful children. I try to put myself in their shoes and can’t imagine myself being joyful and happy about it. It is truly a joy that I can only imagine being given by God.
The school also feeds the elderly and the widows in the local community. The widows and elderly would come up to each of us personally and thank us for nothing more than just coming to visit them. The widows would dance and sing songs of gratitude in their native language to us to show their appreciation. It was so humbling for them to be so thankful for nothing more than stopping by and seeing them. The joy that I saw in them comes from community and relationship with others as well as relationship with Christ.
After leaving the school we went to the college where we had a prayer walk for the upcoming school year. One of the ministers here told us that HIV plagues the school. Abortion is also a common occurrence as well as women being taken by men and used for sex. The school is in need of strong men and women to step up for righteousness. We will be ministering to the students here for a little while. We will be passing out Bibles and sharing our stories with them, building relationships with them so that we can start conversations about Christ. Please pray for the school and us, so that the seeds planted while we are here get cultivated and grow into roots of strong men and women of God.
Here in Africa getting involved in the kingdom is where my heart has started to change. I still miss my family and friends, as well as my bed and maybe some air conditioning. But being here and experiencing the kingdom in this way assures me that I am where I am supposed to be and that this is where God has put me at this time in my life. I am so blessed to be able to be here to do God’s work and experience the Joy of His kingdom.
