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.