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.