22. Mr. Stonier is my father.

People have started calling me Mr. Stonier. I don’t like it.

Mr. Stonier is my dad. “Mr. Stonier” is a hereditary title that can only be passed on after the current holder has passed on. Which is some time in the distant future, all things being well. Plus it sounds old. I’m too young to be Mister anything: I’m only, what, thirty…umm…seven? I think. Ok, maybe I am old. When you start having to work out your own age you are by definition old, but still. Mr. Stonier.

You see: completely different.

This is a new thing to me. Where I come from, people are generally on first-name terms. I was even on first-name terms with a previous Managing Director. Though, actually, he called me James for nearly 5 years, because I didn’t correct him the first time and then kind of lost the opportunity to do so without looking like a dork. But you get the point. In British culture we’re more familiar. Respectful, but still familiar.

So I've never been called Mr. Stonier before, and the epithet feels a bit like a hat that’s two sizes too big. But, nonetheless, people have started calling me it, and that’s because somebody, possibly after a momentary lapse of reason, has seen fit to make me the boss of something.

The hat is part of the package.

We said in the last blog that we had some news to share. That was quite a while ago, and we’re only just sharing now because for the past three months we have been almost unbelievably busy. For those who care and follow our blog, I’m sorry that it’s taken this long to write.

Round about August a couple we know announced that they were leaving the ministry that they had set up 13 years before, Mechanics For Africa, and asked us if we would take it on. We said no: we were heading back to the UK in less than a year, why would we want to do that? But the seed had been sown.

Essential mechanics tool

Jump back a few years to Johannesburg airport, after a short-term stint with J-Life. I made the mistake then of joking to my friend that I could go work for J-Life for three years. Unfortunately, God overheard and took it to be a verbal contract. Earlier this year we made the same mistake, when we said we would be willing to consider staying in Zambia, but it would have to be for something big. Will I never learn to keep my fool mouth shut?

I said it needed to be something big. This is that big something.

Mechanics For Africa is a training college for underprivileged young men and women, teaching a diploma in Motor Vehicle Engineering. We have 70 students over two years, a 2 acre site, 13 staff, and a commercial workshop. In 13 years, the college has trained over 200 people, and from what we know, most have gone on to disperse all over Zambia into good jobs.

Halfway through a ground-up rebuild

We mainly teach Mechanics, but what sets us apart from other technical colleges is that we also teach ‘life skills’ – communication, conflict resolution, interview skills, CV writing; we teach computing and first aid, and bring in experts to teach nutrition and sexual health. Being a Christian college (although people of all faiths and none are welcome) we also do bible studies and small group work. 

If that wasn't enough, over the 2 years we give the guys a grounding in agriculture too. It’s a busy timetable.

And we have a good reputation in Zambia: I heard a story which went something like this – a major trucking company down south in Lusaka wanted some mechanics, so the boss asked around and found that the best mechanics came from the Copper Belt. So he travelled up here and asked around the trucking companies and found the best mechanics came from Ndola. So he came to Ndola and asked around the trucking companies, and found that the best mechanics came from Mechanics For Africa…

Now I’m sure the size of that metaphorical fish has grown with the re-telling, but it seems that we do produce really good mechanics here. In the second year our students go on industrial placements for six weeks at various big companies in the area (mines, hauliers, that kind of thing), and a good chunk are retained full time as a result.

So we started to get a bit excited about the idea of running the place. The previous leadership couple did an amazing job, building a top-tier college from nothing, and so we were inheriting a great legacy. Running it would put us back into the world of business, it would give us something that we could really get our teeth into, and it would tax all our skills to make it work even better. Plus, and here’s the spiritual bit, we began to believe it might just be where God wants us – the timing and skills fit, and our feeling about the place seemed spot on.

We love J-Life, let that be understood. But as the main J-Life training centre gets ever closer to completion the main phase of the J-Life work was beginning to tail off and we weren’t filling our time. It did give Claire time to focus more on Jireh Crafts, but even with that we’d started to feel like we weren’t making the most of the commitment people had made by supporting us to come here. Mechanics came at the right time for it to be a plausible option. When we started negotiations with the trustees of Mechanics we said that the first “non-negotiable” was that we had to remain involved with J-Life Zambia, and we are, though in an advisory role at the moment while we are working some things out with immigration. We’re running the discipleship training using the J-Life material under Mechanics, so as far as J-Life is concerned nothing much has changed. And, as our J-Life director pointed out “You were going home next June. This way we get to keep you in Africa.”

So it was a bit of a head-trip for us. To switch our mind set from “going home in 10 months”, to “staying at least another 2 years”, was the most difficult part. But our families have been incredibly supportive.

So at the beginning of September, after being interviewed by the UK trustees, we were handed the keys to a technical training college. Claire is the business manager and I am the Principal. When I find out what that means, I’ll be sure to let you know.

The past few months have, therefore, been a roller-coaster for us. The position with Mechanics comes with a house on the site, so we had to move home, but since that move put us 50 metres away from some of our closest friends here we’re quite happy about it. 

Our boys get to roam freely about the site, and Emmanuel the college administrator lives here with his young kids, plus our friends’ boys as well, so ours get home from school and then we don’t see them for two hours as they play.

There's probably a child in that tree.

And apart from the site there’s the work. Having come from the world of business, we did kind of miss the pressure of the workplace.  Day-to-day I am involved in the running of our workshop and I deal with the academic side of things. Claire handles all our finances, and HR issues. Together we work with the trustees on setting the strategic direction for the college.

Head lecturer, Mr. Lungu.

Our staff are awesome. It’s been a massive upheaval for them – there has never been a change of leadership in 13 years so it’s taken some adjustment. They have been incredibly welcoming. As we adapt to running a business in Zambia there’s so much we don’t know, but there are 13 people who work here and at least one of them will always have some helpful advice for us.

Just a few weeks ago we held a ‘vision day’ where we pulled all the staff together and got them to work in focus groups to define the principles and vision of the organisation. Afterwards Desmond, our gardener, took us to one side and thanked us for the opportunity to contribute. He said in all his years of work nobody had ever asked his opinion on the running of something. He's one of the stars actually.

The kind of thinking whereby all staff are invested in the success of the business appears to be counter-cultural here in Zambia. But being counter-cultural is something of a defining characteristic of Christianity, so we are embracing it wholeheartedly.

Jesus turned culture on its head: he scandalised people by talking to prostitutes and, gasp, women. He put children in pride of place at his gatherings. He invested in uneducated fishermen, and stooges of the Roman Empire. He said “whichever of you wants to become great must become a servant, whichever of you wants to be first must be last”. I never want to hear our staff say “I’m just…the cook…the guard”. Desmond is not just the gardener: he is a servant of the living God, working for the Kingdom.

There’s often this tacit assumption that missionaries exist to take Christ someplace foreign…but that’s such a dumb way of thinking. Christ has always been here. We’ve just come to join in with what he’s already doing.

So, am I Mr. Stonier? I suppose I must be.

The 2nd years after their final exam.

21. How can I bless you today brother?

I have a friend here in Zambia who always answers the phone by saying "How can I bless you today, brother?". It's brilliant, so I've started doing it myself. The reaction is great: invariably there's a few seconds of silence followed by a tentative "hello?", to which I reply "Yes, how can I bless you today, brother?". There is then another few seconds of silence and a "Jason?", to which, if I can keep a straight face, I reply "Yes, how can I bless you today, brother?". Ok, by this stage I accept it's getting a bit childish, but it amuses me and that's the main thing.

 

The thing is, behind my childish humour there is a serious point: usually when people call you up, in some way they need something: a conversation; to find out if you're free to visit; to see if they can borrow your nail gun to impress a lady with their manliness; you know, the usual things.

 

Christ said that the two most important things in life were to love God and love people. As Christians, if we're not loving people we're missing the point. Of course that means we also have to let other people love and bless us: sometimes we're the friend carrying and sometimes we're the friend being carried. So to say "How can I bless you today?" is actually a really awesome way to start a conversation.

 

And, as well as a neat social commentary, it serves as an introduction to two teams we hosted recently.

 

Hosting teams is a weird thing: you can't say they are ‘just’ coming to do manual work because, frankly, labour is so cheap in Zambia there's no point shipping white people over from the UK to do it, and simply doing this is actually denying work to those local people who could. And it's definitely not a holiday for either us or the team because it's not even remotely relaxing. So what is it? Simply, it is a time of blessing. Blessing them, blessing us, blessing others.

 

We've had two teams in the last month. Now, as an example of blessing, the second team stayed with us for two weeks in the rural area. On the Sunday we went to a local village church. Half way through we were asked to give a short message and sing a song. Nothing much. But after the service people were hugging us and shaking our hands, saying how much they had been blessed by the visit of the Muzungus, and the pastor took me aside and told me how much we had lifted them by our visit and asked if we would come often. They were truly, genuinely appreciative of us visiting them.

 

You could ask why that is, and I don't honestly know. Maybe a part of it is that people recognise the effort that the team made in travelling to Zambia; possibly a part of it is that they don't get many visitors of any kind. I asked around and the opinion among my black friends is that they were just pleased that white people would want to have fellowship with them (an opinion which in itself makes me very uncomfortable). But whatever, they really appreciated the team's visit.

 

The two teams we hosted in the last month were very different from each other. The first team was an old work colleague of mine, Jack Kiely, with his partner and his daughter. I met Jack a few years ago while I was away on a training course. He describes himself as a loveable Irish rogue, and it is just about the most fitting description I can muster. Before meeting him, I always thought Father Ted was just a comedy show; Jack was the man that made me realise that it is actually a documentary.

 

Father Jack                                Jack Kiely

Jack asked if he could come and do some work for us in Zambia. Of course we said yes, and so in July he arrived with his family to spend a week with us.

 

During the week we did a lot of practical work: Jack's partner Judith and daughter Nic painted hallways and tiled bathrooms, while Jack and I cut holes in walls to fit windows in two formerly very dingy corridors. We also lifted and fitted a huge, 6-metre wooden beam, which must have weighed 300kg. Now I am known as a bit of a maverick, but I was also a safety engineer for years and so I always have an eye open for danger when working. But I confess I was a bit concerned that we wouldn't be able to get the beam lifted in the presence of Jack and his Big Safety Hat, especially since my best plan was to build a giant stack of bunk beds and get some big guys from the village to lift the beam up on their shoulders.

 

Not an actual villager

 

My fears were heightened when Jack stood staring at the wall and shaking his head for twenty minutes, but when he finally came up with a plan involving ropes and pulleys and A-Frames and (I was disappointed to note) not a stack of bunk beds, it all went incredibly smoothly. Just six of us lifted the beam up to 2.5 metres and installed it in about an hour.

 

Jack and his family were great, hard working and skilled. We were sad to say goodbye.

And as they impacted us, I like to feel we impacted them, too. For one thing Jack had never eaten a banana in all his 52 years. Now, if there's one thing that is amazing about Zambia it is the bananas, and so we convinced him that the time was now, the place was Zambia, and the banana was no longer his nemesis. He managed two bites. We were proud of him.

 

The start of a beautiful friendship

 

Then two weeks after Jack's family left, the next team arrived, led by one of my closest friends, Jeff. Jeff is an awesome guy, and we have spent the last12 years continually being mistaken for the other. It seems nobody over the age of, say, 50 can tell us apart. When I was an usher at his wedding, even a couple of his aunts mistook me for his brother.

 

Jason, Jeff. Or Jeff, Jason. It's hard to say.

 

So, naturally, we were excited about this team, and they were awesome. Jeff we've discussed, but the rest of the team were almost unknown to us. Amy, I met briefly a few years ago, Gian similarly I spoke to a time or two in church, Carol (Gian's wife) and Sarah were complete strangers when we met at the airport but quickly became family.

 

A delayed flight led to them arriving in Zambia a day later than planned which meant that the team had to hit the ground running, straight to the training centre to live for two weeks in the bush. The first week was DIY time: the team painted the corridors, shelved out the store, built a table-tennis table and a volleyball court, and helped erect a mountain of bunk beds. The week ended with a day where we invited the villagers to visit, play games, buy clothes, chat, and be tested for reading glasses.

 

 

But the main reason for the team coming was the following week, where we hosted a camp for 40 orphan teenagers from a partner ministry a couple of hours away (http://www.lifesongfororphans.org/).

The kids were all between 12 & 19 years old – a tough age range to cater for. For months before the trip, the team had been planning the camp and, wow, it showed. The theme of the week was the "I Am’s" of Jesus; looking at the places where Jesus says "I Am…the light of the world…the bread of life…etc.". To kick things off on the first evening, we told the story of when God used burning shrubbery to tell Moses to call Him "I AM".



We're fairly sure Moses didn't have to douse HIS bush in petrol.

As the kids arrived one was heard to say "this week is going to be so boring". By the end of the week they were crying because they didn't want to leave.

 



Days were full of interactive teaching, sport, games, activities, and all of it fun. It's no easy task to run a camp which is equally great for a 12-year-old and a 19-year-old, but the team managed it. In fact, Daniel joined one of the groups of the younger kids and he thoroughly enjoyed it too (he's 6). 

 

Teaching through the medium of rap and interpretive dance. You saw it here first.

 

Along with the teaching we played a lot of sport: volley ball; touch rugby; football; table tennis, and did some awesome activities: bottle rockets, loom bands (a massive hit), flag-making…actually so many I can't remember them all. The kids jumped straight in with everything, and they behaved impeccably.

 

Human table football, and water-balloon trampoline.

Bottle rocket challenge, and just throwing water at teenagers.

 

On the last day the "I Am" was "I Am the way, the truth, and the life.". Jeff's illustration was a treasure hunt, where the kids had to follow clues. To start, each team had to pick one of three clues. The clues had the kids running all over the place: for one the kids had to find me hiding out in the bush and say "Are you Jeff?" to get the next piece of the puzzle, and one particularly memorable moment was when a team who had to "Find the woman who leads the drama and say 'Chicken' to her" found me and said "Chicken". "Am I the woman who leads the drama?", I said. "Yes", they said. To be honest I don't know what my takeaway from that is. I'm still processing.

 

The point was that two of the starting clues led you on a path to nothing, but one led to Christ. On the false trails, the final clue invited you to start again, illustrating that in life people go wrong but can always start over on the right path. It worked brilliantly.

The competitive extreme knitting was also a big hit.

 

The final activity was The J-Life Olympics, where the kids had to do a number of team building activities. It made me realise how much love these kids had for each other: One of the activities was 'crocodile pit' where the teams had to all jump over a 2.5-metre-wide ‘pit’. Daniel, who was part of one team, couldn't do that, so one of the older boys put him on his shoulders and made the jump. They won the 'team spirit' award just for being awesome.

 

 

 

It was just an amazing week, all thanks to the team. We came out of it with some great new friends, and the school has booked again for next year. We also came out of the week with some new skills in running camps, and learned a lot about how the centre operates, what works, and what doesn’t when it's full of people.

 

And we came out of it incredibly blessed. Blessed to be part of something cool, blessed to have made new friends, blessed to have spent quality time with old ones.

 

Some people are resistant to short-term mission. They say it blesses the people who go far more than the people who receive, and often that is true. But we are genuinely privileged to have hosted the teams we've had this year. I go to the training centre and people in the village ask when the next team is coming to visit (and it’s not because we give stuff away for free, because we rarely do). I meet a member of the village football team, they ask me to give their love to Steve Perring, who sponsored them with a football strip. I meet the village headman, he tells me (again) what a difference our visitors have made. Our teams have been awesome.

 

 

 

How can I bless you today brother? Let me count the ways.

 

…

 

In other news, things are changing for the Stoniers in Zambia. Our next blog will go into this more, but we have been asked to take on responsibility for another ministry here in Ndola. It is a technical college which trains under-privileged kids in the City & Guilds diploma in motor engineering. We’re going to be running it in addition to our J-Life work, and are really excited about the prospects for both ministries. We'll tell you all about it next time.

20. Standard Standard.

The caretaker at our J-Life Training Centre is a lovely Zambian called Peter, he’s sharp, hard-working, and a really nice guy. But he speaks almost no English at all, I mean, why should he: he’s a rural guy in rural Zambia. I kind of feel that it should be up to the visitor to the country to learn the local language rather than relying on everyone else to speak ours. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that one of the only words Peter knows in English is ‘standard!’, and by it he means ‘wow!’.

So a few weeks ago, after a team from the UK had blessed us with two weeks of incredible skill and energy, I found Peter wandering round the centre pointing at things and saying “Ohh, Standard! Standard!”. “Kitchen! Standard! Standard!”, “Pa painti! Standard! Standard!”.

And I found myself thinking, “You know what, Peter…this is beyond standard. This is extraordinary.”

You see, when we planned the work for the team, our aspiration was to take the kitchen from being a bare room with a badly-fitted sink resting on some blocks, to being a room we could actually cook in. I thought it was going to be tight to get that done in two weeks.

So what we wanted was a kitchen, maybe a painted kitchen at a push. What we got was above all our expectations:

The kitchen is completely built with finished terrazzo work surfaces, tiled splash-backs, a new serving hatch, painted walls and floor, and fitted sink. It looks amazing, in fact far better than this early photo shows.

The team also painted and shelved the pantry; converted, painted, and shelved a store room to turn it into a new shop; fitted the bedrooms with rails and curtains [ed – task 1 so they could sleep with privacy]; re-wired all the South African plugs to make them Zambian compatible; fitted two electric showers; painted every door-frame and window-frame; painted the courtyard walls; and, in between all that fun, supplied & fitted 200 pairs of reading glasses across two locations, and sold 500 items of clothing for 20p each as part of our plan for engaging the community with the building. And, of course, woke up a dignified and respected team member by throwing a cockerel into his room, because, well, if you had a dignified and respected team member and access to a cockerel, what would you do? Exactly.

I can’t say enough how amazed we were at the energy the guys brought. On the last day, it came to be that the kitchen really needed one more coat of paint. At this point it was 8pm, we were shattered, and the guys had to leave the centre at 9am the next morning, so I said we should leave it at that. The patriarch of the team, Alan, or Papa Al as he became known, said “No, we want to finish. I will be up at 6 tomorrow morning”. And, sure enough, at 6am the next day, four of us were in the kitchen finishing it off. That’s the thing about a team – you spur each other on. In those two weeks we achieved more than I could have done in six months on my own.

Of course, the practical work was great, but it was only a small part of the whole reason for the team coming. With the reading-glasses clinic and clothing sale, our aim was to really place J-Life within the community we serve.

We’d advertised an afternoon of activities in advance and on the day we had about 300 people arrive , first in ones and twos starting from 7am, then building up through the morning until we had a big crowd waiting for things to start. Some people walked 15km to get to us, and all we were doing was selling clothes and fitting glasses. I can’t imagine walking 15km to a jumble sale, but  many people in rural communities really, really, need  basic things like, simply, somewhere to buy clothes.

So we opened our doors just after lunch, and the team together with the Zambian J-Life leadership marshalled the crowd, letting 20 people in at a time to buy 5 items of clothes each, and for the next 3 hours people patiently waited their turn, bought their five items, then rejoined the back of the queue to start again. It was amazing, a great atmosphere of fellowship and chatting and singing.

Those needing reading glasses formed another queue and were served by three stations with a tester and translator at each.

Two of the most heartwarming stories were a woman early on who left us with new glasses and a huge smile excitedly telling everyone that she would be able to read her bible for the first time in five years, and later a young boy who was extremely short sighted and really needed prescription glasses, but whom we gave a pair of strong reading glasses to and who went from being able to read almost nothing with the chart held to his nose, to being able to read the bottom line at arms length. Those two alone would have made the enterprise worth while. Over the two days of eye tests (one at another location the previous week) 200 people left with glasses, which means that 200 people can now read or do close up work much more easily than they could before.

A few days ago I stopped in the village to chat to the Head Man, Mr. Shibemba, and he was saying that they feel transformed: people are acting with purpose in the village much more than they did before. How long this will last we don’t know, but if we are able to continue to develop the centre as an on-going community resource then perhaps it can. We certainly hope so.

I’m sure many of you will have at least heard the Bible story  of the feeding of the 5000: a large crowd of people had been with Jesus all day as he was teaching, and as it came towards evening the disciples realised that the people hadn’t eaten and it was now too late to send them down to the corner shop. They held a whip round, and it turned out that only one boy out of the thousands had thought to bring his sandwich box. Inside were five small bread cakes and a couple of sardines.

Jesus took this tiny offering from a young, unimportant, and un-named boy, and used it to feed the entire crowd until their bellies were full and they groaned that they could eat no more.

You see, that’s what God does: He takes the meagre offerings we make and he multiplies them past anything we could do ourselves. He took our few days of painting and a couple of hundred pairs of donated glasses, and used them to start a work of transformation in a rural village.

And as with so many trips like this, I think that it is safe to say that every one of the team felt moved and blessed by the experience, probably even more so than many of the individuals we met and served.

If we want to see God at work, we have to be at work. If we want to see our labours multiplied, we have to be at labour. God takes what we do and multiplies it: if we do nothing it doesn’t matter how big the multiplier, the outcome is still nothing. If, however, we do something, when multiplied by the creator of the universe, the outcome can be staggering.

19. Contrasts

Twatotela Ba Lesa pakutulenga ukuba no mweo mubushiku bwalelo.

 

When people pray in Zambia, the prayer very often starts with some variation of this phrase, there written in Bemba, and meaning something like “We thank you Lord that today you have counted us among the living”. Or, to paraphrase further, “thanks that we didn’t die yesterday”.

 

I suppose in some way most of us are, at least subconsciously, thankful to be alive. But for people in Zambia, there is a real, heartfelt appreciation just in seeing another day. Even as Zambians become slowly more prosperous, they still hold life lightly and appreciate the very fact of living.

Last week I was driving with a Zambian guy and we were talking about village life. In rural areas people basically do one of two things to survive – they grow things, or they burn things. The growing things feed the family and, if they have the good fortune to grow more than they need, some can be sold at the roadside. The burning refers to making charcoal, which is used for cooking a family’s food, and again for selling at the roadside. It takes about a tonne of wood to make eight bags of charcoal, which will sell for around £6 a bag. The adult minimum wage in the UK is just over £6 per hour, so eight bags of charcoal sold in Zambia is equal to a day’s wages for someone on the lowest working income in Britain. Can you imagine cutting, hauling, splitting, stacking, and baking a tonne of wood every day to earn the minimum wage? Neither can I.

 

Of course, thinking purely in terms of wages is slightly misleading because in Zambia the minimum wage is less than 10% of the UK minimum: £90 a month against the UK’s minimum of £1000 for a full-time worker. But here’s the thing: the cost of living in Zambia is not 10% of the cost of living in the UK, and certainly not if you eat a varied and healthy diet (which includes meat) and have electricity in your home. Often a family will eat one meal a day, and that meal will be a plate of nshima; maize porridge. Last week I was at our training centre after a heavy storm and our caretaker was out with his wife and children collecting the abundant flying ants which emerged after the rain. That was probably the first protein they’d had for many days.

 

And here’s why so many prayers start with simple thanks for living another day: people just don’t take life for granted.

 

Now this is not intended to pull at your heartstrings and let you know the dreadful plight of people in Africa. People’s plight isn’t, on the whole, dreadful. I asked an elder in one of the villages if his people were happy. “Oh yes, we’re very happy. There are challenges, yes. But we are happy.”. “What are the challenges?”, I asked. “Well there are 40 of us here and I think 5 of us can read; we know there is a better way to do farming but we don’t know how to learn it; when we get sick the nearest clinic is 2 hours’ walk away; we want to work but there is no work.”.

 

And yet…look again at his answer: “Yes, we’re very happy…”.

 

That’s why this blog is called Contrasts. We came to Zambia full of high intentions to immerse ourselves in the culture, to learn the language, to meet the people on their level. It quickly became apparent that that’s so far from being possible that we may as well try learning to levitate. None of this is because we are insensitive or incapable of adapting, it’s just that our cultural context is so far removed from the average Zambian that we will never truly meet on the same terms.

 

We are importing our car at the moment, and the import duty is shaping up to be in the region of £2000: we need to do this so that we can legally drive in the country, and so that we can sell the car at the end of our stay here. Yesterday and the day before I took the maximum amount out of the bank using my card in a cash machine: 4000 Kwacha. The minimum wage is around 900 kwacha a month. That means in the last two days I have taken out money worth 9 months of wages. In my wallet, right now, I have enough money to employ someone for almost a year.

 

When we came back from our visit home at Christmas we brought a few things with us, including some cooling pads to keep our laptops working in the heat. We gave one to our friends, and when they offered to pay for it we declined “it’s only £4, don’t worry about it”. It was at that moment that I realised all the above things about the impossibility of immersion here. A Zambian would no more readily write off £4 (35 kwacha, almost a day’s wages) than you would write off £50. We may be donation-funded missionaries, but here in Zambia we are the wealthy elite.

 

A friend of ours is diabetic and his health is seriously compromised at the moment. His specialist said that he must reduce his consumption of maize and eat more protein. Now he is comparatively wealthy by normal Zambian standards, but when he was telling his wife about the new diet I overheard him say, “…so I think we must try and find some money to buy a little dried fish.”.

 

So every day we appreciate just how blessed we are by our supporters, who enable us to live in safety and comfort, and who remove for us the need to choose between taking food and taking medication. And every day we rue, just a little, the fact that we can never truly meet on an equal level the people we are here to serve. We will always be, and we will always be seen to be, elevated above those amongst whom we live and work.

We’ve begun to accept the situation, and to realise that we have no need to be embarrassed by it. Yes we are elevated, and thus we are set apart, but that fact in no way diminishes our ability to serve. We try to act with humility and to be good stewards of the resources with which we have been blessed.

 

So that’s all very philosophical and, hopefully, interesting, but we’re not here to be sociologists: we’re here to make a difference. So what is the practical outcome of all this introspection? Well, look back at the challenges our friend the village elder noted: literacy, farming, health, work. Those are very practical things we can use our wealth of money and skills to affect.

What we have at our disposal is a large and underused building in the centre of a rural community. We have a small amount of money from our ministry fund and a social enterprise which is making a tiny profit. We have time, and we have transport. Our aim is to use all of those for the people of the area. So here are a few things we are doing, or hoping to do:

 

In the first instance the road to our centre, 1km of sand through the bush, gets washed out every time it rains, and so requires a 4x4 just to get to the building. Instead of getting a professional company from town to fix it, we’ve employed three guys from the village for six days to repair the road using sandbags. They’ve done a great job so far, it’s given them a wage they wouldn’t otherwise have had, and it has got our road repaired for a really good price and three sets of new wellies. Everyone wins.

Secondly, one of the J-Life Zambia management team is also an agriculturalist in his day job and we are in the early stages of setting up training sessions in farming for the local villagers. We hope to start a small demonstration plot, so that the local guys can come along to learn and practice new farming methods.

 

Thirdly, we are hoping to expand the training centre to be more of a community resource. Ideas we are exploring are to provide space for kids to study, with very small and cramped accommodation this can be a real issue, and we’re looking to provide a shop for very simple provisions saving a walk of 6km to the nearest market. We are also intending to keep a stock of malaria test kits and medicines at the site, which we will provide free of charge.

As the prophet Isaiah wrote when he echoed what God was telling him:

 

“Is not this the kind of ‘fasting’ I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every bond? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them..?”

 

I wrote in a recent Facebook status that if you want to see God’s Kingdom come you have to be God’s Kingdom come. If you want to see people’s lives improve, you have to be an agent of the improvement.

 

Our plans really are not much, and even these may not be practicable, but we’ve started talking to the community about whether these ideas meet their needs and it’s a start. If we can achieve this in the next year alongside our other J-Life responsibilities then we’ll be very happy.