Stranded for a week in the bush of Africa.
“God, what the hell am I doing here?”
Month six: Malawi. The race has now become “ten countries, eleven months” for me with the A-team Remix, and team MOR3. We’re in Dzuwa, Malawi.
You know that place you’ve been to once or twice before, the one that’s in the backwoods of the boonies of the middle of nowhere, an hour away from any paved road. That’s where we’re at, but in Africa. Even Malawians couldn’t tell you where Dzuwa is. All I know is that it’s an hour away from the closest paved road, and once on that road the closest main town is an hour away: Kasungu, Malawi.
Fortunately our contact has a website, I think. Google search: Joy to the World Ministries in Malawi.
It’s a nifty ministry they have. They’re trying to establish a medical clinic for the area, because during the rainy season the surrounding region becomes more isolated than it already is due to swelling rivers. The clinic is up and ready to go, but staffing is so difficult that it hasn’t opened for over a year. In the meantime, they’re using part of the hundred of acres of land donated to them by the local “chief of chiefs” to generate food crops for a local kids feeding program. Kids can’t learn if they’re starving hungry, so during the school year and especially between harvests, the local women of the 15 surrounding villages rotate turns volunteering to cook a meal a day at the local school. One meal each day is all many of them get, and it’s no more than a typical cereal bowl full of a gruel of flour, water, and sugar, much like grits.
We helped make a feed this meal for one day. Another day we spent a half-hour planting shrubbery at the ministry-owned maize mill. Twice or thrice now we’ve taken an hour to go somewhere and give a word of encouragement.
We’ve been here three weeks. Besides a few of us praying over the chief of chief’s wife each morning on our morning jog, we’ve had no regular ministry. We’ve had YEARS, I mean days, of downtime, with no regular ministry. I don’t know why, but that’s how it’s been this month. Many things have also been cancelled by the rains.
The days drag on. Nothing to do except sit around and wait to see if something comes up for us to do with the ministry. Some days yes, most days nothing. So more often than not we are bored out of our minds. We read books, we read and study the bible, maybe we have a devotion as a group, many of the hours are spent playing cards. There’s not really anything to do away from the two houses we’re staying at, because we’re surrounded by farmland, everywhere. We would go evangelize by ourselves, but we don’t speak the language, and often those who can translate have other duties that require them being gone for extended periods of time.
We are plenty of entertainment for the local African children though. We’re like zoo animals to them, because we’re white. They’ve never seen so many “azungu”‘ before. So at any given time we have a dozen or so African kids staring at us through the windows, watching us from in front of the house, crowding us as we walk around outside, always yelling something or doing something to try to get a response out of us, sometimes begging… I’m about sick of it, honestly. I may never go to a zoo again, now that I’ve been on the other side of the fence. Sometimes during the day we’ll play with them. Every evening, once dinner comes around and we cook our main meal of the day outside on charcoal, we get anywhere from two to three dozen kids coming around the house. They’ve heard that in America we don’t cook, we only have to press a button and hot food comes out of somewhere. It’s also the hardest time of the year for them, food-wise, so many come in hopes of getting a hand out, sometimes even begging. Sorry kids, besides it being ministry policy not to hand out food, that’s just a slippery slope that we don’t want to start down, or we would never cease to be hounded by hordes of hungry children. So once time comes to cook dinner we play a game where the five of us men who are here play “territorial tiger,” and we chase off african kids in a fun game of “safari”. If we catch them, we tickle them half to death. This is the funnest part of our day, and it’s the funnest part of their day too because the azungus are playing with them.
So we have a few short bursts of fun during the day, but mostly it’s mind-numbingly boring, and demanding nosey children are more or less a constant nuisance except when we do play with them.
So we’re stranded with nothing to do. But God is still teaching us lessons through it. There are at least three big lessons coming from this month.
The first is taking our thoughts captive and our attitudes positive. Being so bored, it’s so easy to adopt a negative, idle mindset, wondering “why the crap am I here I’m not doing anything,” thinking negatively about how things are happening, the way they could be happening, what we would rather be doing and where we would rather be. You know what? Shut up. Praise God, study some Word, pray, be thankful in all circumstances, encourage each other, there are plenty of constructive things to do that we can mobilize ourselves for. This brings me to the second big lesson:
Self-mobilization. Here’s how it’s been so far on the world race: We go to a country, meet with the contact, the contact tells us what we’re doing, when we’re going to do it, and what it looks like. Much of the time we are “managed,” by the contact, so to speak. But not this month. We could sleep and never wake up all day, maybe for a few days. There are very few things that we need to do out of necessity. So we must learn to self-mobilize and develop that discipline of motivating ourselves to do constructive things and “internal ministry,” whether to our self to each other, any of the aforementioned things.
The third lesson is this: we aren’t really doing anything less than we did back in the states. We’ve thought to ourselves, “What would we be doing if we were back home?” Before the race, many of us filled our days with distraction. Maybe we’d watch TV, go see a movie, go to a park, enjoy our favorite hobby, maybe even go to work or school. These are all things we do, but more often than not we’re not really doing anything more for the kingdom than we are right now by sitting on our butts playing card games for hours. We may do a lot of things and think we had a productive day, but how many of those things have eternal value? If we fill our day doing things that don’t have eternal value, than we may as well be doing what we’re doing right now: sitting on our… yeah.
The caveat is that God has us right where he wants us. He’s teaching us things during this downtime that we wouldn’t learn if we were busy doing things all the time. This month what is deep down inside comes out, because we don’t have so many distractions to keep the inner things covered up. And the chief of chief’s wife that we’re praying for, she has had a large growth on her face that not even doctors could do anything for (they had already tried), but since we’ve been praying over her this month, the growth has shrunk to about a quarter of it’s original size. So God is at work, and even if that’s the only reason why He brought us here this month, it’s worth it, and though I talk about sitting on junk all day I don’t dare belittle His will and plan for us this month; His good, pleasing and perfect will. Even if we don’t understand it or feel like we’re doing anything, what is happening in just the way He’s determined it should be, and I will praise Him for it.
