Living Behind the Screen

I'm sitting on a screen porch at a lake in Wisconsin.   We are taking a few days away from our visit to Chicago where we are visiting our dearest family friend, who is in the late stages of terminal lymphoma.  This is a chance to renew and refresh before our final days together.

The evening cool is gathering here, crickets are in full throat (or whatever they use to make themselves known), the evening light has now emptied from the sky, an occasional still-energetic human voice wafts in, the dark outline of a tiny gnat crawls across my backlit laptop screen.  We watched the burning orange sun set over the lake an hour ago.

This is now the magic hour for which the screen porch was built.  It just sits here most of the time, but now I get to sit enclosed in it and read, or write, enjoy the sounds outside without becoming dinner for the sinister bugs that lurk on the other side.  You see, with all this flat land and standing water, I'm in Mosquito Heaven.

I was enjoying the cacophony outside my cocoon a few minutes ago when I received an unusual email from my friend John: "I'd appreciate you and Janet saying a prayer for this little one. Thank you for all the healing work you have done around this suffering world. Bless you!"  Below that was a link to his blog page with a short entry.  Through another child sponsorship agency he has supported for some 30 years, he was now sponsoring Meta, a little girl in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa.  He was stunned to receive a letter today that she has died of malaria, two months before her eighth birthday.  He went on to lament, ". ..I have Meta's picture but had never gotten around to writing. It was something I planned to do tomorrow. Today's letter from [the organization's] always efficient and gracious staff left me feeling desolate and ashamed. I've written back offering to sponsor another child in the same community. But no one can replace Meta. For her, I'm forever a day late. Sometimes all we can do is give thanks for the opportunity to do better."

Needless to say, my serenity on the screen porch was immediately pierced through by the story...just the simple tragedy of a singular little girl whom few people would ever know.  But for that sponsorship connection and John's willingness to send in $30 each month, he would never have encountered her. 

Sponsorship can seem so happy and simple.  How nice that as a sponsor I can give a few dollars each month through automatic credit card deduction and have this relationship that the organization mostly handles for me, almost like having a spouse or assistant who makes me look good by sending flowers on my behalf when it's a loved one's birthday. They make it so easy for me, and as long as I send in my check I can feel that my life and the life of my sponsored child are interconnected, and to some degree they are connected.

But then a tragedy like this happens, a one-page letter becomes ice water in the face, and we realize we are still oceans apart in our experience of the world, our rights, our opportunities. It's absurd that a million little kids die every year of malaria on the same planet where I live. I'm writing from Mosquito Headquarters here in Wisconsin, and NOBODY here will die of malaria. Why? Malaria was a major killer in America 150 years ago, but we eliminated it.  That happened mainly through widespread spraying of DDT, which for several reasons—many of them relating to global economics of the choices you and I make as consumers—is not an option today.   

It's tragic.  It's complicated, and I'm no expert.  But in the meantime, the unevenness--the unfairness--of the world in which I live in and in which Meta lived for a few years leads to numbing letters like the one my friend received today, giving us a piercing glimpse behind the curtain, to the world outside the screen.  

Screens, like the new mosquito nets we use in malarial regions, help a lot.  But the truth is, there are no malaria-infected mosquitoes on the other side of this patio screen.  I might get plenty of bites, but none of them would kill me.  Decades ago, we broke the larva's life-cycle once for all here, and every year the dividend in human lives saved grows by leaps and bounds. 

That this was not a viable option for Meta and her community is just a small part of the tragedy and unevenness of our lives on this earth.  And there is nothing at all in this inequality that pleases the heart of God.

So yes, John; I’ll pray for this little one.  I'm sorry for little Meta, sorry for you, sorry for Meta's family... sorry for the Kingdom that is not yet come.

Cory

August 2012

Good News for Bad Feet

I’ve got bad feet. 

I learned this when, at about age 30, I was determined to get more exercise and decided to try jogging.  Soon my heals were hurting and cracking, well beyond the deep cracks they’d had as long as I could remember.  I finally ended up at the podiatrist’s office to get my heals sanded down, and he told me I have bad feet.  Actually, the feet themselves are fine, but they are connected to bowed legs.  The shin connections to my feet are straight, but the legs aren’t, so the result is that my feet don’t hit the ground flatly as they should.  I have to spread my legs fairly far apart to get my feet fully on the ground.

But now I’m learning that this physiognomy may be to my advantage.  As someone who purports to have one foot firmly planted among the world’s poorest inhabitants and the other among the world’s richest, you could say I have wish-boned feet.  That pulling apart we do after Thanksgiving dinner is the feeling I get some days.  Or maybe it’s a fear more than a feeling, a fear that I will not be able to integrate the two halves of my life, that the two halves will be torn apart and have no relation to each other, no connection, no integration.

This certainly can happen to people who go on vision trips, or to any of us when we have close encounters with cultures which are “foreign” to us.  World Vision just published a terrific new Vision Trip Field Guide.  It includes a section about reentry and “reverse culture shock”, that whipsaw feeling when we are now back home and are confronted once again with our first-world habits, values, and lifestyle against the backdrop of our recent encounters and new friendships with the third-world* poor.  The Field Guide describes three roles we can choose to adopt in response to the dissonance between the two worlds…

Assimilators act as though there was nothing to learn from the experience and do everything possible to fit back into their home turf, dismissing whatever memories makes them uncomfortable.  “Although they seem to adjust well, they have actually missed a tremendous growth opportunity.” 

Alienators reject their home culture in favor of all things new, alienating and often condemning those around them.  “Unable to create personal alternatives, though, they eventually succumb to their home culture out of a need to belong.”

Integrators try to “embrace the tension they are experiencing” between the two halves, trying to call upon the ‘good’ learned now from each culture and recognizing the shortcomings of each, hopefully ending up a ‘richer’ person as a result.  However, because they want their short-term experience to have a long-term impact, in a way they are choosing a life sentence of dis-ease, as they “grapple with how to integrate their new understanding into a broader view of life and of the world.”

Sounds to me like wish-boned feet would be a big plus when attempting to be an Integrator: the only time my feet are actually firmly on the ground is when my bowed legs are in tension, being pulled apart. So, short of reaching the breaking point (which can feel dangerously close at times), the pulling has the potential to actually make me more “grounded” than I’ve ever been!

Certainly, it is an act of the will to grapple so, when a “don’t bother me” dismissal of our memories and encounters would be much easier.  Yet I feel continually compelled, even called, to stay in the struggle and to learn from the dissonance.  The process itself not only gives me that “broader view of life and of the world”, but also of God’s agenda for both.

And now I’ve realized I even get a bonus: that God actually built my body to benefit from the attempt… this Wishbone Effect actually improves my balance physically as well as spiritually!

Cory

June 2012

* The handy but outdated Cold War political term “third world” is now often replaced with “two-thirds world” or “majority world” to  represent the portion of the world’s population who live in poverty.

Christmas in Summer

In my last meditation I mentioned little Jose Antonio, our sponsored child in Tijuana, and his apparent learning disability.  We've now asked World Vision Mexico to find out more about his situation and to let us know what can be done.  We might want to help financially beyond our sponsorship commitment.

As a parent, we always believed in treating our children as unique individuals, providing the same love to each, but tailoring our "help" to their specific needs.  A few years ago I discovered an amazing way to go beyond the standardized construct of child sponsorship to be truly responsive to individual sponsored children.  It happened accidentally...

At the end of one year, we sent an extra $200 to World Vision for a project I’d visited in Malawi, where Janet and I were also sponsoring a child.  I didn't explain our intent sufficiently when we sent our cheque, and apparently the WV gift processing team didn't catch the subtlety, because several months later we received a thank you letter from little Tiyamika and her family, along with a photo.  The picture showed her and her parents surrounded by blankets, sacks of grain and cans of cooking oil, a new outfit and shoes for Tiyamika, a dress for her mother, and work gloves for dad.  Accompanying the photo was a letter thanking us for our “special gift” which had provided all of these things. I was so stunned by the impact for this family that I couldn't be frustrated about the receipting mix-up.  In fact, we kept the photo on our fridge for many months and talk about it to this day.

A year or two later I was in Kenya with a couple who is sponsoring 6-7 children in one community.  We met all of their sponsored children, and afterwards the wife came to me privately and asked about one girl.  "Gladwell seems unusually bright, and the letters we receive from her do are well written.  She wants to become a lawyer!  I think she could go far but I'm concerned that when she starts secondary school next year here in the slums that the teaching quality won't prepare her for university."  I encouraged this donor to ask World Vision to look into the feasibility and cost of a better secondary school.  It took a few months, but word came back to Kathy & Rick that for $900 a year, Gladwell could attend a good quality boarding school.  They had their own four children in private schools at the time, so they were thrilled at the comparative cost and very happy to provide the funding. 

When Janet and I were in Kenya two years ago, she spent an afternoon with Gladwell on behalf of Kathy & Rick.  Gladwell had graduated secondary school and was now a student at the University of Nairobi (Kathy & Rick decided to support her university studies for about $1200 per year…which includes room and board).  Gladwell is also a regular volunteer at the World Vision office, giving back for all she's been given, and training to become a public defender.

We followed Kathy's example.  A few years back, one of our sponsored children, Godfrey, was quitting school in Uganda at age 16 to help support his family because of his ailing father.  He seemed to be abandoning all the dreams he’d written about in letters over the prior years.  So we contacted World Vision and asked whether the local staff could find out if he had the interest and aptitude for vocational training, and they reported back that he would like to apprentice as a mechanic, which would cost about $500.  Underwriting his career training was a privilege and became a lovely final contribution to what we hope and pray is dear Godfrey's success.  

I recently read perhaps the best story yet... a little snippet from the Summer 2012 World Vision magazine, about Mike Murphy, a construction worker in Florida who sent and extra $100 to benefit Devi, his sponsored child in India...

   For Mike, 43, it was a significant sacrifice. A deep recession in Florida’s building industry means Mike has struggled to find regular work. He has no car and little family support, and he estimates that over the last 12 months he has earned just $16,000.

   But Mike felt that God laid it on his heart to give the money. He believed Devi’s family could make even better use of it than he could—perhaps by using some of it to help improve their home or buy a cow.

   What happened after he sent the gift took Mike’s breath away.  He received a letter from Devi’s neighbor saying that the family was extremely grateful. The letter went on to explain that it was now the cold time of the year, and Devi’s father was conscious that children in their village needed something to help them keep warm. So he worked with World Vision to use Mike’s gift to provide a top-quality blanket for every child in the village.

   Accompanying the letter were pictures of the village children clutching their new blankets. The letter and photographs reduced Mike to tears. “It floors me that somebody that poor can share with somebody else.” He says the letter could not have come at a better time. Because his own circumstances have been so trying in recent months, many times he has succumbed to depression and felt like giving up. But the news from India revived his spirits.

   Mike likens the experience to throwing a rock into a still pond. One ripple touches the next one and the next one and the next one. “It’s like God touched me, and then I touched Devi’s family,” Mike says, “and then they selflessly shared what they had with their whole village—touching many children. That’s how God’s love works.”

This little-known service World Vision provides to child sponsors, under the terribly bland name "Gift Notification" (because our local staff notify and work with the family of the child to determine the best use of the special funds), has become a favorite Christmas tradition for Janet and me.  We'll send an extra $100 or so for each of our sponsored children and await with anticipation the letter and photo we invariably get back, usually 3-6 months later.  So as summer starts, we receive our own Christmas gifts: learning how our funds were used to bless these children and their families.

This evening we opened a hand-written letter in beautiful Sanskrit from Nakitha in India, along with translation.  Also included was a photo of Nakitha with her mother in front of the “wet grinder” which was purchased with our funds.  The mechanism grinds various grains for food preparation, and perhaps could be rented out to generate family income as well.  “My heart is full thanks to you for all your love, care and concern toward me and especially for the gift. My mother is also conveying her special thanks to you.  We are able to feel God’s love through you.  Please do pray for me and for my future.”

And last month, our sponsored girl in Ethiopia, Worki, sent a photo of herself with a young cow.  In the accompanying letter, she says "...With this gift, one bullock is bought for me.  It we'll use for farming after few months.  Really, all the ups and downs of our problems on farming will be eliminated. My God bless you..." 

Janet and I never cease to marvel at what can be accomplished with small amounts of money, provided with loving guidance by the staff.  So, I was a bit taken aback a few years ago when one sponsor I know sent $5000 for one of his sponsored children!  But the letter he got back explained that the boy had received a new set of clothes, his father had received a bicycle for his business, and the entire village had received a new granary to reduce spoilage on their harvests!

Gift Notifications are unique in that the entire amount is used for the beneficiary; World Vision deducts nothing for administering the donation, though we spend outsize amounts of staff time ensuring that extra cash actually helps children and families and isn't a deterrent to good development work.  We also need to ensure that large gifts don't create jealousy in the community; thus sometimes the entire community benefits.  And in the most beautiful instances, as Mike Murphy experienced, our meager funds empower the poor to be generous themselves with those around them, sharing their blessings with others.

Special donations like this are icing on the cake, not the “main course” in our family’s giving.  But, like the Gift Catalog, they provide us a fun way to feel a tangible connection to those we are helping.  OK, it’s not the meat and potatoes of making a lasting impact on poverty, but after eating a balanced meal, good icing tastes sweet to everybody.

The Pink (and Blue) Elephants in the Room

The Pink (and Blue) Elephants in the Room

Because of Child Sponsorship, I didn't have a prayer.

I took a group of women to Tijuana last week, my first trip there in 2 years.  My last visit was also with Women of Vision, and some of the same women were on this trip. 

In the morning, we visited several energetic microfinance borrowers at their businesses.  It was a whirlwind display of practical and creative enterprises, all of these run by women: a convenience store, a beauty shop, a produce stand, even a pet food shop and an internet cafe.  The latter business owner was clearly a serial entrepreneur.  With each subsequent loan, she has addressed one more customer need and business opportunity after another in her "cyber cafe"...moving from telephone access to computer access, to arcade games for the bored children of computer users, to a snack counter, refrigerated drinks, even a still-rare indoor toilet for customers.

These were fun visits, learning about the impact of the loans, seeing once again the confidence that running a business builds in these women, most of them single mothers.

But our host Bárbara was wise in scheduling those visits prior to our stop at the Las Palmas Community Center.  Because once we arrived at Las Palmas, all love broke loose. 

Most of the visitors in the group are sponsoring children now in Tijuana—something which has only become possible in the past couple of years.  The staff and community volunteers had arranged for virtually every one of our group’s children to meet us at the community center.  A couple of these children had met their sponsors two years ago, and you'd have thought a favorite aunt had just arrived for a visit.  There were hugs, squeals (especially from the women in our group), and laps to be sat upon.

We tried to organize our usual program overview, and each person around our large circle introduced themselves.  But each time a sponsored child was introduced, or a sponsor mentioned the name of their child, another connection was made and everything stopped for new hugs and more exclamations of glee.  

A little side drama was happening for my wife Janet and me.  In a shadowed corner sat little Jose Antonio with his mother, his head buried into her chest.  He's our sponsored child, a replacement for another "Jose" who moved away last year.  We chose this little guy because his photo looked so forlorn, and we wondered if he was mentally disabled.  In fact, he has just been diagnosed with some learning disability—probably autism or Asperger’s Syndrome.  He kept his head down but his eyes piercing straight ahead, never smiling, and at times headbutting his mom's chest.  She was embarrassed, and I'm sure that whatever small disappointment we felt in comparing the reaction of the other sponsored children against the reaction of our Jose Antonio was magnified many times over in her heart.

As the introductions continued amidst the growing din, Bárbara tried valiantly to keep the process going, but it was as though she was trying singlehandedly to hold back a dam.  It was a powerful reminder to me, a guy who earned quite honestly the moniker "Agenda Trenda", that connection trumps information.

You see, there was an elephant of love in the room that day, and even when we tried to focus on other topics, such as the important work being done in economic development, sanitation, delinquency prevention, health... that elephant kept getting in the way and demanding the attention of everyone's heart—even those who didn't have a sponsored child.

And it was beautiful to behold.  Though geographically Sponsor and Child live less than two hours apart, socially and economically they are practically on different continents.  Yet the bond of relationship was so strong and tangible that it was the most important reality in the room.

I've always had a strong desire for these one-day trips across the border to be a window that gives visitors a clear understanding of WV's global methodology. It's rather amazing really, that in just a few hours, a person can have a cross-cultural Vision Trip experience, and they can come back much better educated on just how sound our program model is and how its underlying principals operate anywhere in the world.  I've thought with satisfaction many times of the day when a pastor told me, "Traveling with you Cory is like getting a graduate-level course in Christian Community Development."

So when I was younger and more agenda-driven, I'd have been frustrated that so little of this wonderful, important knowledge was imparted last week. But instead, great love was imparted. An entire crowded roomful of love was on display, in the staff and community volunteers, as well as in the children and their sponsors.

And in the final analysis, the most intelligent, logical, world-class program is nothing without love. 1 Cor 13 makes it clear that only that which is deeply and truly rooted in love will make any difference at all.  At least on this trip, I saw that Love had a better idea of what could be accomplished than I did, and I didn’t fight it.

I've recently realized that a primary motivation for my writing is that I want readers to experience the love I've come to feel for the poor, and to realize that really, we are all the same.  Or, in the beautiful words of Father Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, which provides economic opportunities for inner-city youth and gang members in LA, "It's not us versus them; there is only us."

So, was my "agenda" achieved?  More to the point, I think God's was.  It’s not knowledge versus love.  In the end, there is only love.

Cory

May 2012

The Difference A Century Makes

Last evening, Janet and I watched an episode of the Ken Burns' documentary Baseball which focused on Babe Ruth and the singular, unparalleled impact he has had on the game. One small factoid really jumped out at me: George Ruth (his given name) was born into a poor family in Baltimore in 1895, the oldest of nine children. Of the family’s subsequent eight children, seven did not survive infancy. How amazing and even miraculous that George lived to become arguably the greatest baseball player ever.

Today I was reading a World Vision annual update regarding our For Every Child initiative.  The report included the story of Rose Mukarukundo, a Rwandan woman and single mother who fled that nation’s tragic genocide in 1994 and then married.  Buried in the middle of the story was the sentence, "Four of her five children died as infants, and eventually Rose's husband abandoned her."

How similar those stories are, separated mainly by geography and one century.  There was one other point of separation: my focus, which had shifted from the surviving child to the unspeakable heartache of a mother who has lost nearly every child she bore.  Parenthetically, in our country it has become popular to say “No parent should have to bury their child” which—while true and empathetic—also speaks to our expectations of zero child mortality, a reflection of the incredible change in our reality over the past century.

Another part of this same report focused on malaria, the #1 child killer in much of Africa.  Malaria.  It seems so intractable and so pervasive in these countries, but completely absurd when imagined as a fearsome killer in America.  Yet, until roughly 100 years ago, malaria was a major scourge in the Western hemisphere too, including the U.S., particularly the southern states.

Totally "unfixable" in Africa*, yet long ago totally "fixed" in America.

What a difference 100 years makes.

And yet, how many of us can tolerate such a long view and be faithful to do what we can do now in order to achieve results that simply will not be accomplished in our own lifetime?  We have this vague sense that this would be poor stewardship, because we won't "be there" to witness the final declaration of victory... that on the day of my death God will somehow hold me accountable to the final result of my efforts or prayers or donations, so I’d better stick to problems that will be "dead" before I am.

As I've noted previously, when I started in this work 30 years ago, over 45,000 children were estimated to be dying every day of preventable causes. Today that number has been reduced by half.  Taken over the long view, the progress is stunning.  At the same time, it’s impossible to truly comprehend the vast numbers of children who still died needlessly each day over this same 30 years.  The glass is both half full and half empty.  But it's certainly not stagnant, even if the change appears so sluggish and arduous that many people throw their hands up with impatience that "nothing is changing."  Some days the same thoughts creep into my head, days when my shoulders and chin sag and a sigh escapes involuntarily.

At times like that I'm comforted with a beautiful prayer-poem usually attributed to Salvadoran Bishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated in 1980 while celebrating Mass in a cancer hospital in San Salvador...

It helps now and then to step back and take a long view; the Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.

Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.

No prayer fully expresses our faith.

No confession brings perfection.

No pastoral visit brings wholeness.

No program accomplishes the church’s mission.

No set of goals and objectives includes everything,

This is what we are about.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.

This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.

Amen.

Rose's story of unimaginable grief as a mother is tragic.  Yet the fact that the equivalent tragedy occurred in Babe Ruth’s family only 100 years earlier gives me great hope for the future of places like Rwanda.  One hundred years from now, there will still be plenty of current social ills everywhere, crusaders aplenty for programs ministering mercy and justice appropriate to that era.

Yet the infant mortality rate in urban Baltimore today is but a tiny fraction of the 77% that George Ruth's mother endured.  One hundred years from now, may that be the case in Rwanda, and Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, and in all of God’s world.  Our offspring's offspring may not be ready then to declare that God's Kingdom has fully come, but may we then be in that great cloud of witnesses testifying that, compared to the way things were during our watch, God's will is being more fully done on earth, as it is in heaven.

Cory
May, 2012

* Actually, major progress is happening regarding malaria deaths, thanks to a major scale-up in malaria programs over the past decade in Africa.  A recent study, "estimates that 842,800 child deaths have been prevented across 43 malaria- endemic countries in Africa, compared to year 2000. The impact in 2010 is estimated to be biggest, with a 24.4% decrease in malaria- caused child deaths, compared to a scenario of no scale-up of prevention interventions beyond 2000 coverage levels."

Raised From Their Beds

It's often endearing to hear non-native speakers try to communicate in English.  Often their childlike word choices are actually quite communicative, yet in ways that we don’t expect.

On my latest trip to the Afar desert, we received the obligatory overview briefing from the field workers before visiting the project sites.  I was pushing the staff to keep this short -- the travelers are often fighting jetlag just to stay awake, and making them sit in a stuffy room after breakfast and follow a too-technical PowerPoint presented with thick accents often brings slumber to the even the hardiest among us.

Buried somewhere in this presentation was almost a throwaway line that sounded so odd that I wrote it down.  (My thumbs get a real workout on these trips as I type furiously into my smartphone.) We heard that people living with the virus that causes AIDS had been "raised from their beds." It struck me as a phrase that only faith healers and pitch men would use in this country, but it was spoken with humility and without any claims of superhuman power or braggadocio.

We heard a great deal more, and then proceeded to make several project visits.  The next day images, not words, flooded into my mind. And then those words made sense...

The faces hang on the wall in my office. And they live in my laptop.  But otherwise, I assumed they were faces of those long since dead.  I can "see" them clearly in my mind just writing this, the nameless man and the woman whose photos I'd taken five years earlier during another HIV Support Group meeting in Afar.  Their faces were so gaunt, eyes pleading and almost visibly losing their light... I would look at the photos and with a little sigh and sense of empathy I'd wonder: How long ago did she/he die?  I didn't see them when I returned two years ago.  I was certain these two had succumbed to the virus and I was looking at "dead men walking" on my wall, almost like seeing a photo of JFK smiling and waving as he drove in his motorcade in Dallas, or Dr. King standing on his motel balcony in Memphis.

Two years ago, in 2010, it was rather shocking to notice the faces I didn't see from my 2007 visit.  So I was hopeful that due to better treatment -- thanks significantly to President Bush's AIDS Initiative -- that there wouldn't be so many additional missing faces this time. 

Then as soon as I walked into the dimly lit room, I recognized a man.  But not a face from 2010.  Though he was older, I'd seen the photo so many times that I was rather certain his was one of the faces on my wall.  "I've… met you, haven't I?" I asked him, still unsure what more to say.  He nodded.

We sat down and went through the usual formalities and introductions.  Then we were invited to speak or ask questions.  Whenever they are willing or can be coaxed into it, I try to let the visitors speak for our group, but this time I felt strongly that this was my turn, and my legs propelled me upward almost involuntarily. 

Yet I could hardly speak.  I didn't want to offend or say the wrong thing, but I felt I needed to tell the story.  Trying not to choke up, I began a public conversation with this man who was now five years older but who looked younger and healthier than when I first met him in 2007.  I expressed my joy, my wonder!, at finding him alive when I was certain he had passed away.  We hugged and took pictures, I found out his name--Saeed Mohammed, and I sat down having had what became my most memorable and poignant experience of the trip.

We then heard several stories from HIV sufferers who had taken small loans averaging about $80 to start businesses, thanks to a $1000 loan pool our 2010 team had donated for this purpose before we left Ethiopia.  It was a real delight to hear the stories of how the loans were being put to use...

One man, Alem, had no source of income. With his loan for $80, he rented a fridge and started selling soft drinks. "Today, I can pay for my children to be in school." He even saves about 50 cents each day.

A woman, Amenot, received a loan of about $100 to start a charcoal business.  She told us that because of heath limitations and discrimination, "Before this, I didn't have any work."

A moment later, as I was scanning the others in the room during the stories, there at the farthest point across the round thatched-roof room was another face…again different but distantly familiar.  I asked and found out that she was in fact the woman from the same 2007 visit—the other face on my wall!  "Ergo" is not only still alive, but her children are now in school.

It's difficult to articulate the feeling I experienced, and I certainly had great difficulty expressing it that day. But I now have a small understanding of the feeling of those who witnessed Lazarus come walking out of his tomb.  Truly, I had seen first-hand that people were honestly being “raised from their beds."

Maybe it’s a good reminder to me to take it easy on the writers of the gospels when their human words seem to fall short in communicating works of God.  That day, I felt that I too was witness to a work of God, a modern day resurrection, and I was speechless.

My New Hero

I'm sitting in the side chapel at St. John Chrysostom church, where Janet and I are spending a reflective hour as part of the Good Friday prayer vigil. Earlier this morning I read a meditation for Holy Saturday which I'd written last year but never sent out. It was concerning an attack on World Vision's office in Afar Ethiopia, which happened just before Holy Week last year. My reflection was that in Afar we were in the in-between time: we knew about the bad news, but we didn't yet know what good would come of it... "This day, the day between Crucifixion Friday and Resurrection Sunday, is the 'not yet' day, the day when the worst had already happened, and no one knew the best that was about to happen.  The disciples thought it was over; the women went to the tomb early Sunday morning simply to dress out Jesus' body, not to check whether his body was still there or had been resurrected.  They could not envision another chapter to a story they thought had ended in tragedy. The best was about to happen.  God was using death to bring life in all its fullness." I'd closed with a twist on Tony Campolo's famous sermon: "In Afar, it's Saturday; but Sunday's comin'!"

But I didn't send it out, partly because it seemed a bit glib and partly because I was concerned that explaining the causes of the attack might be too complicated or risk being misunderstood and derail the piece. I thought about sending it this year but—as I complained to Janet while we drove to our church, it’s a year later and there’s no Easter ending to the story yet.

To start my prayer vigil time, I decided to employ an ancient ritual for focusing the mind on God by "walking" along a handheld labyrinth using my fingers and a stylus.  As usual, my mindset while traveling toward the center of the labyrinth was that of moving into God's presence.  But then it shifted, to a reminder of Christ's arduous but willing journey up to Golgotha, Skull Hill, the place of his ultimate suffering.  My usual joy upon arrival became serious if not ominous.

Then my mind shifted again, to the suffering from last year, and then to what happened a few weeks ago when I was again in Afar...

For the first time, this year I was blessed to take my 16-year-old granddaughter Emmy to Ethiopia! She was an absolute delight to have along and stole everyone's heart, not least her proud grandpa's. Last weekend Emmy and I reflected again on our trip as we prepared to give a talk at University High School in Irvine, which was holding a fundraising event for WV.  I asked Emmy: Who does she remember most when she thinks about Afar. I was expecting her to say the newborn baby she’d held in her arms, or the teen girls she met, or the students she addressed. Maybe even the camel she rode.

But she surprised me by answering, "I always remember Yared. He's my new hero." Yared was WV's project manager in Afar, and one of several hosts for our group. When Emmy learned that Yared had been injured in last year's attack, she was moved to give him a letter and the Valentine's Day teddy bear that her mom had sneaked into my suitcase for her.

After she’d written the letter, we all had a lovely morning at a school, interacting with the kids there (pretending to teach them English while they pretended to learn from us). As we drove back, Emmy and I were able to climb into a vehicle alone with Yared so Emmy could give him her gift. As he read her note, Yared wiped silent tears; they rather streamed down his face. I asked if he would mind telling us about the attack.  The story was dramatic and painful.

An angry mob of young people had attacked a high school teacher, and as the adrenalin-soaked herd headed back into town, they passed the World Vision office and decided to wreak more havoc.  The upshot is that they hit Yared over the head with bricks and though a few of them (the girls!) pressed to do more, he and three other staff were left bleeding and semi-conscious inside the wrecked office.  The wounded were moved out of the area for treatment and recuperation for several months.  Yared told us he'd been reassigned to the regional office, and though he comes back to the office in Afar and has had to give depositions in town, this was the first week he'd been back in the outlying communities where we work.

He became very quiet, turning away toward the window and wiping his face profusely.  When we'd arrived at the school earlier that morning, we had walked the joyous gauntlet of all the students clapping and shaking our hands, hundreds lined up on either side of us.  I flashed back to our interactions.

"Were...any of your attackers at the school we just visited," I asked sheepishly.

"Yes. There were several."

Did they do or say anything? Was any kind of remorse shown?  No, everyone just acted as though nothing had ever happened.

I didn't need to ask him how he was feeling about this; he was doing his best to hide his face from us and furtively dry his tears.  I prayed for him instead.

We returned to the same school the next day for a second morning of “teaching” and, to my surprise and admiration, Yared came with us again, even knowing what he now knew, and he translated in the classroom, though others could have done so.

Pausing in the center of my labyrinth, my heart went out to Yared and his colleagues as they continue in their slow healing process, and I decided to travel back out of the center “walking” in Yared's shoes, walking down from that mount of pain, taking the circuitous route one must follow out of the labyrinth, sweeping away from the center, practically around in circles, back toward the now-unwelcome center, and finally, finally out...to freedom.


I told the story to Janet as we drove away from the prayer vigil, and I pondered that Yared was clearly still in pain; he hadn't “arrived” or done anything outwardly "heroic".  Then I thought again: but he came back.  And, every day at our early morning devotions in the desert, Yared was one of the most enlivened worshippers.

Now I saw where the analogy to Holy Saturday, that place between the pain of Good Friday and the redeeming miracle of Easter Sunday, fits authentically.  Here is the place where we still don't know Sunday's comin', except by faith.

Yared is facing and walking through the pain from his own Friday; and while it's Saturday he's holding firmly onto faith in the God who redeems all things.

Maybe he's my new hero, too.

Cory
April 2012