I Didn't Expect It--Raw Feelings and Photos from Sierra Leone

I  didn't expect it.  

I didn’t expect the air to burn so hot when it rolled across my face as I stepped off the plane and onto the dark tarmac.

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I didn’t expect the dirt roads to be so red against the gigantic sky.

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I didn’t expect the palms to wave so exotic and the bananas to hang so lush on trees above a ground so littered and scarred.

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I didn’t expect the smell of sweat in every inhale to be a scent that filled my nose not with repulsion but rather with humanity.

I didn’t expect to find unity in hot skin against skin, sweaty palm against palm, for sticky arms hugging shoulders to be our common ground.

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I didn’t expect to ingest so much dust, to thirst so deeply, to be so filthy every night, and yet feel so alive.

I didn’t expect the disparity of hospitality. To be treated as royalty, served chilled sodas and heaping plates of steaming rice and chicken, all while a dozen sets of little eyes gathered on the outskirts to quietly watch every motion of spoon to mouth.

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I didn’t expect the extravagant generosity, gifts given with pure joy from hands who knew hunger to hands who knew no physical need.

I didn’t expect my heart to throb again. I thought I was prepared for the cracked lips, the skinny arms, the protruding bellies, the sheer desperation for a bite of sugar.

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I didn’t expect to feel the helpless ache of love. I thought the years had scarred over and even calloused the cuts Ethiopia left. I thought I could visit and learn and embrace and then come home without the hurt this time. But the callouses are rubbed off and I feel raw again.

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I did’t expect to sit by John and feel at home.

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I didn’t expect to carry the mother-weight of worry, fear over the future of a boy I’ve only seen a total of 3 times, back with me across ocean and continents.

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I didn’t expect the juxtaposition; Ebola signs and barren school rooms and wells that run dry and naked children and so many scars on so many arms and legs, set against the loud singing and clapping and dancing and smiles that fill entire faces and hugs and hard work and hopes for a better tomorrow.

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I didn’t expect to come home so conflicted. To laugh or to cry? To stay present and ache, or to move on and mute the pain? To promise to return and feel it all again next year, even if my only offering is a few days of companionship? Or to spend my money supporting from afar, less dollars on 20 hours of plane travel and more for a college fund and bags of rice?

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I didn’t expect to be writing this from the dark of my closet because I am too restless. Because my house feels too big again, like it did after my last trip to Ethiopia when I couldn’t stand the sight of the two empty chairs at our kitchen table for weeks after my return.

  I didn’t expect to encounter such a tenacity of human sprit in Sierra Leone, to see such persistent optimism from people who’ve known suffering at its worst. Such dedication to their education and studies from students who have so little. John showed me his meticulous biology notes and diagrams, how he’d named every part of a microscope, the steps to preparing wet and dry mount slides, and the details of how an amoeba eats. He’s never even seen an actual microscope, let alone looked through the eyepiece.

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I did’t expect to feel such an urgency that I have to do all I can to change the story for one. A familiar notion, but it hit me with new fervor. One high school degree, one college education, one good lawyer or health care worker or pastor… maybe it could be the difference for a family, a village, a generation?

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I didn’t expect the hope that would fill me when I witnessed this strength of character, how the sum of all my fears about the looming obstacles in his path are still less than the total hopes I have for John's bright future.

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Choose to change the story for one. The impact on a child's life, and yours, will go beyond what you could ever expect!

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Meet John

The first thing I noticed about John aside from his familiar shy expression, was the way I could see his heart pounding through his shirt. There had been a misunderstanding about which John we were meeting, (John seems to be a name as well loved in Sierra Leone as it is in the U.S.) so he was given no head’s up that he’d be seeing me. When we arrived at the school, he’d already walked home. A staff member took a motorbike to go get him and bring him back. When he walked up to the school’s porch, his day suddenly went from a regular Tuesday of math exams and after-school chores, to four grinning Americans chattering about meeting his sponsor and receiving a gift and getting a video of him. He blinked and had a mic above his head, two cameras on him, and me hugging him.  

He was crazy nervous, and I was too. My first relief was that he spoke English (one of four languages he told me later), so I could communicate with him without an interpreter, but understanding each other’s accents was tedious, and he hardly spoke above a whisper. I gave him his gift and he put his watch and Ohio State hat on without hesitation. We looked through a photo album, I read him notes from the girls, and showed him a letter he’d sent us years ago. He grinned at his crayon drawings and told me what each was. I asked to see his classroom.

He took me across the school yard to a building with narrow bench desks and a wall of chalk boards. I asked about the algebra problems on the board. He said it was from today’s exam, and then explained to me how to solve one of them. He lost me at exponents, as has every math teacher I’ve ever had.

We asked if we could see where he lived. He said it was too far. He didn’t want us walking the distance with our stuff. When we told him we had a vehicle and he could ride along, he agreed. When we arrived, he introduced us to his family members. I gawked at the trees in his back yard loaded with bananas, and he grinned and told me they weren’t ready to eat yet. He was relaxing, but each word was still so quiet.

I asked if I could see his room, the place he spent his time. It was in a separate building. On the walk over I asked about his siblings, their names and ages, how they were doing. “Fine. Thanks be to God” he replied. The standard Krio answer, but it still catches my breath, especially considering the horrors the country has faced the past 2 years. Then he asked me a question. “What?” I asked softly, desperately hoping not to annoy him with my endless requests for him to repeat himself. Between adjusting my ears to a new accent, his quiet tone, and the volume of little voices from his village following us, I was trying to catch each word and not having high success. He asked it again. I paused, apologized, and asked him to repeat it once more.

“How is Kayla?” he said carefully. I stared for a moment.

“Kayla?”

“Yes. Your sister.”

“Kayla my sister!?” I said, stunned. “How do you know Kayla?”

“You sent a photo with her in it.” he said matter of factly.

I answered that she was very well and that I was amazed he remembered. He moved on but my brain was stuck repeating “how is Kayla”.

He told me one of his after-school chores was laundering his clothes, and held up his sparkling white uniform shirt, a startling sight considering the thick red dust. The room he and his brother shared was small. A clothesline ran on either side, for each of them to hang their clothes to dry. The tiny bed was made and the room was orderly and clean. John pointed to a paper tacked above the bed. It was a schedule of his classes. And next to it on the headboard was a notebook. He picked it up and showed me pages of meticulous class notes. “So this is how you are getting such good grades!” I said, looking from the schedule to the literature notes. He gave me a shy grin.

We went back out and he introduced me to some if his friends. Amos grinned wide, much more outgoing than John, and asked if I could take a photo of them together. I told him I would do my best to send a copy the next time I sent photos to John. Then John called for a boy across the way. “David is my best friend, he said.” David came up and shook my hand. We talked about what the boys liked to do. They talked about soccer, but said they had no ball.

“How is your family?” I asked David.

“Both of my parents are dead”, He answered.

"I'm so sorry", I said.

“Do you have uncles and aunts? Grandparents?” I asked?

“No.”

“Do you have a sponsor?”

“No. I have no one. No one but John.” He added, and smiled at John.

I showed John every photo in my phone gallery. His friends and the rest of the village children crowded in to see videos of Landon and Sami in the snow, and to stare at my “very big dog”.

John went into his room and brought out an album that looked vaguely familiar. It was dirty and ragged. It was photos of us I had sent with a team maybe 6 years ago. “See, Kayla!” he said when he turned to one of her with me.

When we went back to his room to take a few more photos, I asked if he had anything else he wanted to show me. He picked a Bible that was laying by his bed.

“My Bible”, he said.

“Wonderful!” I said. “Do you have a favorite chapter you like to read?

He turned to Psalm 25. “This one.” He answered, and read, “In you, LORD my God, I put my trust. I trust in you…” He carefully read the entire chapter. I can’t yet find the right words for what the day meant to me. To witness the incredible person that he is; courageous through many photos and questions, shy as he was, earnestly dedicated to his education, respectful and generous to his family and friends. To see that even without any prior notice or preparation, he knew me, knew my family, was succeeding in school, had received a christmas gift made possible by sponsorship funds, and even over the years and through moves, had kept the photos we sent.

Though his is most personal to me, John’s is not the only impacting story in the three days on the ground here. I watched Yawah’s delight as i read a letter to her from her sponsor. I saw Rugi sit in front of her village and weep as she told her story and spoke of the difference sponsorship and her relationship with Angie has made in her life.

Since John read it to me in his little room, these are the words, the prayer in my heart for John and Rugi and Yawah and the thousands of children like them who have seemingly insurmountable obstacles in their path, yet a light of hope in their eyes.

Guard their life and rescue them; do not let them be put to shame, for they take refuge in you. May integrity and uprightness protect them, because their hope, OUR hope, LORD, is in you. Deliver your children, O God, from all their troubles!

You guys, I came with my doubts and plenty of hard questions. I don’t have them all answered. But I can say this. World Hope International often says “Child sponsorship works”, and I’ve seen it to be true. This month, WHI has a goal of choosing love every day for the month of love. 29 new sponsors choosing to change the story for a child, one for every day of February. I would love for you to join. To be one. Choose one. Choose love. If you’re ready to jump in, or just want to see more of what World Hope is about, visit here.

Good night from the hot and lovely Sierra Leone, ~C

Safe Friends

Safety meetings are held frequently in this house. Some would say that is the case for all parents. Others would say that is the case for an over-protective, teensy tinsy bit control-freakish parent. Specifically, we’ve been discussing safety in the context of relationships as they start playing more independently in friend groups, on playgrounds, and soon go off to school. We want them to recognize unsafe behaviors and be courageous to stand up for themselves and talk to us if someone behaves poorly towards them. We want them to choose safe friends. While we aren’t aspiring to raise kids who live in a bubble lined with cashmere, I think all parents could agree that in relationships, safety is vital, no matter how daring and adventurous ones antics may be.   When talking about safe families, friends, and people around us, we usually hit on these points: • safe people speak the truth and avoid lying or gossip. • Safe people respect and care about our hearts and bodies and don’t want us to get hurt, on the outside or on the inside. • Safe people make us laugh and feel happy, but don’t laugh at us or make us feel embarrassed. • When someone makes us feel unsafe, we can respectfully step back from the relationship, but we do not have the right to be unsafe back. • We should carefully choose people who make us feel safe to be our closest friends. (We have more things we discuss in the context of safety from perpetrators, but I’m sticking to everyday encounters here.) And this is maybe the most crucial element of the conversation: • We are all the unsafe one sometimes. We’ve lied, laughed rudely, said words that hurt, or talked when we should be listening. There is no one getting it all right. No, not one. And the person who says something that makes you feel unsafe, but comes later and says, “I shouldn’t have said it, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I care about your feelings. I want to use better words.” And then you see them caring, trying their best at making more respectful choices? Those people? Those people are brave. And they just might end up to be the safest friends of all.

  As is often the case, I find myself wrapping up these sermons and stepping down from my parental pulpit deeply stirred by my own message. (Certainly more moved than my audience.) These child-level conversations start replaying in my head, in adult contexts. I need safety; I want it in my marriage, my friendships, my society. And I am painfully aware that I have been the unsafe person so many times; reactive, quick to judge, angry, defensive, and gossiping. I need the courage to step up and apologize, to listen and learn and use better words.

  What if we made it our global mission to be a safe person? Beyond our close circles, what if we intently set our hearts towards being brave, being kind, being safe, to every human brother and sister we met? To assume that everyone, whatever color or language or class or issue or attitude they presented, was carrying a heavy burden? To assume that everyone could benefit from love? What if we stopped with the judgments and the labels, the assumptions and the indifferences? What if, as white people, and even more so as Christians, we owned our abysmal track record, and said it’s time to turn the tides? We’ve been indifferent and inattentive to our brothers and sisters for too long, but no more.

  What if we committed to the safe friend rules? I think these can apply to every relationship we have. I know I need to put more of them to use in my marriage, towards my girls, in some of my friendships, and to certain individuals in society that I am frankly not too keen on. It all sounds good until we think of that one person, huh? The one Wal-Mart clerk. The one rush hour driver. The one classmate with a unique lifestyle choice. The one west-side apartment complex. But here’s what I know I want people to do for me, and in turn, I owe to others: 1. Discuss someone else’s life with that individual, not to others. It doesn’t feel good to discover you’re the topic of conversation, even if the content wasn’t mean. Gossip doesn’t have to be nasty to be unsafe. 2. Refuse to laugh, respond, or repost jokes and comments that target someone or some group. That someone is some mother’s precious child. That group is someone’s identity they are living every day. I don’t care if they are doing their best or doing their worst at life; criticism, judgment, and mockery are nowhere in our human job description (unless there’s a revised version I haven’t received). 3. Less talking, more listening. If someone has been hurt by a system, a slur, a societal bias, or whatever their source of pain, our job isn’t to explain, correct, or point out their flaws. A safe friend is simply present in the pain. 4. Less talking is good. Silence is not. Speaking from my own, simple story, I have been hurt by gossip and words, but I have been hurt by silence more. On a bigger scale, consider how our silence translates to a populous of people aching under days upon years of complex disadvantages, discriminations, and living on the under belly of white privilege. Our voice may be stuck on silent simply because we’re unsure or removed from a situation. I know mine has been. But inactive silence translates to the wounded as passivity, indifference, and even compliance. It does not rescue the abused, bind up wounds, light up the darkness, or bring good news. As Martin Luther King Jr. says, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” We don’t have to come up with answers or solutions. Start with “Tell me your story. I want to understand. I care about your pain. How can I be a better friend?”

5. If you have small people under your watch, teach them that differences in humans exist, equip them with respectful terms for our differences, and impress on their minds that differences are beautiful, identities are tender, and jokes and rude terms make insides bleed. Labels, stereotypes, an “us and them” mentality, are all taught. “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” Nelson Mandela

You guys, can you imagine what could happen if we started living like this? If we shut up on gossip and spoke up on behalf of love? If we turned off the assumptions and theories and instead put our ear to the ground, even amidst riots and media outbursts and attitudes that went against our grain, to listen for the pain pounding in every human heart, and simply said, “your story is safe here”? I can imagine it. I think it could change the world.

What do you think? Tell me about your experiences in having or being a safe friend, or share what you've learned from an unsafe relationship.

In Their Shoes-Part 1 (thoughts on the confederate flag)

No matter how much we wish it wasn’t so, no matter how valid it is that skin color is the tiniest variation of pigment amongst countless identical facets of our humanity, skin color impacts each life and shapes each story in ways that we cannot be blind to.

This is why I can’t help but speak up when I hear comments about the Confederate flag. While I am aware of the argument that it’s some new, hot button political topic, it’s not a new grief by any means. For us as white Americans, and especially for those of us who’ve grown up in the Midwest/north, it might seem new. I was oblivious to the fact that government buildings fly the Confederate flag until this year. And I was stunned upon discovery.

I recall my first introduction to civil war history somewhere around 5th grade; remember the churn in my stomach when I read the details of slavery. Shortly after the history class, we drove through a rough little burg and I noticed a Confederate flag painted on the pack of a pickup window. I remember staring at it with alarm and asking mom “Isn’t that the Confederate flag from the Civil War? Why do they like it??” The same confused concerns swirled in my mind when we first drove south for a Florida vacation. Every time I’ve seen that flag, whether as a clueless elementary student or as an adult mother of two African children, I become unsettled and find myself thinking, “I wonder if they still wish the south would have won.” In my mind, the Confederacy=slavery.

We could discuss the flag’s role as a historical image (a representation of one of our most despicable times in American history, I might add), the fact that taking a flag down will never solve racism, compare and contrast it with the Nazi swastika flag (a historical image illegal to fly in many European countries), or discuss government involvement and it’s valid or invalid roles in the issue. There are one hundred articles that have done so already. What I am hoping and longing and praying for is a reflective effort by all of us; imagining ourselves in someone else’s shoes. I live this daily as I imagine my daughters’ futures, but today I’m thinking even beyond that. Not just my mommy heart for them, but what if it was ME?

What if I was the woman on the church floor, soaked in the blood of my dying child who was pierced through with bullets from the hand of one on a mission to “kill black people”? What if I was a teen goofing off with friends, taking dares to do dumb things as most teens do, and I was the one thrown to the ground and hand-cuffed while my white friends watched and went home? What if, when I googled “civil war history” (like I actually did today), and read account after account of states announcing their succession for the primary purpose of maintaining their rights to own black humans, I knew if I’d been born in the 1850’s it would have been me they were planning to purchase? When powerful leaders announced to the country:

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”-Alexander Stephens (Vice President of Confederate States of America), Cornerstone Speech.

what if my family had been the ones to huddle by the bed that night, weeping and crying out for deliverance, half believing our suffering was a sign we were only worthy of subordinate roles? After all, those in power announced their beliefs, backed them by ill-quoted Bible verses, and refuted those who were “…attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal” –Stephens What if those demeaning, brainwashing messages were directed at my identity, for days and years and generations?

I sobbed as I read Stephens’ speech. I urge you to read it, too. We do well to go back and remember from time to time, as nauseating as it is. Tell me this, if those words represent the spirit of the Confederacy, doesn’t it seem that, no matter how many years pass, its flag will represent suffering and tears and unimaginable despair to a people group whose story traces back to its origin? And since this spirit of hatred is still alive and well in so many who proudly wave that flag today (Dylann Roof being a most recent example), do we not owe it to those whose history bears more scars than we can count, to stop and listen oh-so-carefully when they speak up about something that brings them disrespect or pain? As a nation of liberty and justice for all, I’d say yes. As a person who has taken an oath to the kingdom of Love and claimed Jesus as King? YES!

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Isn't kindness grounds enough? Isn't love alone worth it? Could we all just say “I don’t know how it feels in your shoes, I don’t understand all this pain, I can’t heal the wound, but here, rest on my shoulder. Let me kneel down and loosen your laces.”

(This is part 1 of a 3 part series on navigating current issues, white privilege, and building safe relationships in regards to race. I have written this under the assumption that those who are reading are white (since unfortunately 90% of my friends and family are). If by chance you are reading this as a person of color, please, please speak up. Tell us your story. Point out where I’m getting this wrong. Private message me, I have questions and I want to listen, ideally face to face. For the rest of you, I want to hear your thoughts and experiences, too. Bring on the respectful dialogue!)

~C