When you're a kid, time ticks by so slowly. An hour in the car is torture, a school day stretches to some distant invisible horizon, the summer six-week holiday feels like a year, and Christmas is always an eternity away. As we go into the last days of our time in South Africa, I wish I was a kid again so the days wouldn’t scream by so quickly.
Our time here has been amazing, we've been part of an incredible community and formed lifelong friendships. We've accepted and been accepted. We've been part of a great church, marked down only because of the instant coffee (I ask myself, what would Jesus drink? And I think it’s clear he drinks Espresso).
When we first came here, we were planning on heading to Zambia about the end of June. Round about May we decided to have an extra month and extend our stay until the end of July. Then we realised a bunch of people were visiting from our church at the start of August, so we said we'd stay until end of the first week of August. When you love living somewhere, it's all too easy to push your leaving date ever further into the future. And then Claire's sister announced her wedding date in mid August, and it would have been foolish for us to go to Zambia only for Claire to fly back a week later leaving me in an unknown country with two small boys and no support network. So we extended our visas until the end of August.
Then, just this week, Reuben was admitted to hospital with pneumonia. He’s on the mend, but we’ve been advised to stay another two weeks [Ed. - the blog was started a couple of weeks ago - Reuben is back to being his cheeky self].
But despite these extensions, our leaving date is approaching fast, and, you know, we're ready to go. We're excited about the next part of our challenge. Excited about getting stuck in. Excited about the next part of the call God has given us. One of the J-Life guys here described it like this "For you guys leaving here is bitter-sweet, bitter saying goodbye to your friends, but sweet going where you're called to be. For those of us who have to let you go, it's just bitter." That says it all, really. We, and the community we have become part of, have changed, grown. I like to think that God has been planting, and now he wants to start harvesting. We’ll grieve the leaving, but:
"Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you'll have life forever, real and eternal" (John 12:24-25 Message translation).
We’d love to be the grain of wheat, hopefully being part of something awesome growing in Zambia.
The last month has been an interesting time. We even had a cool minor miracle, which I’ll tell you about now.
My folks were here for a couple of weeks, and one day we were in the car on our way into Johannesburg. Driving up a hill on the motorway the car lost power and the engine light came on. We pulled over to the side, and saw that the car was blowing copious amounts of steam out of the exhaust. Now anyone who knows anything about cars will be thinking “Uh huh. Head gasket. Definitely head gasket...”
So we called our friend and he towed us back into town, and we left the car at a garage. The mechanic said “Head gasket. Only thing it can be. We’ll test it and give you an estimate for the repair.”
Now the last time anyone I know had a head gasket repair done in the UK it was £1200, so we were pretty concerned. So at staff prayers the next morning we just asked everyone to pray that it would be less than R10,000 (about £700).
As the day ticked by we were getting increasingly worried. And then the next day went by without word from the garage. When it comes to cars, no news is bad news in my considerable experience (I once owned a Morris Minor, so I know whereof I speak when it comes to money-sucking rust-buckets). On day three the garage phoned and asked me if I would go in to have a chat. The zeros were mounting up.
When I got to the garage the mechanic took me aside and asked me to describe what had happened again, which I did. “Well, it just can’t be anything but head gasket...but...we can’t find a single thing wrong with your car. Nothing. We’ve run every test we can think of, we’ve driven the car for two days, we’ve checked everything. There is nothing wrong with this car...sorry to ask you this...but are you sure you saw what you saw?”
So that was that. We paid £130 for the testing and a full service and drove the car away. Since then we’ve done 7000km and it’s not missed a beat. I’m really not the kind of guy to ascribe any and all unusual happenings to God-did-it (or, as Richard Dawkins says, smuggling in magic whenever it suits you), but I’m inclined to let Him have this one.
Staying on the theme of God sorting stuff out, a few weeks ago, after months of trying to arrange houses and the like in Zambia from afar, we decided to take the hit and I flew up to Ndola for a few days. Some friends of ours up there had given us a lead on a house and I wanted to check it out for myself, amongst other things.
My intention was that I would stay with the J-Life Zambia director, but he wasn’t available for me to stay with him for the first two days of the week that worked best for us. I decided to contact the aforementioned friends who, well, they are definitely friends, but I wouldn’t think we’d invested enough in our relationship yet to leave me comfortable rocking up for four days and leaving tide marks in their shower. They live at a bible college and are building a school for orphaned kids, and we know them because her mum goes to our church in the UK. Anyway, of course they said I was welcome to stay with them, because they’re that kind of people.
I went to look at the house, which is a couple of doors down from friends of our friends which is how we came to hear about it. The house is great, or, it will be when the landlord finishes renovating it. Turns out that the landlord is a deacon at the church we had been planning to go to. Anyway, the house might be just right, but won’t be finished until at least mid October which left us with nearly two months with nowhere to live. That night I was talking to our friends about it and they said “oh, there’s a guest house here on our site - why don’t you stay here until your place is ready?”.
So that was that. I went to look at the guest house and it’s great. It is in the middle of a banana farm, and right next door to a couple with kids the same age as ours. It gives us a fantastic soft-start to life in Zambia while we get to know people, and how things work there. Also, we were keen to build on links with the bible college, and living there for a couple of months is a sure-fire way to kick that off. Also, despite our extreme desire not to, we’ve been told we must have a dog, and the couple next door have a pregnant doberman so we’ve reserved a puppy [ed. ug].
On to the next coincidence - having seen the area where the house is, and the route to Daniel’s school, and the distance to the J-Life training centre, we came to the realisation that we need a second car. We’d really hoped to get away without it and cycle the kids to school, but it’s just not possible - the road is just too dangerous for us to consider it. So, again, I was talking to our friends about this and they said “oh, some missionary friends of ours are going home for a year and want to sell their car. They’re asking half what it’s worth just to get rid of it quickly...”. I went to see the car and it’s perfect, a 7-seater estate in great condition. And they really were asking half the market value for it.
Having agreed on the car, we were talking and I met their 5-year-old daughter, and it turns out she’s going to be in Daniel’s class at school. Now, I didn’t know this because it came out with Claire while I was away, but Daniel has been really anxious about going to a new school. So when I came home and told him that I had met Emma and she was going to look after him in class it was if a weight had lifted from his shoulders. It was only after that that Claire said he’d confided in her about his anxiety.
So we’ve got a set of things that have fallen into place because of those unexpected days staying with our friends at the bible college - somewhere to live while our house is being made ready, an easier start to our life in Zambia through living in an established community, a puppy from a known dog which is good with kids, a half price car, a school mate for Daniel, and the chance to kick-start links with an organisation we were already keen to partner with. Oh, and one more thing, the bible college runs a saw mill which can make bunk beds for the kids at a very good price.
Christians often have this idea the God goes before us. I don’t believe that - I think that God is already there and we go to join him. For me, being Christian isn’t an insurance policy to make life easy, far from it, but looking back over things we often see what looks very much like a plan being followed.
Back to the present: Friday (30th August) was an interesting day. Winter in South Africa is a very dry time, and fires are a problem for farms. Over the last few days the wind has been building up, and yesterday it was blowing at probably 20 miles an hour. A massive fire started a few farms over - in fact one of the guys we know saw it start, from a smoldering log left over from a previous burn.
As he drove past, the fire raced out in a V-shape, jumped the road in front of his car (a distance of about 8 metres), and raced through the adjacent farm. By the time he’d driven the 10 or so kilometers back to our farm to warn people, the fire was already over the fence line and every man available was rushed out to try and fight it.
Until you’ve seen a burning grass in a 20mph wind, you just can’t grasp how scary and destructive a wild fire can be. I was with 8 farm men fighting one flank of the fire (bearing in mind that it was burning as a continuous line probably 10km long) and we pretty much had our section under control using water spray and beaters, when the wind changed and the fire billowed back towards us. Fire in a strong wind, moves faster than you can run. People have told me that before and I didn’t believe it, but it does. The only advantage you’ve got when it does that is that you’re marginally smarter than the fire. Now I’ve been told that Johnny Wilkinson can run the 100m on a rugby field in 11 seconds. Yesterday I saw a 50-year-old 130kilo black man in wellington boots in a maize field smash that record. Stick that in your Ruck and Try it, Wilko.
The good news is that we got the fire out. Took about ten hours of constant work and we were up and down rocky hills all day chasing the burn line back and forth. As it turned out we were lucky - the neighbouring game farm lost all their land and lots of animals to the fire, and only managed to save their lodges by driving round them with a fire truck spraying the ground with water until the fire past. Their two leopards were rescued with minor burns - their herd of hartebeest wasn’t so lucky.
At one point we completely lost control of the fire after the wind billowed and the flames jumped back behind us to race up the next mountain. With no way we could catch it, the men were all rushed in tractors round the base of the mountain with the intention to deliberately burn the whole of the next valley to give the fire nowhere to run. When we arrived round there (about 10km drive) we found that somehow the “puller” (a petrol fire lance) had been forgotten and we had no way to start a controlled burn. Some of us sat by while one guy went back to fetch the puller.
In our group was an old guy with a crutch, which the others called Mkulu - a term of respect for an older man. Mkulu set off to amble up the mountain from the our side to see for himself how the fire was progressing. About half way up a young guy followed him, and then about twenty minutes later I went to call them back down so we could start our controlled burn.
When I got to the ridge and looked over, all I could see was fire raging out of control. The line must have been 300 metres long and racing through long grass - I thought that it would be utterly impossible to control it, even if we could have got the fire trucks up there (which we couldn’t). I found the young guy stood up top and asked him where Mkulu was. He just shook his head and pointed down into the smoke and said “Napa” - That side, over there. Now I had focus I could see Mkulu at the edge of the fire line beating at the flames with a branch - just a small old man with a grey beard against a huge wild fire. I still thought it was pointless, but I went down to join him thinking at least I could support him.
When I went down the young guy followed me, and we broke branches off a tree to go and help Mkulu. Between the three of us, and against my pessimistic predictions, we killed about 100m of fire. By that point three other guys came and the six of us killed the whole line before it reached the ridge. I’m not being prosaic here, but I genuinely couldn’t believe it. If it weren’t for this guy who refused to be beaten we would have just given up and burned out the next valley in desperation. But because of his quiet inspiration we just tried anyway and beat a fire I thought couldn’t be beaten. It was a real lesson. And that guy never said anything, just quietly ambled down the mountain through the char to join the men at the bottom who were in the process of killing the opposing flank of the fire.
For me, he was the hero of the day, if it wasn’t for him we’d still have been burning a fire break at 3am. As it was, we were all safely back in bed by 10. All because one old man didn’t know when to stop.
So we come to our last day in this part of our journey. We just had a staff braii with all our friends. My buddy Matthew and I went and shot a couple of pigeons which we cooked on the fire next to the sausage and steak, and we sat around in groups eating meat and pasta and drinking Stony Ginger Beer: about 30 of us having a good South African time to end this South African leg. People said lovely things about us, which has made it all the harder to leave this amazing community. I’m welling up now just thinking about it. We’re leaving some great, great friends, but, as someone said tonight, it’s not goodbye, it’s just farewell until we meet again, which will hopefully be at the annual summit in February.
Our kids will miss people here a lot. In particular Daniel, who really doesn’t form relationships easily, has developed a real bond with a couple of our friends, so much so that when Claire couldn’t get past yesterday’s fire to pick him up from school, our friend David went over from town to collect him and take him to Wimpy for dinner and Daniel took it all in his stride without freaking out. Anyone who knows Daniel will know that that is very special.
That’s the essence of community - everyone supporting everyone else because you’re all striving for the same goals. You can’t get to pick your kid up from school? No matter, someone else can. You had a bad day and need some company? Knock on any one of five doors and you’ll find it. Your car breaks down and you need a tow? I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Your youngest child gets rushed to hospital and you need an overnight sitter for the other? No problem, bring him round, we’ll do pizza, someone else will take care of your washing, someone else will bring you what you need for hospital and someone else will come and say hi. Community rocks.
So we love it here. Really love it. We wish we weren’t leaving, but we are looking forward to working with the J-Life team in Zambia.
See you on the other side.
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