ali's african adventures

Thursday was screening day over in Benin. According to my sources (that is, friends on the ship), over 1,900 people were scheduled for surgery. It's going to be an amazing year, and it's killing me that I'm not there for the start of it all.



(Not sure who put that video together, but it's making me want to jump on a plane immediately. June seems so far away right now.)

I've been wanting to tell you about something that happened today, but I wasn't sure how to begin. And then I logged on to my blog reader, and saw that Danielle over at 6YearMed just wrote this. Go over there and read it, then come back and I'll tell you my story. Go on. I'll wait.

I've been so used to seeing Jesus in the dark eyes of my African babies. If you asked me to describe Him, the way I see Him most often, I'd tell you that Jesus has tight plaits sticking out at odd angles and a wide, toothy smile. He has thick-soled feet and likes to dance whenever He hears the sound of a drum.

Today I walked out of the chiropracter's office and into the gathering snow. Almost to the warmth of my mom's car, I glanced back to see an older man, walking slowly and leaning heavily on his cane. Despite the cold and wind he was dressed only in a sweatsuit, mismatched, too short and in various shades of faded navy. He looked around helplessly, grey head shaking slightly as he asked everyone passing whether they had a car. I stood in the parking lot, and it took me a while to realize what I was looking at.

I'm not always going to see Jesus staring back at me in an African child's eyes. He's not always going to be sitting on a dirt floor, eating rice and plantains. Sometimes he'll be shuffling through a parking lot in suburban New Jersey, trying to figure out how he'll make his way home on legs that just won't do what he wants. Sometimes he smells vaguely sour and needs a hand getting into the car, unsure of where to stow his cane. And sometimes he'll smile quietly, head bobbing and dipping as he fumbles with a seatbelt he can't fasten. I'm Anthony. Thank you for letting me ... for driving me ... for taking me ... home.

I've been biding my time here in America, just waiting to get back to the people I feel called to, back to The Real Need, but Danielle's words are so much more eloquent than my own. I just cant let myself think that "some other city needs saving, more than [my] own."

Okay, so we all know I'm a missionary, headed back to serve the poorest of the poor in West Africa. It's kind of the classic scenario. Leave your family, leave your homeland and go live where you're the only white face surrounded by malnourished kids with little pot bellies.

My cousin is a different kind of missionary. Her name is Sarah, and she's the one in the blue hoodie. (She shows up first around the 2:50 mark.) I'm going to get around to posting about everything I learned in Gateway, but for now, here's a preview that pretty much sums up everything they tried to teach us this past month.



Move into Ottawa from Joel V. on Vimeo.


I want to be just like Sarah when I grow up.

And this is why you shouldn't let smoke-addled nurses anywhere near a fire-training dummy.

We're just not right in the head.


(Ryan, however, is right in the head. He took these photos, and they're awesome.)

When I was in first grade, the house next door to mine burned to the ground while I was at school one day. I came home to see flames and smoke and firemen with hoses trained on our walls. In the weeks and months and years that came after, I used to lie awake at night, listening for the crack of flames and planning my escape routes over and over and over. I've never been afraid of candles or campfires or anything like that. But if you ask me to rank my biggest fears in life, I'll answer unhesitatingly when it comes to Number Two: getting trapped in my house while it burns down around me.

The last week of my Gateway training is the one I'm in right now, Basic Safety Training (BST). It's a week of CPR and water survival and firefighting. In case you missed it, that last one calls for me to don a ton of protective gear, fit a mask around my face and walk into a steel box filled with fire, clutching a hose like a lifeline.

I have never been more scared, and I've never felt so tough and I never want to do that again. (But don't we all look so legit?)

To “The Poor” : An apology, for I have been blind.

I have always come to you with my heart full of your suffering. I came with my guilt, all so carefully amassed over the years as I sat at my table and despised the abundance in front of me, knowing that you were going hungry. The eyes of your children, liquid black windows to souls I thought were haunted, haunted my dreams when I saw them from my sleep.

I thought it was right to come with my arms full of things, shirts and stickers and little plastic cups with handles. When I saw your need from across the ocean, my soul was stirred to bring you something to fill the void in your lives. I brought shoes to cover feet accustomed to feeling the warmth of the earth beneath their soles, cartoon character band-aids to cover wounds as deep as time.

I have always seen myself through what I thought were your eyes. I was a ministering angel, there to bless the masses, and your faces and stories swirled and mixed in my mind as I moved among you, touching and greeting and unseeing. If you asked me now to share your stories, I wouldn’t meet your eyes as I searched to call out your names.

What must you have thought? Each of you with your history, your life as real to you as the breath catching in my own throat. I came with my whiteness and I held your hands as you spent your time with me, and then you walked away and I couldn’t remember your mother’s name. I worked beside you to hand out medicines in villages filled with your own people, stood shoulder to shoulder with you as we prayed against the passing of your sisters and brothers. But you have never seen the inside of my house and I have never asked to see yours. We have shared life and death but not our tables.

I have been so blind. I saw you as one. You were “the poor” to me, a myriad of people neatly packaged between a set of quotation marks, bundled together and taken as a whole. Instead of Kukenga and Gift and Greg and Isaac and Nyakamwengo, I saw you all as a shifting crowd of humanity, as one vast story of heartbreak and pain. I have been so blind.

I have not seen your creativity. I walked past your children pushing cunning cars made from milk bottles and coat hangers, and I felt my heart grow heavy when I thought of so many babies living without toys. I have not seen your intelligence. I tucked books back into my bag, shaking my head because you could not read, even as you looked to the sky and told me when the rains were coming. I have not seen your love. I scolded your mamas when they pulled you so roughly by the arm; I was not there to see them do the same as they wrenched you from the path of the rebels, risking their own lives to guard yours. I have been so blind.

Please, when you see me standing next to you with my eyes shut so tight, come to me. Take my hands and pull them from my ears. Sit with me, speak to me in strong words, and tell me your stories. Tell me why you named your child Peace. Tell me why you live outside the village with your lip all twisted and split. Tell me why you spoke those words over your daughter, why you cursed her and why she cries at night, her empty arms reaching for those three babies in the ground.

Tell me over and over and over again until I listen, until I understand. And in ten or twenty or fifty years, when I come back from my wanderings and sit again at your table, ask me your mother’s name.

I will tell you.

I feel like those of you who have kept reading, even while I'm in the boring old USA, deserve to know what's going on with me. Like, in some way, I owe it to you for sticking around all this time. The problem is that, right now, I have no idea how to explain what's going on in my head these days.

It turns out that I've been living blind, operating from a subconscious set of views and assumptions that have shaped the way I think about myself in a lot of very wrong ways. That seems like an incredibly grand statement to make after just two weeks of classes, I know, but I spend entire days wandering around in a daze, wondering how I've possibly missed these truths for so long.

I want to sit here and write for hours. I want to type in the pages and pages of notes and highlight them and scream at the top of my lungs. Can't you see? This changes everything! Give me some time to digest all this, and I'll be more specific. I just need a little time to pick up all these pieces and put myself back together properly.

Just give me a little time.