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.

 

18. Have you been away?

So we have just had the privilege of spending a few weeks in England with family and friends where we have laughed and cried and been extremely well fed in what seems like most regions of this fair land.

 

It's been great, really great. For the most part it has been strangely normal - driving in to Poole it felt like we were returning from a weekend away, and later someone asked Jason if we'd been on holiday - but it has also been challenging and in some ways uncomfortable.  I say this because we returned to England at the most commercially exploitative part of the year, where conspicuous consumption reaches epic proportions both before Christmas in a bid to buy the 'best' gifts, and after Christmas in a bid to get the 'best' sale bargains. I have found myself torn between my penchant for grabbing those sales bargains (I am, after all, from Yorkshire), and being acutely aware of the difficult financial situation for the majority of people in Zambia. The question 'do I really need this' has been extremely valuable (if slightly irritating as I am led by my conscious to put the item back on the shelf) and without wishing to sound preachy is a question many of us in the West should ask more often.  I think Jason wants to write a little more about this in a longer blog for the future, so I'll hold off the suspense for you until then.

 

We go back in less than a week and I confess to feeling daunted about it, about the task in hand and wondering whether we really will make a lasting difference. But we are also excited about what the next year has to hold.  There are already two teams coming over to us on short term missions which we are massively excited about (there is always room for more by the way) and we are being supported by another team visiting a different organisation in the area.  We are helping to plan the J-Life training for the next group starting in February and have a number of embryonic ideas for how to take Jireh crafts forward, partly fuelled by some successful meetings with stockists in England, and links we have been fostering back in Zambia. Of course, even the best laid plans change and evolve, but at least we have some things to work with

 

As we end 2013 we look back on an amazing year for us, and as we start 2014 Jason, myself and the boys would like to wish you all a very Happy New Year. Thank you to those who have supported us in whatever means and in whatever country, whether through prayer, finances, time stuffing envelopes, providing board and lodging, being a shoulder to lean (and cry) on, sending us letters and parcels, or simply being there at the end of a phone or computer, we couldn't do this without you.

 

God bless you all.

17. Panono panono

And so we arrived… apparently 8 weeks ago. In some respects it feels like forever, and in others, so many others, we are still babies learning how to walk in a new environment.

We arrived in early September to live on a farm while our main place was being renovated…we have just now moved in and frankly our new house is far more than we could ever have hoped for, great for us, for visitors and ideal for hosting our embryonic social enterprise about which you will read more later... we just need to get rid of a few…existing residents first.

Our Director (David) was sick when we arrived. It is customary here for your host to come and visit you first before you may go to see them, indeed others would have viewed David as very rude if we had gone to his house before he had first visited us. This is to do with the hospitality culture in Zambia and would have implied to anyone who found out that we weren’t being adequately welcomed, and would have shamed David (the first of many cultural differences we have learned). Hospitality is a seen as a serious issue in Zambia. So with David ill and unable to travel to see us, we had a few days of settling in, meeting people, registering with clinics, sorting visa paperwork and so forth. We spent time generally working out which way was up  – it was actually really nice and we soon began to feel comfortable. When we finally met up with David and his wife Lydia it was lovely and natural, a great start.

Walking through Ndola you are unlikely to see another white person unless you go to the new and fairly posh out of town shopping area (where you can get amazing ice-cream for a special treat). I [Claire] was asked whether this was intimidating – the answer is an emphatic no. With the kids we get stared at, especially as Reuben tends to walk rather than being carried, and we will be told off by a passer-by if one of the children has a runny nose, and naturally we get touted for business on the street more than the average black guy (you are white and therefore automatically wealthy), but that is as far as it goes. People seem to be genuinely friendly, warm and welcoming, especially if you greet them in the local language. There’s not much to ‘do’ here, and the town centre is run down, but there is real investment going on and even rumours of a cinema opening in the next couple of years.

We have heard that Zambians are among friendliest people on Earth, and our experience certainly supports that. Last week we were in the next large town North of Ndola without a map and trying to find a shop which was mentioned on a web page that was ten years without update. After wandering round in circles for a while we asked someone if they knew where it was, and not only did they know, they left what they were doing and walked with us to find it – about a kilometre away. Now you could suggest that was one random friendly person who fancied a walk with a couple of white folk on a Tuesday morning, but then it happened again while looking for a second hidden shop – after asking someone where to find it they left their own shop to take us over there. So, ok, that’s two people out of a population of 14 million, but from our small and statistically insignificant sample I say we agree that Zambians are friendly.

Aside from the friendliness of people we meet, what strikes us most is the utter beauty of the trees. Yes, everyone knows Claire is an environmentalist and therefore constitutionally required to find trees pleasant and heart-warming, but they really do have to be seen to be appreciated - while the ground is often dry and dusty, the vibrancy in the colour of the Jacaranda and Flame trees is spectacular. The simple beauty of these trees never fails to lift our spirits… I hope that is always the case and I am so thankful for it.
 

Whilst we were in the very early stages of settling in Jason received a call you don’t want to have to take:  8 members of David’s wife’s family, including 4 brothers and a sister, had been killed in a tragic car accident. 12 people were killed in all and the accident was national (and international) news.  A state funeral for all 12 people was held at the Ndola stadium; about a thousand people attended the funeral, including many dignitaries – it was a very sad occasion. The grief felt by David and Lydia is very big and very real and it will take the family a long, long time to come to terms with. We hope we can be a real support in this process.

So with David being understandably out-of-action, we have been filling our time with other things while waiting for the J-Life work to be envisioned and clarified. Claire was asked by one of the ladies on the farm if she would go and speak at her ladies group – which she readily accepted and totally loved. It was such an honour to be invited into their home, a very small tin roofed house where the ladies met to chat, pray and sing. Many of them didn’t speak good English, but one lady translated and they had a great time. Here is a photo of some of the ladies outside the house.

All through our time with J-Life we have both been committed to exploring the idea of setting up a small number of micro enterprises to providing sustainable employment at above average wages and good working conditions. This has many positives…we provide employment opportunities for local people and we raise much needed funds for J-Life Zambia. Claire’s emergent enjoyment of sewing, cultivated whilst in South Africa, seemed the perfect way to start… but getting things up and running with one sewing machine in time for the Christmas market was going to prove tricky. Our neighbour dropped into conversation that her friend in Uganda made Christmas cards, at which point a huge light went on in Claire’s head and she went immediately (literally) to action. She cut up the African chitenge sling we bought to carry Reuben (in the vain hope that people would stop stopping us in the street to complain about him being made to walk) and played with banana leaf from the farm. We talked to lots of people and asked Claire’s new bible study friends to be our focus group and help whittle down our prototypes to a final selection. We were encouraged by the response, Jason got to work on the website, and we agreed with David our desired name ‘Jireh Crafts’ which links back to one of the Biblical names given for God – Jehovah Jireh – God the Provider.

We now employ two ladies who are doing well. We are hoping to diversify in the New Year and work on the sewing idea (helped as one of our ladies is a trained dress maker) and we are currently looking at ideas to keep them employed whilst we are in the UK for 5 weeks over Christmas. But for now, whilst there are still lots of questions to be answered, we think this could work and we are giving it our best shot. As this blog goes to press we have had orders for almost 1,200 cards and have made just over 1,000. We want to make this business sustainable so we can keep our ladies employed and earning so here is the blatant and unashamed plug…if you haven’t yet bought your Christmas cards and want something a little different that could make a little difference, check out our Jireh Crafts website at www.jireh-crafts.org. We love the designs and hope that you like them too. If you do, then please fill in an order form.

So back to our house. It’s an old colonial building which you would immediately recognise from any film set in 1940s Africa. The area of Ndola in which we live is Kansenshi, which is fairly affluent and has a higher-than-average proportion of mzungus (as those of us with a genetic melanin deficiency are called around these parts). It’s a nice place – the roads are in very poor repair, and every house is gated, but it is friendly and pretty and quiet. We have friends who live round the corner, and the garden is massive – easily big enough for the vegetable patch, chicken run, and banana tree that we are planning, and the bike track , sand pit, and reptile arena that Daniel and Reuben want. It’s going to take a lot of work, but one of the things about living here is that there’s a social expectation that you employ at least a gardener, and given the wage for a gardener is pitifully small, it’s not a tough choice. We hope to give someone slightly higher than average wages for lower than average hours in an attempt to be honourable without creating division.

(Incidentally the word Mzungu comes from the Swahili word mzunguzungu, which means “a terribly dizzy person” because, evidently, that’s what the first white folk looked like when they stumbled blindly into Kenya wafting at the flies with silk handkerchiefs and asking the peaceable natives for directions to the nearest mint julep.)

On the first day we moved in, Reuben and Daniel were playing and we heard Reuben saying “There’s mice, there’s mice!”, which we put down to part of their game not thinking that a) he could have been telling the truth and, b) his limited vocabulary might conceivably lump mice and rats into the same furry bracket. It was only when one of the things ran across the lounge during Grey’s Anatomy, causing Claire to squeal and Jason to have to pretend to be manly, that we realised we should pay more attention to our two-year-old. Four days and a whole bowl of rat poison later, and we think the situation is settling down. Shame, really, as Daniel was on board with a plan to get a snake to keep them under control. A few more days and Claire would have cracked.

On the subject of reptiles, we do have some other house guests that are way cooler than the rats: we have a big colony of gheckos living in the walls. We often see them climbing around inside chasing flies, making them attractive and useful pets. And the kids love them. Here’s a picture of a baby one making friends.

Apart from that, we’ve been doing some J-Life promotion with pastors with a view to pulling an Ndola-based group of trainees together in the new year, and Jason is going to DRC in a few days to help with some training in Kinshasa. And we’re trying hard to learn Bemba so that we can communicate more effectively with people in the rural areas.

So things are settling down for us here in Zambia. The house is great and big enough to hold training events and socials, and the community is awesome. Just in the two months we’ve been here, we’ve made friends we’ll stay in contact with for life, we’ve got friends we share child care with, we’ve got friends we share curry with. The only thing we’re waiting on is for the J-Life work to really kick into gear, which will hopefully take off when we come back to Zambia after Christmas.

Things are moving along. Not as fast as we’d like, but getting there, as they say in Bemba, panono panono. Little by little.

16. Elephants On The Road

You’ll recall from the last blog that we had said our goodbyes in South Africa and were about to embark on the journey north to Zambia. For those of a nervous disposition, or those pressed for time and wishing to jump to the conclusion, let me tell you right now that we arrived safely, and in good spirits.

We’d planned our route very carefully, looking at distances, researching border crossings, checking out the online forums for advice (because if it's on the internet it's bound to be true), and we ended up confident that the journey was do-able in a fairly relaxed manner giving us plenty of time to enjoy the view. We even built in large margins for error, so we knew we had more than enough time to get to each of our waypoints while it was light. It’s 2100km, and apparently you can do this journey in 2 days; we planned to do it in 4. 

We decided to go up through Botswana (rather than Zimbabwe), because, although it’s a couple of hundred kilometers further, it does have the twin benefits that the border crossings are apparently easier, and you’re less likely to be kidnapped for ransom by armed despots.

Our days were planned to go like this:

Day 1, 1002km: set off midnight, arrive Martin’s Drift border post 06:30, be through the border by 08:30, be at our campsite in an elephant sanctuary in Nata, Botswana, by 13:30. It gets dark about 18:00, so that’s a nice 4h30m margin in case of delays.

Day 2, 314km: get up early to see the elephants, leave around 11:00, arrive Kazungula Ferry around 13:30, be through the border by 14:30, be at our campsite at Victoria Falls by 16:00.

Day 3, 477km: get up early and see the falls, leave around 11am to arrive at a guest house in Lusaka by 17:00.

Day 4, 319km: have leisurely breakfast, leave at 09:00 after the first rush of traffic in Lusaka, stop at the missionary-run Fig Tree Cafe for lunch around 12 noon, arrive Ndola around 15:00.

Now, before anyone shrieks “Naive fools! This isn't Europe you know!”, we’d talked to quite a few people and looked at a few travel forums, and this itinerary was eminently sensible.

So, day 1, we arrive at the South Africa / Botswana border as planned at 06:30... and joined the back of a queue at least a kilometer long. Turns out this was the day that 200 cars were returning to Botswana from an annual gathering of some international church. Gosh. So a border crossing which was supposed to take a maximum of 2 hours actually took us 6.

We’d hoped to be through the border by 8:30, but in the end we got into Botswana at 12:30 with a 6-hour drive ahead of us to the campsite. By this point our usually patient and compliant kids were showing clear signs that they had just about had enough.

The main road up Botswana isn’t all that great. It’s full of potholes, there are frequent herds of cattle blissfully chewing cud while they wait for you to crash into them, and there is the ever-present risk that elephants will just wander in front of you as you drive.

The other big problem is that speed limits are frequently not sign-posted. You just have to know that the approach and departure of a town is 80kmh, and the bit in between is 60kmh. And for ‘town’ read ‘two or more  huts’. So it wasn’t entirely surprising when, as evening approached, a police officer stepped into the road and waved us in. We [Ed... Jason is being generous here... I was driving] [JCS...You're right, I was being generous, you despicable criminal] were doing 80kmh, but unfortunately this was in a 60 limit. There was no way we could have known.

Before we were stopped, the satnav was saying we’d be at the campsite at 18:00 - just about ok to get there and get the tent up before it got too dark. After we finished with the police it was looking more like 18:45 so we decided to bail out and find a closer campsite. Claire had the inspiration to look at Points Of Interest in the satnav, and found a campsite close by that turned out to be excellent. Not so many elephants, but a lovely spot with a nice restaurant and we decided we deserved a nice meal after a tough day.

Day 2 dawned and we thought we’d pop in to the elephant sanctuary we were supposed to stay at the night before, so after paying the speeding fine at the local police station (and they were somewhat surprised that we had bothered), we set off. The website said that the road was unsuitable for road cars, and that a 4x4 was required. Well we have a 4x4 so we thought we would be ok. Turns out we weren’t. About 1km down the road we got totally beached in soft sand with a full car and a heavy trailer. Claire and I spent half an hour digging the trailer out and turning it round by hand, and, with the weight off the back of the car, I then managed to get the car out, smoking the clutch in the process. It’s quite unnerving to be in the middle of nowhere with no support driving a car which is spewing smoke from the engine compartment.

But, here’s the thing, had we not had that speeding fine the night before we’d have pressed on to this campsite and got stuck on the road in the dark with no other options. It’s not often in this world that you are ever thankful for a speeding ticket.

The good news is that we got the car out of the dune, turned round, and managed to drag the trailer out and back to the main road. The next hour was a bit fraught as we had to get confidence back that the car was ok and not going to break down - a dead clutch on the M1 in the UK is inconvenient - the same on the R1 in Botswana is a disaster. But it was fine, and we got to the Kazungula ferry across the Zambezi in good time at about 14:00. 

On the approach to the ferry we finally saw what we had been hoping to see - a herd of elephants crossing the road. It was a great end to the Botswana leg of the trip.

As you approach the river, people come up touting for whatever business they can get; changing money, looking after your car, selling you insurance. We eventually managed to fend them off enough to enjoy the trip over the river. 

Crossing the Zambezi was quite a moment for us - one of the iconic things to do at some point in your life, only slightly marred by explaining, again, to that guy that, yes, we're white, but that in no way means that we are rich. Eventually we gave him the equivalent of £1 and he promised to sit on our trailer and not steal anything.

Customs and immigration were a breeze, the car was stamped through with no issues, and within half an hour of leaving the ferry we were on our way to Livingstone. Moreover, we were in Zambia. Still two days away from our destination, but nonetheless in Zambia. 

It’s an odd thing, but as soon as we were on Zambian soil, our stress levels went down - I guess something to do with knowing people in the country; having a number to call if anything went wrong. It’s daft, really, because it would be somewhat inconvenient for anyone to travel 14 hours down from Ndola to help us out, in just the same way it would be if your mate called you at home in Manchester/Houston and asked you to kindly pop over and pick him up from Munich/Mexico City (delete as culturally appropriate). Still, it was comforting to know we knew people.

The Maramba River Lodge campsite was great, and within 4km of Victoria Falls. Bounded by a river, at dinner that night we saw a hippo and a crocodile just over the balcony, and apparently an elephant walked through the camp in the night. Quite a cool place. In the morning of day 3 we packed up and went out early to see the falls. 

Considering Vic Falls is one of the 7 natural wonders of the world, the area is pretty low key. There’s a fairly subtle entrance on the Zambian side which takes you into a carpark/curio market. It’s $20 per person to go into the falls and $5 to park your car, which we thought was quite a lot. Randomly we got talking to one of the security guys and came round to the fact that we were missionaries and coming to live in Zambia and he went and chatted to the entrance people on our behalf and got us in half price. In Zambia, it really is all about relationships. Next time we go, though, we’ll be Zambian residents and then it’s only $7 each. If you get chance to go, please visit Ephraim in shop 46 - he was disappointed that we couldn’t afford to buy anything so we said we’d send some rich westerners his way.

At this time of year it’s dry season and the flow over the falls is as low as it gets. It’s still impressive, but not nearly as impressive as it will be in March. Consequently there were few people around and we could wander in peace. Our friendly security guard showed us round for a while and took us out onto the rocks (strictly forbidden for the unaccompanied), and then left us to it. We had a pleasant hour leaning on railings admiring the geology and watching the insane throw themselves down the rapids attached to bits of polystyrene.

Here and there are information boards with some of the history of the falls. They are bizarrely inconsistent - one board tells us that ‘previous generations would have seen the water falling into gorge number 2, rather than the present gorge’. The water has been falling into its present gorge for at least 200,000 years, which would mean that the sign writer counts Homo Erectus as a ‘previous generation’, now I love good prose as much as the next man but that's stretching it a bit even for me. Another board talks about the start of the Jurassic era 200 years ago (that would be 200 million years ago), and still another board describes ‘stone age visitors’ to the falls 2000 years ago, which surprised me because the orthodox interpretation of history sees the stone age ending about 6000BC when some enterprising chap discovered how to smelt copper. It was interesting to me to discover that the Roman empire was, at least according to the historians of the Victoria Waterfalls Trust, a stone age civilisation. Here's a picture of Reuben, shaking his head with incredulity at the folly.

But dodgy history aside, it was awesome, and we’re looking forward to going back there in rainy season to see the falls in all their watery splendour.

We’d been told that the journey from Livingstone to Lusaka, the capital city, was between five and six hours, and since we had booked into a missionary guest house for the night we were fairly relaxed about setting off, so we were on the road about noon. 

Zambia has lots (and I mean lots) of police check points, and the convention is that you approach them slowly with your main and hazard lights on, roll down your window, take off your sunglasses, and greet the officer loudly and cheerfully. We’d done this at every check so far and been waved through with pleasant words. 

Just on the outskirts of Livingstone, however, was a checkpoint that I didn’t see in time, approached too fast, and ended up with the police woman putting her hand out to show me to stop. After that she was looking for any reason to haul us in, and she objected to the way our bikes were being carried on the roof. She waved us in to the police compound and told us they were impounding our car - obviously a nervous moment. 

As we drove in there was another police guy driving out and we stopped alongside him to ask where we had to go. It turns out he was the chief inspector of the division and shook his head when we explained what had happened, that we were new in Zambia, and were not tourists. I got the feeling that this particular police woman was known for doing this. He told us to follow him out and he talked to the guys at the check point after which we were waved through with a cheery “go well” and “God bless your journey”. Again, as I said above, Zambia is all about relationships. Everything happens in a manner dependent on the way you deal with people - in fact, since arriving in Ndola we’ve been ensuring we stop longer than we need to at our local police check point to get to know the guys there; you never know when a friendly police inspector might come in useful.

The rest of the journey to Lusaka was fairly uneventful until we got to about 40km from town and discovered the road had been removed. Literally. There was a guy with a flag waving you off the side of the tarmac, and beyond him there was just sand. Not only that, but the ‘diversion’ was completely un-signed, and basically through the bush. At this point is was 5pm and starting to get dark, and there was hardly anyone else on the ‘road’. But when the only road between the 4th and 1st largest towns in Zambia is missing, there’s little option but to do what a man with a flag tells you. So in approaching darkness, and on one of the worst ‘roads’ I have ever seen, we slowly carried on. At one point the track dove off into a carpark full of trucks and crowds of drunk guys before before emerging again, and then later it went through a quarry - the road actually wound down into the pit of the quarry before climbing up again past a whole village on fire and back to the trail.

I can’t describe how stressful it was - we were both tense, the kids were fractious, and of course the satnav was having a hissy-fit because we were so far from any known road that even David Livingstone would have scratched his head and wondered if he wasn't just a little bit off piste.  After about two hours of this we found ourselves behind a truck, which we guessed, most likely, was going through to Lusaka so we just stayed behind it and went wherever it went - if we hadn’t had that I don’t know what we’d have done because in the dark it was impossible to know which way to go. It took us 4 hours to do 40km, making our easy 5-hour journey into a deeply stressful 9 hours. It’s incredible that the government can just remove the main (and only) road between two major cities without any other provision. 

At least we had the number of the guest house and kept in contact with them, so it was that when we arrived at 9pm they were waiting for us with a hot meal and cheery company. It was a nice end to a tough day.

The next day, our last on the road, was fine. We got up late, had a leisurely breakfast, and left just after nine. After negotiating the Lusaka traffic we were on our way. We stopped off for lunch at a very cool diner called The Fig Tree Cafe, run by missionaries and famous in Zambia, and then arrived in Ndola about 4 in the afternoon. We collected the keys to our temporary house in the middle of a banana farm and let out a sigh of relief for a safe arrival.

The journey had been eventful but now, looking back, it was great and we always arrived safely. We’ve got some good stories to tell, and we had an adventure. Sitting at my desk writing this and looking out at the farm, well, it’s a pretty nice place to be. We have a lot of adjusting to do, not least to really define what we’re here to do, but we think we will be just fine.

So starts the next stage of our African adventure.

15. The End Of The Beginning

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.