Where do we fit?

I feel like we’re job searching lately.  Not that we plan to go anywhere, but we’ve opened a whole can of worms with this plan of digging deeper into the needs and resources around here.  Suddenly it seems like everybody and their brother in the white community has a “project” that helps this or that group of black people.  Several, which I’ll detail below, are pretty exciting.  But where do we fit in? 

The irony of it is that we’re here searching for jobs we can do, mostly on behalf of the thousands of others around us that don’t have jobs.  I just learned that unemployment in this mostly rural area is about 90%, and half of those who are working have to commute or live away from home in order to have that work.  The one question I hear from everyone I talk to is, “Do you know anyone who I could work for?”  They say they would do just about any sort of work, as long as it pays.  And here we are with the strangely privileged opposite dilemma: we have no need for pay, but we want to do only what will really matter.

Not that everything has to be only what really matters.  I won’t discount the fact that merely being here has a ripple effect.  My prayer life is phenomenal lately—the more I live here, the more I see prayer as our best, and often only, response.  And there’s the little things that can surprise us by making big differences—the friends back in the developed world challenged to see their world differently, the staff we’ve invested in here, the encouragement we can be among foreigner friends here, and the difference these years will make in our children’s lives. 

But still, there comes a point where we want to stand up and do something!  Like I wrote in the last entry, the micro loans seem like a tiny drop in what needs doing.  This learning and listening phase we began just over a week ago has been graciously blessed—enough that we get out of bed with some fresh hope each morning. 

I met a white pastor with experience in inter-racial church and an excellent network of charity-workers.  Adam had some in-depth conversation with our own Zulu pastor brainstorming community needs and possible solutions.  One morning I shadowed a woman designing easy sewing projects for rural women.  And Adam visited a camp near us that is starting a project to motivate top students from rural areas to achieve their dreams.  I met with a young woman leading a theater troupe of 10 disadvantaged youth interested in financial training for managing their unique business.  (They’re a fascinating and talented bunch writing and producing dramas about their lives as disadvantaged South Africans.  I can’t wait to see one!)  Oh, and I also met a woman who plans to home-school her four and seven year-olds next year, and Adam met a group of men who meet twice a month at 6 a.m. to pray together. 

So over the next few months we trust it will become clearer where we fit among all this. 

P.S.  Correction from the last entry:  I realized I accidentally typed that I might be doing distance seminary classes.  At this point it’s Adam doing the classes, not me.

August 5, 2007

Getting to the Roots, the Flu, and a Jazzed Up Goldilocks

A couple months ago a sweet young woman wrote in an email about her future life plans, “I pray that I would be set free to do what God wants me to do.”  Something about the phrase “set free to do what God wants” stuck with me, and suddenly in the last week I realized it describes what I feel has just happened for Adam and I.

For the last two weeks we have spent time with Lynn, the founder and U.S. director of our little organization.  For the weeks leading up to the visit we basically dreaded the conversations we would have.  Frankly, while this microfinance for youth idea has made a significant difference in the lives of a handful of youths, we feel it’s missing the mark of the roots of problems.  Until we have a better understanding of how to meet those needs, we feel like we’re treating a handful of leaves on a tree that’s dying branch by branch right down to its core. 

But our visit with Lynn went well.  She’s an amazingly caring woman who believes in listening, even for long hours and in difficult conversations, which was exactly what we needed.  The long and short of it is we’re moving into a phase of looking again at what real needs are here, and more open now to different kinds of work, based on what we can find in the way of solutions.  We’ll be spending more time just talking to folks, looking at churches as ways to serve community needs (especially related to AIDS and orphans), writing more for newspapers and magazines about the situations here, and maybe a distance-learning program for me from a seminary here.  We’re still continuing on with the school microfinance program, but trying to find a way to incorporate it into the school day, with the cooperation of business/economics teachers.  We’ll see.  And we’re continuing with the home-based care worker lending program (for women who volunteer their time taking care of sick neighbors), and maybe opening it to more people taking care of orphans or particularly poor.  So, some exciting clarification for us from Lynn, and we’re eager to see what God leads us to in the next couple months.

The big news around here is the fire that swept across several miles of farmland and township, even right past the farm next door to us.  We weren’t in serious danger, but many lost everything.  I have yet to hear an accurate count of how many households were all or partly burned down, but I would guess upwards of 60 Zulu homes, plus about five white-owned farms and businesses. 

It’s been interesting to watch the reactions, for better or for worse.  In my mind it’s a case study of how we humans react to tragedy.  At first there’s a big explosion of people willing to help—there were many farmers with tractors carrying water tanks and hoses fighting the flames, plus dozens and dozens of neighbors evacuating people, doing first aid, and bringing piles and piles of clothes, blankets, kitchen supplies, and other donations.  But from what I hear, now just a week later the work of distributing all these donations has fallen on the shoulders of just a few people, several of whom are becoming frantic, angry, judgmental, or exhausted.  And meanwhile, poor people who have lived without blankets, kitchen supplies, and all these things for years on end are coming out of the woodwork, sometimes posing as fire victims, to get their share of the donations.  But the root of their problems is even harder to put out than a fire on a windy day.

Why do we do this?  It’s easy to get hyped up about tsunamis, sudden invasions, earthquakes, and other big new-toppers.  Meanwhile, however many thousand people die of HIV/AIDS every day, and then there are the slow wars, unjust laws, belief systems based on lies, domestic abuse, and the list goes on.  All so much harder to deal with than the tragedy of the hour.

So top of my list of things to do this week, in keeping with our new approach of digging deeper into understanding the slow crisis around us, is to volunteer as a donation-deliverer and try to get into some conversations with the poor people in our ten mile radius.  My goal is to write up, in some form or another, a description of one South African a week.  Some will likely go toward my newspaper column or magazine articles, but I’m hoping to post some here or slap them on an email list for anybody interested in “Meeting an African” every couple weeks. 

In family news, we just went through a week of the flu, which knocked out both kids and Adam.  I’m enjoying every meal in the expectation that it might be the last I can digest in a while when this thing hits me.  Zeke has wanted to do nothing but snuggle for about 48 hours, which is nice since I can’t remember the last time I’ve gotten to watch him sleep all cuddled up on my lap. 

Encouraging Voices

There’s nothing I love more than waking up and listening to little Zeke singing “Halleluiah! Halleluiah!”  I sang him a song with the word in it last night, and it seems to have stuck.  So this morning at six a.m. while we try to stay quiet in our hotel room, Zeke’s singing away.  In between he makes zerbert noises, commands “Hamba hamba” (“go” in Zulu), says “Me have belly button!” and shares other important information. 

We’ve had plenty of time to bond as a family this week, on a five day trip that included a stop in Kruger—the mega-game-park of South Africa—and a two-day visit with another well-established microfinance organization to get advice. 

It’s been a good time of refreshment and encouragement.  We’ll come home today with a couple good photos of cheetahs and “lilac breasted rollers” (rainbow and lilac colored birds), and some confidence as we begin offering larger individual loans to a few stellar business plans, and move into the next round of school loans.

The week before the trip I spent three days at a conference for people working with youth in entrepreneurship.  We came to South Africa with the understanding that our little organization supporting young people starting businesses was a unique thing, and here I meet about a two hundred South Africans doing the same thing!  For about the first day of the conference I asked myself “So why are we bothering?” 

But as the conference went on, I heard at least a dozen people complain that hardly anyone actually works with the poorest of youth in the rural areas, fresh out of high school or younger.  Over the last two weeks I have collected about five pages of notes from dozens of people I hammered with questions, and their advice mostly comes down to “keep doing what you’re doing, yes you’re weird for coming to do this as a foreigner, don’t be afraid to experiment, and don’t be discouraged by failure.”  So we press on.

While I was staying in the large city of Durban for the conference, I also had an unusual experience that reminded me of a higher power who has put us here.  I came out a long day of conference presentations tired and discouraged.  I was one of only about five non-black faces in the conference of over 300 people, and I had never felt more alone.  In spite of my many attempts to start conversations, only one person actually expressed interest in me.  This one person hammered me with questions.  “I don’t understand why you Americans come here,” he said.  “What do you do?  Just drive around in your four-wheel drive vehicle and hand out things and feel good about yourself?”  I sat talking to the man for over 30 minutes.  We ended up parting as friends with respect and understanding, but it was exhausting.  And it left me wondering, “Is this what everybody else thinks of me, too?  A white know-it-all who’s got no right to intrude?”

I went for a walk toward the Indian ocean, dragging my feet and praying, “Lord, I just want someone to recognize that we’re all just human.  I want you to show me you love me, and love all these people too.”  Twenty minutes later I hurried home just as the sun set.  Two young men brushed past me.  I had received ample warnings about the dangers of walking alone in Durban, and these two, if anyone, fit every stereotype of “unsafe.”  But just as they passed, one man turned around and faced me, took the cigarette butt out of his mouth and said, “Sister, I just want you to know, we’re human beings too, and God loves us, and God loves you, and we love you too.”

They sped on, back in conversation in a mix of Zulu and street talk, and my jaw just about fell off my face.  Had I heard correctly?  Was that not the exact prayer I had prayed?  What kind of bizarre impulse made that young man say that?

A block later, I reached my hostel and the men stopped again.  “We just want you to know,” they said, “we were watching out for you.”  In a strange half-crazy conversation, one guy went on to tell me how they live on the street, how he got a scar across his nose from a man trying to steal his shoes, and how they would most certainly not ask me for money.  “We just want you to remember,” he said, “while you’re waking up in a bed and going about your day doing whatever you feel like, remember us here on the street.  Ok?”

Rarely have I felt as if God was speaking to me so directly through a human’s mouth.

Microfinance: What ARE we doing?

Adam and I recently wrote an article for Relevant Magazine’s website, which we called “Microfinance: Good News?” We challenged ourselves to address the question of whether microfinance is compatible with the gospel, partly because we thought Christians should wrestle with that question, and partly because we thought it was about time we figured out what we thought about the issue.

To summarize the article, we brought up three challenges that microfinance in a Christian context faces: to get people access to credit fairly, to deal with people of the world wisely, and to keep the higher purpose in mind through everything. It’s that last one that gets to me. It’s what makes microfinance next-to-impossible as a Christian, and yet it’s about the only thing that keeps me going in microfinance.

Twice in the last week I’ve happened upon Bible verses where Jesus tells people “lend without expecting back.” Great, we microfinance people respond. Jesus, don’t ever try to be a business man. Good luck building anything sustainable. Guess we’ll quit our jobs and go back to the old give-out-a-hand-out model.

And yet I stumbled upon that verse at a time in our project when it doesn’t seem so incompatible with what we’re doing. I look at what this project has done so far in its two and a half years of existence. We’ve learned to do a pretty good job of getting money back from the youth we lend it to, and we’ve even done a pretty good job of getting youth to start little businesses.

But we haven’t found as many youth interested in the project as we hoped, making us think about restructuring the loan products we’re offering. That feels like risky business. I haven’t got the financial savvy to make three year projections of how exactly the sustainability of this project will be affected by the various loan product options we could think up. In the next two weeks we’ll meet with a variety of microfinance experts from across South Africa, and hopefully gather some good advice. I suspect we’ll feel way out of our league though. Giving loans as low as $11 does seem a little piddly, doesn’t it? And by working with youth we are doing what financial people call “targeting a very unstable—and thus risky—population.” Sometimes I feel like our little Microfinance for Youth five-year experiment is about as odd as Jesus’ notion of lending without expecting much back.

And when it comes down to how much the three-dollar-a-week profits these little businesses make matter, and more importantly how much lasting life change this all makes in the long run, well that’s a whole ‘nuther conundrum..

Maybe Jesus knew what he was talking about when he praised a widow’s donation of a penny as worth more than a year’s wages, and told stories with heroes who gave away their master’s money or paid workers a full day’s wage regardless of their hours worked. Jesus was able to pop his head up above the whole economy of this world and see a bigger picture, where development, prosperity, and success all have his own definitions. Even among microfinance at its best, I see how any project aimed solely at getting the poor to earn a living wage comes up short. So what I want to know is how on earth, literally on earth, are we supposed to operate with Jesus’ total disregard for earth’s rules, and still get anything done?

I have yet to meet anyone with a clean-cut answer to that one (if you’ve got it, email me and tell me please.) In my daily life it comes down to a lot of admitting I don’t know what I’m doing, asking God what to do, and being willing to try stuff in faith.

I met a young man who wants to buy a tent to rent out for Zulu funerals. We haven’t got any loan product set-up that will get him the kind of loan he needs. So here comes Faith, saying “take this opportunity to try something new.” And yet Wisdom at the same time says “think hard before you charge into this.” I wish Faith and Wisdom could just agree on one easy path and show it to me all right now.

But where’s the adventure in that? We came into this pilot project knowing it was going to involve a lot of trial and error, and sure enough it has. But the more we doubt ourselves, the more we’re able to celebrate the successes we do see and give credit where credit is due. There are far too many obstacles in this line of work that don’t get bypassed except by patience, prayer, and a thankful heart.

Take for example, the three weeks where one of our staff members was hospitalized last month, or the three weeks this month where the teachers went on strike. Both made it rather slow going for our work. At times we felt like we must be on strike, since we had absolutely nothing to do except sit at home and hope.

Another great blessing I don’t take for granted, though, is having Christian friends. We’ve started meeting with a rag-tag group of mostly-foreign do-gooder Christians every week, and we wrestle through these and more issues. Seems like nearly every week somebody’s crying over some joy or sorrow. Life sure ain’t easy, but sure is worth trying to live well.

Daily Life

I thought this blog needed more of our daily life news—more like I’m calling you up to blab about what’s new. So I took a few excerpts from emails to friends lately, and beefed ‘em up a bit.

It's fall here and windy. Crazy windy, like I keep thinking a tree might fall over, and every time Zeke goes outside he yells “Too windy! Too windy!”

But fall is good. We had a kite we were going to give to the kids for their birthdays (June 2nd and 3rd) but we're thinking of pulling it out today because it's so perfect. Yesterday Phoebe had the idea to go for a walk and pick flowers, so I went and took Zeke in our backpack. There weren't many flowers, since it's late fall here, but after we got a slim handful Phoebe got distracted by a piece of trash--a potato chip bag--and started filling that with pecans and leaves. We live on a pecan farm, as you might remember, and this is harvest season. We're not supposed to pick too many, since obviously the landlord sells them for a good price, but we enjoy snacking on a few every time we go for walks!

We just discovered this spot on the property where the ground is all covered a few inches deep in sand. Everyone we know seems to have a sandbox, which inspires some jealousy in our kids, and I’d been thinking about building one until we discovered our own natural sandbox. It’s beneath a row of pecan trees, which are all golden and dropping their leaves, and just up a hill from a river, so I sit there in ecstacy listening to the stream and the wind in the trees and counting my blessings. Just when you need a sandbox, God makes you one, 30 feet wide and more gorgeous than most national parks. We asked Phoebe what we should call the place, and she immediately said “Bacha Beach Sand Pit” (Bacha doesn’t mean anything to us, either, in case you thought it was Zulu).

Phoebe’s creativity, like most four year-olds, is boundless and wonderful. She made her first real book the other day. She had me write down for her a lengthy story about her “big brothers and sisters” (ie. imaginary friends) who had a pet bear that was stolen by a witch. Then she illustrated it in a 10 page book. My favorite page is the one that says “The witch was wearing a bear costume. That way the bear would say ‘why you dressed like me’ and she would catch him.” I guess she’s keeping up with her parents in this newfound publishing interest.

I just finished painting the trim of our house blue, which I think helps it quite a bit. It was just white, which made it look a lot like a barn since it's just a short little cinder-block converted sheep-barn anyway.

Tomorrow we'll take Pheobe and Zeke both to a nursery school for the morning for the first time. I checked it out with them last week, and both of them loved it. I wasn't thrilled by the teacher, who’s only been running it for five months, or the fact that they have two Zulu women working there who are treated, as usual, a little like servants while the white woman and her mom run it. But I've decided our kids just need to play with kids who speak English sometimes, and this is about the only option I can find, so we'll try it maybe once a week.

As far as what we’ll do next fall when Phoebe’s old enough to start the pre-kindergarten equivalent here, we’re thinking we'll likely try a year of home schooling Phoebe, but it's still a tough decision. We found out the black school only starts for kids age 6 and up, and we hear the principal has been very closed to any whites trying to get involved before. Plus we agree it’d be too hard for Phoebe without knowing much Zulu anyway.

We like the idea of home-schooling at least until she’s first-grade age, since it would give Zeke someone to interact with during the day, and we feel like we’d enjoy it and be good at it. But we’re hoping for some definite ways for her to interact with kids her age, which might be tricky since people here seem to like to send their kids to school young. Anyway, so the debate continues, but we trust we’ll be able to make the decisions when the time comes.

In just a week my mom, dad, and brother should arrive for a 10-day visit. We’re thrilled. We hope to pack in a visit to a game park, an aquarium, and give them a good dose of our daily life here, too. Hopefully they’ll return with many good memories and stories to convince a lot of other family and friends to come, too.

Yesterday we enjoyed our own personal movie theater! Adam borrowed a projector to show a movie at the school where he works, so we took full advantage of it by inviting over friends and watching Narnia. Pretty thrilling for our family, with no TV. I get excited just getting a new screensaver on our computer. We hadn’t watched a full-length movie in months, and then only on our laptop.

We invited our friend Sofi, who has only solar panels for electricity. The solar panels power up her laptop computer only long enough to run for about an hour and a half stretches, so it’s rare for her to see a whole movie in a sitting, too. Zeke enjoyed shouting “Beaver! Two beavers! Beaver there!” the entire time the beavers were on the screen, and running around the couch most of the rest of the night. Phoebe said in a happy daze “I’m going to dream about this movie tonight.” Sofi’s 5 year-old son, being typical boy, said “I liked the fights! Like when the rhino flipped right over!” Sofi’s one year-old daughter mostly enjoyed sneaking away and eating the remains off everyone’s dinner plates.

In two days Adam and I celebrate our 8th wedding anniversary. And I turned 30 last month. Dang, we’re getting old.

Tonight, being Sunday, we’re continuing a tradition of going out for all-you-can-eat pizza for 35 rand (about $5) at a restaurant down the road. And they have life-sized cement animals for the kids to climb on. Hopefully some friends will join us. Mmm. Life is good.

Me and My Beet

Yup, that photo of me and my beet is about to circulate across South Africa as the mug shot for the new columnist of a South African gardening magazine! The basic idea of the column is I write about all the things I mess up while figuring out how to plant flowers and plants in my new South African yard. Trust me, I have plenty of stories to tell. My garden is currently a tangle of dead squash plants (I planted them even though my wise old lady friends said the frost would kill them, which it did).

Life is funny, hey? (South Africans love to end sentences with “hey?” Phoebe picked it up before the rest of us, but it’s contagious. It does sound nicer than “huh?” or “doncha think?”)

Seriously, God works things out sometimes just to tease us I think. This year started with Adam getting on a big kick of sending articles to adventure motorcycling magazines. And the responses? One acceptance after another. He’s had photos and stories of him and his little red Honda published all over this country and the U.S. Read some on the link of “our writing.” Really, they’re pretty cool.

I meanwhile, was stewing in jealousy. I’d just finished a long correspondence course called “Breaking into Print,” and swore I should be the one getting stuff published.

Well, I had a big talking to from God about my bitterness and prideful motivation for writing in the first place. And I decided to hunker down and accept my husband’s writing gifts (and the fact, which he also admits, that motorcycling magazines aren’t always dealing with the most talented writing pool). And I also decided to just push on writing the stuff I felt like writing.

So one day a month ago Adam and I were looking at a magazine and he said, “Why don’t you write a column about being a gringo in South Africa and trying to figure out how to garden?” He told me to call up an editor, I did it, I wrote up an article, and boom, they liked the idea. About the same time an American missions magazine wrote back to a very old query letter to say they wanted to publish an article I wrote, too. When it rains it pours.

As I often like to do, though, I’m finding this whole experience full of metaphor for the Christian walk. As I wrote in our last newsletter, our microfinance work feels so much like starting a garden right now. I would add that trying to get things published felt the same way to me—I have a whole folder of rejected articles. But then just when you’re humbled enough to accept that God’s in control, something sprouts.

The Bible is so “choc-a-block” (my new favorite British term for “very, very full”) of analogies about gardening. We plant, we wait, we see lots of seeds fail, we see God water and shine on the plants, and we see a harvest that’s miraculously blessedly big. Just wish I could remember that back in the dry seasons.