Building Upon Foundations

April 2012

Today I met Chatty for the very first time, and Godfrey for the second. Both of them four years old, both of them stripped too soon of the love and care and security of their parents, and both of them possessors of arrestingly disarming smiles, if not only because they are so rare a thing. It struck me as surreal to see these children face to face, to hold them as closely as I did, after knowing their stories so intimately and for so long. Since April of last year, when a team from our church in the UK returned from a short trip to Zambia having spent time in this community we support, Chatty and Godfrey have been spoken of much. The impact they made upon our team, Chatty upon my own Dad in particular, reached beyond the hearts of only those who met them in the flesh; upon the heart of a church and a family that miles and culture keep far distant from this place. Back then these two young men, both of them wounded in heart and memory, allowed not a corner of their lips the faintest flicker of a smile. But today I saw different children than those of whom I’d heard so much. Welcoming. Loving. Even happy. How fairer the countenance swept with a smile. I started thinking about the way we lay foundations in the lives of others. We first entered this little rural community, obscured deep in the Zambian bush, in 2010 to meet a crowd of children too afraid to approach us except to see the magic of bubbles blown from a little tub of soapy water. Now it’s difficult to walk for fear of trampling on children so happy and so proud to hold us as friends. And this time, Godfrey can be loved in his joy and in his healing, because once upon a time someone else loved him in his pain and poverty. Chatty, this misnamed child as my Dad called him a year before, can know something of safety and security in the presence of strangers such as us because he remembers a stranger who once upon a time walked into his home, and exited it all the same, only leaving behind him the faint aroma of deep and lasting love that can pierce the stench of loneliness, despair and death. We like to think of ourselves as independent and autonomous creatures, only affected by others in as much as we allow ourselves the vulnerability to be affected. I remember sitting in a pub in England listening to the fiery exchange between one woman and a much younger girl, apparently her granddaughter, who was bombarding the older lady with verbal and emotional abuse. Her reply to all of this was something about having very thick skin and not letting insults affect her, particularly from a snotty little brat who should know better. But I thought: what must have affected her in the past, and to what extent, that she would now not allow herself to be hurt by the sting of a well aimed insult, even from a voice as precious as that of her own granddaughter? And I realised, no matter how independent we like to think ourselves, no matter how we may like to believe that we live in a vacuum, only being affected by that which we allow close enough to affect us, the truth of the matter is: we are all of us architects of one another.

One lays the foundation, and another builds upon it. A mother speaks a cruel word to her little girl and the foundation is laid for a lifetime of cynicism and mistrust. Another child loses a father to alcohol and a chasm is ripped in that boy’s heart that no closeness or intimacy will ever be permitted to bridge. They stay with us like a foul taste stuck in the mouth, these bitter memories. But another child, with every reason to give up on life and the world and whichever god had the insanity to make that world and then the audacity to call it ‘good’, against all odds grows up into a happy and healthy child. Why? Because where once he knew only hurt and pain someone loved him into healing, and upon a broken and bent foundation something beautiful was raised. We have the choice, all of us, as to whether we let our past determine our future or allow our future to redeem the past. No pain is beyond redemption. Someone once said that every child comes with the message that God has not yet given up on the world. That must be followed shortly by the message that no child is born to be given up on. If only we could see how much of the healing power of God himself was embedded in our DNA when he gave us the capacity to love one another. Then the quiet word, the passing smile, the tear lent to someone who has used up all their own would never be underestimated in its might to heal. All of us are in either the business of construction or demolition, building trust, hope and love into the lives of those around us or tearing it down. In Godfrey, in that misnamed child Chatty too, people are continuing to build from a broken and a bent foundation something truly beautiful. And few things are as beautiful, few things at once so simple and yet so profound, as a face once etched with pain now swept with a smile.

Goma, How Deserted Lies the City

Three days ago, sometime on the 30 April, rebel troops under the command of former Congolese army general Bosco “Terminator” Ntaganda, marched upon the villages surrounding Goma, a large city in north-eastern Congo. The Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which Goma is the largest city, has played host to a dozen or more wars in only the last couple of decades and boasts history’s largest refugee camps, some numbering more than 1.5 million people. At the hands of warlords and forces descending upon Congo’s communities like starved locusts, the people of Kivu and its surrounding villages have become some of the poorest in the world. A billion people worldwide live on less than $1 a day; in Goma countless families live on less than $1 a week. In such an environment in which healthcare is so essential, it is missing; sanitation is simply not a facet of life. Every man, woman and child in Goma knows too familiarly the sound that heralds their exodus: marching on the mountains, gunfire in the hills, screaming in the homes. They know what it means to decide between fleeing into the bush with children slung over their back, where they will have no food, water, shelter or security, or staying where they are and waiting for the soldiers to arrive, young men with Kalashnikovs in hand, whose only wage is as much food as they can pillage, as many women as they can get their hands on. The troops always invade the villages first. This is life in Goma.

And so, when we hear that the soldiers are marching again, again, what are we to do? From the beautiful farmhouse in which I find myself in Zambia, gathered together with all my Hands at Work family for a time of celebration and thanking God and discovering His vision for what is next, what am I to do? It is difficult even to pray. But then, such are the occasions when prayer is most important. When it seems so trite as to be even a joke. This thing we do before we throw the first forkful of dinner into our mouths, and do more earnestly with clenched fists before an exam or interview, this thing we fall asleep doing as we lay our heads down at night, are we really to do that now? 1,000 kilometres away in Zambia, or 3,000 kilometres away in Europe, or 6,000 kilometres away in North America, what more can we do?

How deserted lies the city, once so full of people. Her children have gone into exile, captive before the foe. Our pursuers were swifter than eagles in the sky; they chased us over the mountains and lay in wait for us in the desert. Those who pursue us are at our heels; we are weary and find no rest.

- Lamentations -

Sometimes a broken heart isn’t enough. Walking amidst the smouldering ruins of the once great city he called home, the poet of Lamentations “pours out” his heart upon the ground. Broken, beat, smashed into little more than a puddle on the floor. A prayer like the one above rises from the devastation of a heart as spent as his. He can do no other. My heart is utterly sold out for the Congo. That’s no secret. When I heard about Goma, standing in our Zambian farmhouse as my friend recounts the news he has just received from one of our guys in Congo, I can only describe what I felt as something akin to getting a phone call telling you that your home has been hit by a bomb. And what could I do? Only pray, and pray more. I slept outside that night, because sometimes words aren’t as articulate a prayer as the actions that follow them, and it seemed wrong to crawl under my mosquito net into bed as I finish praying for the safety of thousands sleeping in the bush. I even had the audacity to be a little frightened of some of the sounds filling the night, birds and other unrecognisable animal calls. I was scared because I didn’t know which animals were making the noise. Gunfire is much more distinguishable a sound. And so this is me doing the little more that I can do: asking you to pray also. Even if you're not the kind of person to pray much or at all. Some things are more important than the theological standpoint in which you find yourself in this very moment. Please pray. We can do little more. And as you pray know that God has designs and dreams and visions and promises for Goma, that long forgotten city in some abstract corner of the African jungle. If you don’t know that, then your prayers will go little further than asking God how in His name or in the name of fate or destiny or bad luck or anything else something like this could happen in a world that for all intents and purposes would actually be pretty much perfect were it not for that great slip-up of His in making a creature with the capacity to ruin the place in ways so horrifying as to be unimaginable. Praying like that won’t get you or the children lost in the hills of Goma anywhere. That’s how my prayers seem to always start these days. But that mustn’t be where they end. Wading in an ocean of hearts unreservedly poured out for these children, these women, many of them pregnant, these grandfathers and grandmothers too tired to run again, let us take our lead from the poet, his heart wasted before him on the ground:

I remember my affliction and my wandering

the bitterness and the fall,

I well remember them,

and my soul is downcast within me.

Yet this I call to mind

and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed

for his compassions never fail.

- Lamentations -

Hard to look and listen, hard to turn away

Someone once wrote upon leaving the Congo, “Oh Congo, what a wreck. It’s hard to look and listen. It’s hard to turn away.” I can’t tell you how truly that resonates.

These last two months I have spent being touched by the lives and stories of children living in a nation the UN recognises as the least developing in all the world. The statistics are bleak; home to 4 and a half million orphans, host to a dozen international wars in only the last two decades, consequentially making it the world capital of rape, torture and war crimes. But statistics offer a distant and disaffected view of a situation that can only hope to be understood at a closer look; like standing back to view a whole work of art while missing the brushstrokes that make up its beauty. No matter how long I’ve been in Africa now, seeking His heart with everything I have and am, I never cease to be reminded that His heart is only found when you stand close enough to be caught by the story, and the face, of just one child.

Statistics will never show you what is going on beneath the surface. You have to come and see for yourself. You have to allow yourself the courage to see with the eyes of Jesus. He sees the depths of poverty and pain, as no one has ever seen or felt them before. But he sees, more deeply written into the lives of “the least of these” even than their pain and poverty, a true and a lasting hope. The Scriptures say, “Hope that is seen is no hope at all.” If that’s true, then God’s eyes are most attentively fixed upon the places in which nothing will change unless He is the One to change it. Sometimes it’s a whole region, like Goma in the eastern Congo; sometimes it’s just one person, like my friend Dancel dying alone, leprous and arthritic, in his sweltering and smelly mud hut. Encountering such people and places, it would be easy to give up hope, as do so many. It is their greatest loss, this dying hope. The human heart seems able to endure just about anything but that. Because the strength to endure is in knowing that there is yet a more beautiful future, so it is when that future is crushed beneath a numbed heart and a beat spirit that a life born of hope is lost. But we stand on a promise, written upon the heart of the nation and all the hearts of all God’s children in it;

...hope that is seen is no hope at all...

And there is hope. Of that I’m convinced.

As for me, I think I’ve been caught in the spell that the Congo casts over most people who visit it. It caught me before I ever stepped foot here, and has only gotten stronger the longer I’ve stayed. Only now it has a face. Actually lots of faces; kids who it’ll be tough to leave behind, some just because they’re great kids, others because I’ll leave them in just the same state in which I first met them. It’s hard to look and listen; it’s hard to turn away. Hard to turn away from people in whose stories I have had the honour of sharing; people with whom I’ve discovered a relationship strong enough to penetrate language, culture and background. It feels like I’m standing on an axis moment upon which my life is going to turn, one of those “there’s no going back after this” moments. I’ve seen and heard things that God won’t soon allow me to forget. Because Dancel is still laid up on the floor of his mud hut, dying and alone, and the thousand other faces burnt onto my heart are still bearing the same broken expressions, betraying the deep and lasting wounds they hold. It’s hard to turn away, even impossible, because to do that would be to miss not only the honour of sharing in the life of such as these, but the inexpressible privilege of playing a part in changing it.

...to make the hope that is unseen visible

...to afford freedom to those from whom it has been taken

...to reawaken life where it has been lost, more and better life than we ever dreamed of.

To let that pass me by would be to miss the gift for which God put me here. But I won’t let it pass. No way.

Answering the Cry of a Broken Heart

I made a thousand excuses. I was tired. I needed a break, some alone time, after one of those mornings where the simplest work feels like trudging through syrup. I’d just spent a weekend in the community – early mornings and late nights and everything in between physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausting. My arsenal was loaded – “Here you are God, here’s a bunch of excuses, all of them as good as the next, pick one!” But it didn’t matter; the boy I walked past with nothing but a smiling glance was going to follow me whether I liked it or not. When I noticed he was tracking my steps I cast him the vague, polite pleasantries in the hope that it would be all he wanted from the token white man. But he kept following. Soon he was shoulder to shoulder with me, a cheeky but strikingly childlike smile stretching across his adolescent face. He started rambling to me in French, but the only thing I could translate was that whatever it was he was asking, he was genuinely interested in getting to know me. But I was tired, so I walked past and walked on. But he followed. When we came to some crossroads I asked him in slow, slightly elevated English which way he was going. He just smiled, and said he didn’t understand. So I carried on walking, as did he. Eventually, having trawled about town lying every time he asked if I spoke any French at all, we got to the bakery I was going to for lunch. Though he was clearly hungry, he didn’t ask for any food. It wasn’t what he wanted. Nevertheless I bought him a nice bit of bread and a bit for the boy begging on the street outside, to massage that pesky ache in my conscience. I continued to walk and he continued to talk. Approaching the little shop I was going into to buy a Coke I prepared to say a not-so-fond farewell to the young man, when I picked out a single word in his hurried French. Orphan. I felt like I’d been hit by a freight train. Not knowing what to do with myself, I invited him into the shop, sat him on a chair and bought him some proper lunch. We sat there in silence, him smiling that broad and beautiful grin, me feeling like Dr. Jekyll looking in the mirror and discovering that he’s Mr. Hyde. I asked him to pray for the food, but he was too shy and instead the lady who owned the shop came over and, placing her hands on our Cokes, thanked God. He was excited to discover that I was a Christian. What a tragedy that sometimes it is not our character that distinguishes us as Christians, but our little religiosities. He pulled out of his pocket a tattered little French Bible. It was the only thing he carried.  Throwing it open he clumsily thumbed through the pages then stopped and pushed it across the table to me. Pointing at a verse on the page he kept repeating: “my favourite”, and though I didn’t understand the language, I recognised the verse.

– Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you –

The train hit me for the second time. I thought, what if this morning when he got out of bed, this young boy asked of his Father in heaven that today, somehow, he would meet someone who cared? What if this morning he simply asked for his daily bread and as he did so, opened up that tattered little Bible and read the promise of Jesus: Ask and it will be given to you? What if today I was God’s messy, flesh-and-blood answer to the cry of a boy’s heart, longing for love? And I almost missed it. I almost missed Him – Jesus disguised in the face of an orphaned boy named Francois, walking the streets of Likasi in search of a smile. I thought: how often we walk past? How often in the noise of the madding crowd do we miss the Father’s voice, calling us to stop and look around? How often do we miss that little gift of God – that invitation to the inexplicable privilege of being the answer to someone’s prayer? Even today someone cries out to a God they aren’t sure they believe in and he says: I am coming; I am sending my son, my daughter, to be the light of life to you who are lost in darkness. And what shall we do? Walk on? Or stop and say ‘Yes’ to the invitation of Jesus, compelling us to give of ourselves. Such is the mystery of his presence in us, letters from Christ to a broken world, signed and sealed in love, not written on paper and with ink but on human hearts and with the blood of Jesus. Today God invites me to answer the cry of just one heart. And what does he ask of me? Only that I act justly, that I love mercy, and that I walk humbly with my God. Or perhaps you could say – only that I never carry on walking when God stoops down to touch a heart in love.

The Legacy of a Father

Porfela was laid up in bed dying, so weak he couldn’t even stand up to watch out the window of his one-room hut as his children played outside. I walked into his home, knelt by his bedside and held his hand as I listened to his story and told him how much he is loved by God his Father. It seemed bizarrely inappropriate to be there supporting him, trying as best I could to encourage and inspire him, when I was the one who went away the most transformed from our meeting one another. That was April 2010, and I will remember Porfela forever – his was the first home visit I ever went on in Africa, all those months ago on a two week trip to Zambia. Fast forward to just before Christmas, 2011. Having been hurried out of the Congo during the country’s volatile presidential elections I’d found myself back on the soil of my first African love – Zambia. I had since learnt that a few months ago Porfela had passed away. That big slum in which I visited him was just up the road, and so I was absolutely set on going back. I hoped to return and spend a night staying in the community. Preparations were made, few of them by me, and soon my Swazi friend Sibusiso and I were being driven into the huge slum-compound under the cover of darkness, so as not to draw attention to our presence. Having no idea with whom I was going to stay I trekked through the buzzing slum, amidst crowds of drunk youngsters and echoes of “mzungu!” (white man!) all around me, following a care worker to the home in which I would sleep. As we turned into the yard of the tiny decrepit hut I knew instantaneously where I was; it wasn’t my first time there. I don’t know how I recognised Porfela’s home so quickly, having only made a brief visit there over a year before and now returning in the dark. I guess the experience was etched on my memory, the face of that dying man and the feel of his hand etched on my heart, more profoundly than I had ever realised. His wife, a big mother-hen type woman who seemed to carry the weight of all her family’s pain alone, and yet bear it with joy, came out of the house to greet us. I was so overwhelmed, so overawed that God should arrange it that I stay in the home of a family that touched my heart over a year before, that I couldn’t contain my excitement. It seemed I didn’t need to ask if she remembered me, but I did anyway. She told me through the care worker’s translation that she remembered, and giving me a motherly hug she pulled me into her home. There I met Porfela’s children for the first time, the three boys: Akim (14), Renard (12) and Mwenya (9), and a beautiful little girl with an incredible attitude called Naomi (3). Akim, the man of the house, spoke the best English of them all and was gracious enough to translate for me so that I could speak to the family. We spent the evening playing games, sharing a meal, chasing and tickling Naomi until she screamed, drawing in my notebook and trying to pack more and more visitors into the one-room hut as they arrived hour by hour throughout the evening. I learnt that Renard was suffering badly with malaria. Too weak to stand up, he laid in the corner of the room, sitting up every now and then so I could put my arm around him. Akim took care of him with all the love of a father. Porfela had suffered bitterly for a long time, and so Akim had become the man of house long before his father passed away, and long before his childhood came to its end. But he bore the weight of responsibility with such unnatural maturity. 

That night I lay down to sleep in the exact spot where I had found Porfela over a year previous. Renard laid beside me, tucked together under a single sheet on the cold muddy ground. Every time he turned over and his arm touched mine I felt the scorching heat of fever that was taking its toll on his young body. How does so young a heart bear such a season of pain? His hollow gaze betrayed a hurt deeper than sickness. The whole family bore the same wound - they missed their father, Salome missed her husband; and though Akim carried with courage so much of what his Dad left behind, the family’s pain spoke even to a stranger like me of something unmistakeable: that Porfela was a good father. In Africa, where so many are left fatherless at the hands of disease and death and so many more left behind by fathers walking out the door, a good Dad is a precious and prized thing. To leave behind you a family so tightly bound, so knitted in love and faithfulness that even without you they continue to grow closer – that is a legacy to be desired by every man. Porfela was such a father. I wish I had met him earlier, and yet I think to see what he left behind – a family bound by such incredible intimacy – is a greater testament than anything I could have seen whilst he was alive.

I left Salome’s home the following day. We prayed together for Renard and Salome, I said my goodbyes to the family (and about a thousand neighbours), and headed off. I had to leave Zambia just a couple of days later, but couldn’t go without wrapping and sending a few little Christmas gifts for the family. I understand they liked them very much, but I’ll have to see for myself when I go back, which will be very soon. I’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, pray for Akim, for Renard, for Mwenya, for Naomi and for Salome. And know that if anywhere the hope of Africa is shining, like sunlight streaming through a clouded sky, it is in the lives of such as these – a family that bears, in the midst of terrible agony, an unshakeable and extravagant love.

Life Reclaimed

It seems about time for a blog, as I haven’t yet put to words anything that has happened since I arrived in the Congo that stormy November night! (Sounds dramatic doesn’t it?) Right now seems the perfect time, sitting at a desk in beautiful Zambia where I’ve been shipped to whilst the Congo’s unpredictably volatile elections take place. Where to start! These first two weeks have been filled with new sights, new sounds, and definitely new smells. Hugging the borders of my new home - the bustling city of Likasi, DRC – are countless communities devastated by a history wrought with war, disease, famine and the most heinous criminal activity. The Congo seems absolutely defined by its contradictions. The world capital of rape and torture, yet 95% of the country claim themselves Christian. Its brutal history has left scars on a culture that now seems definitively violent, a violence found as much on the market streets as in the halls of government, where current presidential candidates have promised bloodshed for anyone who doesn’t lend them their support. And yet for so many here hope is not absurd or misplaced but as integrated a part of life as the pain and poverty they experience moment by moment. In fact the two seem impossibly married. I’m learning this in my heart too.

Here I’m left without so many of those little things I never realised I would miss; chief of them chocolate, and the English language. You can slip into feeling isolated or alien when you’re lost in a people and a language you don’t understand. It strips you of your security and comfort. And yet of all that the Congo has given me already, that is probably the greatest gift. I’m learning every day that God is enough. Absolute dependency = extravagant provision. You can’t really open your hands to the gifts of God until you let go of everything else you’re clinging to. Sometimes he’s audacious enough to kick it out of your hands. Or send you to the Congo. It’s when I’m weak that God does his best work. That isn’t a cliché! It isn’t a Christian Hallmark card. It’s at the root of so much. I’m learning every day to see like Jesus sees. I’m learning to give of my selfish self without regard or request. I’m learning that God has a plan and a promise written upon the lives of every single one of his kids, that not one is forgotten, not one abandoned. There is not one of them whose fingerprint God didn’t labour over, whose hairs God didn’t count, whose future God doesn’t imagine, envision or dream about. And when you see that, then you see the real, deeper poverty etched into these children’s lives –that their future has been stolen from them.

In an urban community near our home I watched as the open coffin of an eight year old orphan was carried out before his wailing grandmother. I’m still not sure what to think or feel. A boy who watched his father walk out on him, then stood over his mother’s grave, and died at eight years old of a preventable disease. It makes you ask the kind of questions that might have answers, but you don’t expect to hear them. His grandmother knew that it’s enough sometimes just to yell. And that’s life in the Congo, and has been for such a long tainted past. Life stolen by Westerners who robbed the country of its resources and chopped off the hands of the enslaved for their death count quota. Life stolen by civil wars killing more than WWII and then left forgotten. Life stolen by volcanic devastation, by raiding rebels, by famine and disease and malnutrition. In the Congo life is fragile, and always on the verge of being broken. But there is life. Bursting through the cracks of the blood stained ground life is springing up, real and beautiful life. You can feel it. You can see it, there in the faces of the countless people living to bring hope to those with none, people who have refused to be a product of hopelessness. Teachers who every day walk 12km to give a lesson in one school then 12km back to give a lesson in another. Men who orphaned children run to because they see in them a father who cares. Widows pooling together everything they have so that none of their children will go hungry. Life is breaking through the cracks. As for me, I’ve come alive in the Congo in a way I could nowhere else. I’m stepping deeper into the Father’s heart. Without it, none of this is worthwhile. For now, this is exactly where he wants me to be – living in the plans and promises of God. And I get to watch, maybe even help, as life breaks through...more and better life than anybody ever dreamed of.

The Long Road to the Congo

DAY ONE

It is not so difficult to get up at 4am when you know that with the sunrise comes the beginning of a road trip like no other. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has been embedded on my heart for as long as I have known that God was calling me to Africa, so you can imagine both the overpowering excitement and the underlying anxiety that got out of bed with me the morning I started my long journey to the Congo. It was going to be just three of us travelling, but with the very real possibility of our car breaking down on the journey we added the Hands @ Work mechanic to our party. And so before sunrise the four of us piled into the rickety old truck and set off – Dan our volunteer coordinator, Dave the mechanic, Sibu the Swazi and me. Road trips are rarely about the destination but about what happens on the journey. This one was different – the journey itself was made even more incredible because it anticipated an incredible destination.

We drove through South Africa the whole morning, stopping every half an hour for Dan and Dave to pee, until we reached the Botswana border at lunchtime. Despite the reputation of African border posts we actually sailed through and headed into Botswana. The rumours I had been told before I left turned out to be true: it is literally full of donkeys. More donkeys than people for sure. It’s actually the reason it is too dangerous to drive through Botswana at night – you’ll likely hit a donkey. It is also incredibly flat. On the straight roads that run from South to North you can see for miles upon miles around you. No mountains or trees to block the view and few towns or villages scattered along the roads – Botswana is no man’s land. The surplus of donkeys quickly lost its novelty and we were instead hooked on the families of elephants that roamed wild by the roadside in the North of the country. We stopped a couple of times to take pictures; Dave got some of him holding a big wad of elephant poop. By the time the sun started to set we weren’t near enough to the lodge where we had planned to stay, so instead we booked into a little getaway spot about ten kilometres into the Botswana bush. We had the honour of sharing in Sibu’s first ever experience of a swimming pool – amazing to watch! Nothing will knock you out like 16 hours driving, and after a little something to eat we hit the hay and slept like babies.

DAY TWO

I hadn’t realised when we started out just how many firsts this trip would involve for our Swazi friend Sibu. After another 4am start, hot footing the final part of Botswana to the Zambian border, we crossed the Zambezi river on Sibu’s first ever boat ride. He was anxious when Dan told him to watch out for crocs and hippos. On the other side we spent a good while getting through Zambian border control, but eventually were allowed into the country and headed straight for Victoria Falls, about 70km from the border. It is dry season in Southern Africa, and so the Falls were not the great thundering walls of water that I was expecting but more of a dry canyon with a great green river streaming through the middle. The upside to visiting in dry season is that you can walk along the top of the falls. As we waded through the Zambezi feeling like Livingstone himself we came across a big family of elephants by the riverside. Naturally, we chased them. We darted through the bushes, enduring the thorns in our feet, to get as close to them as we could. It was the most amazing experience and an absolute gift of God, and we sat there watching elephants as wild as ever we’d see them. After stalking big game (Dave took another picture of himself with elephant poop) we spent some time walking along the top of the Falls. I took the opportunity to scare Dan by hopping along the edge and jumping down to ledges out of sight so it looked like I’d fallen off the side. We stumbled upon an amazing pool right on the edge, hidden amongst the rocks that no one else seemed to have found. So we dived in off the rock about 5 metres above it and discovered it was so deep we couldn’t reach the bottom. It was so close to the edge of the Falls that if we’d gotten out in the wrong place we would have fallen off the side. But we didn’t, and once we’d finished in our secret swimming pool we got out and headed back to the car and onwards to Livingstone, where we spent the night in a little hotel.

DAY THREE

The day started early again with a 4am dip in the hotel’s swimming pool. We left Livingstone as the sun started to rise and headed northwards through Zambia, stopping in on a few of our Hands friends along the way. At a place called Kabwe we met with Beth and Ali, two of the volunteers from my own intake that had since been placed in Zambia. It was great to see them again, and after having a little to eat in their place we bundled them into our beaten up old truck and headed back out on the road, destination: the Hands @ Work farm in Luanshya, North Zambia. We got there hours later to find the place without power, which meant a rather romantic candlelit dinner prepared by three more of our volunteer intake – Alisha, Janine and Sara. We spent the evening talking, catching up and finding out what was happening where they were. It was absolutely incredible to see them again, but three days travelling, 48 hours of which spent in the car, had taken its toll and our charismatic company was tainted with an overwhelming tiredness from all 4 of us, so we headed to bed.

DAY FOUR

Dave, Sibu, Beth and Ali took the truck back to Kabwe, where Dave will spend some time before travelling home and Sibu will spend two weeks before joining me and Dan here in the Congo. The rest of us began our day heading over to a prayer meeting with a local Hands @ Work service centre, after which we travelled onwards to Kitwe where Janine and Sara have been placed to work. After spending time there James, the leader of Hands in Zambia, and Janine drove Dan and I northwards to the DRC border. We had to wait a while for Erick, the Hands @ Work DRC coordinator, but once he arrived we headed straight through to border control. Despite what we had been told to expect it was a surprisingly quick and easy process – the fastest border crossing yet. We said goodbye to Janine and James as we stood in no man’s land between Zambia and the Congo. Thunder clapped overhead and the bright skies in Zambia behind us became thick with black clouds, lightening and rain in front – like the weather too was subject to border control. It was hilarious – a metaphor written in the skies in the black clouds that introduced us to the place they call ‘the heart of darkness.’ On the other side we encountered the chaotic bustle of the Congo streets and hailed a taxi to make our way to Lubumbashi, 70km from the border. There we picked up Erick’s car and drove onwards towards Likasi, DRC – my home for the next five weeks. I love this place. It is vibrant red and green, just like I imagined, and in the storm that welcomed us to the country the earth and plants burst into colour. The drive from Lubumbashi to Likasi was probably the most precarious I’ve ever been on. At one point the car almost broke down in the middle of the flooded Congo countryside. Dan and I took it in turns to sit in the front seat helping Erick figure out whether it was safe to overtake and how far away those headlights rushing towards us actually were. But despite the rain, the Congolese enthusiasm for dodgy driving and Erick’s CD that only had three songs on played repeatedly for the two hour journey, we made it to Likasi sane and in one piece. I cannot wait to step into what God has in store for us here in the DRC. The journey was incredible, an adventure I hadn’t expected, but was nothing compared to what is ahead. I want to explore God’s heart for the Congo, step boldly into his plans and promises for me and discover as best I can the dreams he has written for this amazing nation. Bring it on!