« Back
Font Size:
Port Perry Baptist Church contingent helps bring hope to small African communities
Aug 18, 2007 By: Dr. Steve Russell(Originally published Aug. 2, 2005)
MALAWI, AFRICA - On this sunny, dusty day, our mission team is visiting one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the city of Zomba, Malawi, in southern Africa, 50 kilometres from the Mozambique border. We are there to help build a house for a blind widow with seven children. Our Toyota 4 x 4 struggles to weave through narrow alleyways between mud-brick houses and crumbling stucco walls. The dirt road is a pock-marked trail of fire-red clay and heaving rock at the base of the mountain.
Our 10-member team from Port Perry Baptist Church (PPBC) is a varied mix of tradesmen, professionals, housewives and students. None of us, save our team leader, has seen poverty this desperate. The stench of human waste burns our nostrils as we step out of the truck. Outhouses and latrine pits dot the neighbourhood. Our feet crunch over broken glass, tattered plastic bags and rubble as we trudge through the rabbit warren of paths and tiny, ramshackle homes.
The neighbourhood children start to appear almost as soon as we arrive. At first there are three or four timid little mites who look at us with their big brown eyes from the corner of a house. Once we say hello, they giggle and slowly approach us for a closer look. Most of them are barefoot, their thick and cracked soles walking with ease over the hard red clay. More children seem to appear by the minute, and soon we are surrounded by a horde of laughing, running, jumping African youth. The boys are dressed in ragged T-shirts and clay-stained shorts, while the girls are running around in light cotton print dresses of every colour.
Malawi is teeming with children. Almost 50 per cent of the population is under 16 years of age. The average Malawian woman bears six children. Sadly, not all of the children survive. Even more tragic is the toll HIV/AIDS has taken on their parents’ generation. The disease has ravaged the country’s 20- to 40-year-old age group. The average life expectancy has dropped to 37 years, and 25 per cent of the urban adult population is HIV positive. The figure for rural residents is lower, somewhere around 15 per cent HIV positive. Men and women are infected in equal numbers. In a population of 11 million Malawians then, more than a million are infected with the AIDS virus.
So many of the children we meet are orphans who have lost both their parents to the AIDS epidemic. In one village we visited, we sat and talked to a group of grandmothers who had banded together to care for the orphans who had lost their parents and their homes. They share joint garden plots, and with seed money from our church, bought a few chickens and goats to raise and sell. In another case, a 17-year-old girl was caring for her six younger siblings on her own, her parents among the victims of AIDS. We heard countless stories of communities taking ownership of the crisis and coming together to care for the sick, the dying and the orphans. The burden of the epidemic is almost overwhelming, and one wonders where they find the strength to carry on.
Yet even here, there is hope. The Malawians are very generous people, despite struggling with scarcity and disease, and tradition dictates they care for any extended family members in need. In recent years, the local church has led the call to expand this responsibility to the care of orphans and widows in their villages. The orphans are being absorbed into extended families, giving the children the hope of being raised in a family circle. The elders see the future of their country in the hands of these children, and they are doing all they can to raise them within a caring community.
One person making a difference is a local fellow named Saulos. A former orphan himself, his is a story of hope and redemption, even amid loneliness and despair. And Saulos has a connection with Port Perry that goes back 20 years.
In 1986, the African founder of the Baptist Church of Malawi invited Emmanuel International (EI) to tour his country to initiate some development projects. Andy Atkins, a member of PPBC and the representative for EI, made his way to a bus stop in Liwonde, having found nobody waiting for him at the airport in the capital city, Lilongwe. He knew no one and had to ask around to find his host, the national pastor. A gangly little nine-year-old orphan named Saulos grabbed his bag and told Andy to follow him. He trailed his duffle bag atop the young boy’s head, weaving through the bustling market in the twilight. Incredibly, he led him right to Pastor Munyewe. The young orphan, it turned out, had been taken in by the pastor. Thus started a relationship spanning two decades, whereby the local church and EI partnered to sponsor Saulos through school and eventually Bible College in Malawi.
Saulos is now a pastor with his own congregation in Liwonde. Having survived his own troubled childhood, he has a passion for helping orphans of the next generation. He has a flock of about 50 he keeps tabs on, getting together every week for some food, a game of football (soccer) and some Bible lessons. Saulos has managed to scrape together enough funds to buy some chickens that help supply a little food and some surplus income to provide for the orphans. He visits the various families who have taken in the orphans and encourages them in their struggles. His program has been replicated in countless other villages.
When part of our team met up with Saulos, his eyes sparkled when he heard that Andy Atkins was in Malawi. He had to wait a few days, but he finally met up with our Andy. It was a heart-warming reunion, as they talked over all that had gone on in the last several years. When Saulos joined us for conversation and singing, his eyes were wet with joy.
"Now I feel as though I have been to Canada," he said, in the tone you might expect someone to say had they been to paradise and back. When we presented him with a soccer ball for his youth group, he beamed.
"This truly is an answer to prayer," he said, as the children darted around the dirt soccer pitch, chasing a homemade ball of cloth and plastic held together with string. In a land of so little, the smallest gift can speak volumes about love and fellowship. We come with resources and a listening ear. They come with courage and a dauntless hope that God will see them through their hardships.
Back in the dirt alleys of Zomba, two of our team joined the builders of a brick house funded by PPBC. The acrid smell of smouldering fires hovered over the streets. The neighbours gathered in front of their crumbling doorsteps to cook maize and chicken over open fires, while the crew laid the tin sheets over the handmade roof trusses. Mayi Sukari, the widow, held her eldest child’s hand as she carefully picked her way along the trail. She has been blind since falling ill in grade school, so she cannot see her new house being built. But even so, she smiles and grips her daughter’s hand as she hears the scrape of brick on mortar.
Mayi Sukari has been striving to support her children by begging in the chaotic streets of Zomba. Her livelihood depends on her sunken, sightless eyes and her tattered, dirt-stained dress. We were struck by her warm smile and gentle voice as she gathered together her children, an anchor of determination in the stormy struggle for survival. We were now looking behind the scenes at the life of a disabled beggar. For each peddlar crawling or hobbling along the dingy streets, there is a story of a mother or a father, a home full of children, and the daily battle against hunger and disease. We would never see them in the same light again.
In every village we visited, the aroma of cooked maize (nsima) drifted on the wind like overdone porridge, seasoned with an overlay of pan-fried chicken. When lunch was ready, everybody stopped work to sit on a rock and hold out their clay encrusted hands. One of the women carried around a cup of clean water to rinse off the worker’s hands before eating. Another followed with a catch basin. This is a ritual that is played out before every meal in Malawi, no matter how dusty and grimy the surroundings.
With ravenous appetites, the builders dug into the starchy meal. With red dirt under their fingernails, they broke off a chunk of maize nsima and used it as a scoop for the red beans. There is no cutlery in sight. But the warm food filled the empty corners of every hungry stomach. The generosity of our neighbours was appreciated. They live day-to-day, meal-to-meal, and so we learned to appreciate every scrap of food that was served to us.
As the team gathers together to pack up the tools at the end of the day, the Sukari family, a cluster of seven offspring of all sizes, gathers in the setting sun and turns toward our group. They sing a song of thanks they composed for the occasion. As their harmonies soar with the smoke over the tin roof tops, our team dissolves into tears of joy, thankfulness and wonder. How in these surroundings, amid broken homes, broken families and hopeless poverty, can the human heart rejoice? And yet it does.
'Those who refresh others will themselves be refreshed' goes one of the Proverbs in the Bible. We have seen this lived out time and again in the lives of the people of Malawi. And after two weeks living amongst them, sharing their cook fires, their nsima, their straw mats and their colourful stories, we have known that refreshing joy for ourselves.
The departing words of Chief Palongo, from the northern village of Palongo, will resonate with us for a long time: "Just as rivers flow from different directions and eventually meet in the Indian Ocean, so it is with us today. We come from different places, but here together we have met. I don’t know how to thank you. Words are not enough to describe how we feel."
We have all come to agree with him. Words are not enough.
