For the month of February we worked at Kids Alive in Mongu, Zambia. Kids Alive is a Christian group home for children ages 5-18 years old who have been removed from their families by social welfare. The children at Kids Alive are guaranteed housing, three nutritious meals a day, an education through grade 12, daily afterschool tutoring, health care, dental care, freedom to communicate with their families, and constant Christian mentorship and fellowship. It’s a breading ground for God’s love. This ministry is so successful because it is a collaboration between Christians from Canada (it’s founder is Canadian), the United States, and Zambia.
Before we were formally introduced to the children, they taught us a song that they sing before any important occasion. “We are gathered here today, by the blessings of the Lord.” This is sung in call and response form, with the leader changing the words of the first line each time to express the many ways we are blessed when we come together to praise and serve the Lord.
The battle between individualism and togetherness has been at the forefront of our minds a lot in Africa. Even though we have been to 4 other countries prior to coming to this continent, there was a smaller emphasis on unity than there is here. In the parts of the Caribbean and South America that we visited, individualism was more acceptable and sometimes even celebrated as it is in America. We did not have to explain the differences in our cultures very often because the West had such a great influence, that aside from the language and a few ideas about marriage and the church, very little was different. However, in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, the cultural foundation is drastically different from the Untied States. Our contacts in Zimbabwe, Mark and Helen Begarly (from Indiania) put it perfectly when they said this is a “we not me” society. It is God’s ultimate plan and desire that all of His people be unified with Him and with each other through His love. Our team name is the “The Fellowship” because we want to embody this great desire (and partly because 6 out of 7 of us LOVE The Lord of the Rings). Our willingness to sacrifice individualism for unity has really been put to the test these last couple of months. But it has been such an encouragement to see the fruit of dying to “me” and becoming a “we”.
At all three of our ministries in Africa, we have lived with our ministry host families, which is different from our experience in South America. In Zambia, we instantaneously became part of lives of the church members, and their friends, especially the youth (ages 18-35 years). The children at Kids Alive loved and respected us instantly and we LOVED, respected, and invested in them. We were more than a family, we were a village unified in uplifting our children and one another. We did have discussions about our obvious differences because my teammates are white, and I am, as one lady put it, “a black that talks like a white” unlike our Zambian brethren. We shared our different kinds of food and recipies, we introduced one another to different music, TV shows, and sports. On a few occasions I or another one of my teammates had to tell the Zambians about the history of American slavery to explain how it was possible for me to look like a Zambian but be ancestrally American. (I was so proud of my teammates because I know explaining the unjust ideals and actions of their ancestors and some current family members was not comfortable or easy but they were champions!) Though it visibly pained some of the Zambians to hear about the suffering of their ancestors caused by the ancestors of the visitors standing before them, they still looked at each one of us with eyes and hearts filled with love. In fact ,we found that despite many differences, we had much more in common.
Volleyball is almost as popular as soccer in that part of Zambia and all of Team Fellowship had played volleyball and/or soccer as part of a team back in the States. We traveled to several different churches and heard familiar hymns and Christian rap songs at each place. There were several occasions where as a group or in private conversations where we dicussed the challenges that the church and society are facing in Zambia and found it to be the exact same list of things as in the United States. We struggle with children not taking advantage of education, deciding to drink, smoke, and have sex prematurally rather than attending church events. We struggle with broken marriages, domestic abuse, and alcoholism. We both struggle with people not wanting to really engage in the Word of God and making it the ultimate guideline for their lives as opposed to merely good suggestions. We all struggle with short-sighted thinking instead of focusing on God who knows the master plan.
The beauty of Kids Alive is that it is the fruit of the understanding that when all of the surface layers are stripped away, the human heart is the same everywhere. When, through Christ Jesus, we share ideas and information from our different cultures, and collaborate without seeking to dominate, we can uplift and better equip the coming generation for the battles that they will inevitably face no matter where they are in the world. We also make life a little easier on ourselves because we can share the common load we all carry. We and our Zambian brothers and sisters may be culturally and geographically separated but as our Botswanan safari guide Steve told us, “God didn’t make boundaries [between His people].” On our last day with our village, our Zambian family sang to us these words,
“Though you are going away,
Oh so far from us,
Remember to create
One union in the Lord.”
