The Mueller Family
It’s easy to be judgmental. It’s hard to be understanding. It's even harder to be introspective, and to turn the magnifying glass on ourselves.
There’s an article in today’s International Herald Tribune that’s worth reading if we’re to try and understand the tensions at work in Swaziland today.
It begins: "Swaziland and its king are throwing a joint 40th birthday bash this weekend, but the mood is far from celebratory in this small southern African land of paupers and princes, mud huts and palaces..."
It goes on to talk about these startling contrasts:
It's been a while since I checked on Swaziland news, so I went online today and was greeted with this story: Aids-hit Swaziland Population Drops.
I didn't have enough cash to give something to all three of them (or so I thought), and so I hung my head an walked by the old man.
Today is Justice’s birthday. He would have been 7 years old today.
If you’ve been a reader of this blog for a while you know that Justice Sicalo Louis was the first child from Mhlosheni we sponsored as a family. We jumped in at that first sponsorship drive and brought his name and his history home. We talked about Justice at dinner time, put his picture on our refrigerator, and our children knew his face and his name. He was as much a part of our family as a child could be who lived 10,000 miles away.
If you’ve read this blog for a while you also know that Justice died. Like many of the children in that fragile, brittle place Justice succumbed to an onslaught from unseen enemies: asthma, TB, HIV, and malnutrition had been his constant companions since birth.
I met Justice’s mother, Nokuphila, in November. (Read that post here.) She was a pretty, fragile, slender woman who had lost her only child and who had been diagnosed as HIV-positive herself. I wish I could talk to her again today. I wish I could tell her I’m remembering Justice today.
I wish I could reassure her that Justice is running and playing in a place that makes even the beauty of their home in the Shiselweni hills look plain and dull. I don’t know how I would do that, though, without it coming out like tired plastic Christian dogma. I wouldn’t be up to the task. I wish I could stand in his yard again and look at the hills and grass and trees and sky he looked at.
Daunted by all these things I can’t do, I’ll instead do the one thing I can do: I’ll pray. I’ll pray that Justice has been lifted into a Presence I can barely imagine. I’ll pray that Justice has been comforted beyond anything my words or money or attention could ever provide.
I’ll pray that Nokuphila finds healing for her wounded body, and peace for her wounded soul.
I’ll pray that every child, caregiver, administrator, teacher, and servant I met in Mhlosheni finds the strength and resources they need to do their invaluable work. I’ll pray that every man, woman and child in America reads something like this blog and begins to understand that our salvation begins when we serve others, when we provide succor to those who can’t heal themselves.
I’ll also go home today and play with my kids, and tell each of them how much I love them.
Dear Michael,
While the presidential candidates were responding to your pressure and announcing their plans to visit Africa, Congress was putting together the 2009 budget. And the numbers don't look good.
As it stands today, the Senate is considering a $4 billion cut from the president's 2009 international affairs budget. What's most shocking is that this would represent a cut of $1 billion from this year's funding, a huge loss at a time when we are poised to do so much to combat extreme poverty and global disease. Slashing this funding would be simply devastating to people like those surviving HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis thanks in part to the help America provides.
Thankfully, we're not the only ones who've noticed the problem, and Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Gordon Smith (R-OR) have introduced an amendment to restore $2.6 billion to the international affairs budget, to match the House of Representatives funding level.
Here is where we come in. We only have one week to get the majority of the Senate to support this effort. It's up to us to take action and make sure that our senators pass a budget that reflects our values. So we're launching a petition asking the Senate to support this amendment:
You can add your name here:
http://www.one.org/2009budget/o.pl?id=254-3425028-2Jje.p&t=2
Petition text:
In the great American tradition of helping others help themselves, we, the undersigned, ask that the U.S. Senate pass the Durbin-Smith amendment to restore $2.6 billion to the international affairs budget.
Increasing the size of the international affairs budget is vital to increasing the amount the U.S. gives to poverty-focused development assistance. The international affairs budget funds all the proven solutions that we call for time and again: lifesaving AIDS medications, basic education, access to clean water, and many more programs helping people work their way out of poverty.
To save these programs, we've set an aggressive goal of gathering 60,000 signatures before we deliver the petition to every senator next week. Please add your name:
http://www.one.org/2009budget/o.pl?id=254-3425028-2Jje.p&t=3
The fight over the international affairs budget is just the first important step to making sure that we keep our promise to help the world's poorest people. Later in the year, we'll work to make sure that enough of the international affairs budget goes to the programs that are making a real difference in the developing world. But that fight will be much more difficult if we don't get a high level of funding for the poorest among us here and now.
Thank you for your voice,
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I'm in San Francisco.
Coincidence or not, it's also the place where I would most expect to find Jesus.
The next morning the grass was wet, but there hadn't been the significant downpour everyone hoped for.
Monday's schedule was a killer. Because we'd be driving to Mbabane and the Swazi Cultural Center on the next day, Tuesday, our last day had a long agenda: We were visiting a community savings and credit group, another Hope Center, a PLWHA --- People Living With HIV and AIDS --- garden project, and a bore hole water project.
In between we were having a last meeting with the Mhlosheni staff over lunch.
ASCAS is a World Vision acronym for Accumulated Savings and Credit Associations. (Sometimes World Vision feels like an acronym machine that's run amok, like the chocolate machine on that old black-and-white episode of I Love Lucy. In our time there we saw lots of the ADP's SPs trying to take care of their OVCs through NCPs and HCs. Which reads sponsorship promoters and orphaned and vulnerable children and neighborhood care points and Hope Centers )
Susan was particularly interested in exploring how these groups created what were in essence small community credit unions, saving money and loaning each other funds with strict guidelines and solid bookkeeping.
I wasn't all that interested in ASCAS, or didn't understand their impact, until we got there and met the group. The Jerusalem community had 19 members in two groups. We met ten of them in a turquoise-painted room near the Jerusalem community school, with exposed wooden beams and sun streaming through the windows.
I've never liked the word "empowered," seeing it as overused and freighted with socio-babble. But there was no way around it: these eight women and two men were empowered and alive and eager to reinforce the positive tangent their lives had taken.
Anyone in the community can join the ASCAS group, though women make up the majority of the members in all of them. They decide upon joining whether they want to save 20 or 100 E Swazi a month, equivalent to about $3 or $15 per month.
The money goes into a Production Fund, which forms the capital for loans and business projects, and a Social Fund, which is available for emergency loans to community members.
A six to twelve month cycle determines the amount of time the funds are locked up for use by the group, and how disbursement of the savings and profits will occur at the end of the cycle.
Most women in rural Swaziland are entirely dependent on their husbands for income. If they need money for new pots or bedding they need to ask their husbands, probably adding to the financial stress of a man already looking for work in a shattered economy.
Members of the ASCAS group very soon see positive cash flows from the savings portion of the program. At the end of a cycle the extra cash can pay for school fees, new clothes, furniture or even an electric stove.
These women were vibrant and entrepreneurial. They had some cash in the Production Fund and were looking for a project to begin funding. Susan had bought a simple handbag in Johannesburg, and before the meeting was over they'd emptied it, turned it inside out, and decided that they could easily make a prototype while they figured out market access and sales projections.
It was fun to see their joy and eagerness, and there was a palpable sense that we were watching a handful of ordinary Swazis pull themselves rung-by-rung from a life of poverty and despair. All World Vision had done was give them training and simple tools and enough support to make them believe in themselves.
Susan made them a gift of the handbag, so they could figure out how to begin making similar ones. She put all her own belongings in a plastic bag for the rest of the day.
Climbing into the van I saw Susan happily clutching her plastic bag of belongings and the Swazi women pour again over the bright handbag, and thought that in a small way we'd seen the type of resource leveling that's required if we're to push back against global poverty.
At 1:00 we were back in Mhlosheni for lunch with the staff and our debriefing --- a review of how things had gone in the last five days of racing around the Mhlsoheni ADP's red dirt roads, streams, and hills, listening, watching and learning.
We gave our feedback and made suggestions, and asked them for a song. Listening to them sing together, especially Nonjabu with her belting, tremendous alto, had been a highlight of our time in Mhlosheni. They agreed, as long as we'd sing one for them. (Apparently our oddity hadn't worn off yet.)
We traded songs, singing as separate groups and then interspersed in a big circle in the conference room, singing You're My Everything while Bonginkosi slapped his broad hand on a bible to provide percussion. By the end of it we were dancing in a weaving line through the conference room: eight ordinary suburban white Americans and the same number of extraordinary, hard-working African Swazis with hearts that broke for children, dancing in praise and fellowship.
It was nothing less than beautiful, and I don't understand it yet. But I can still feel it.
We visited a garden project called PLWHA, or People Living With HIV and AIDS. One of the critical health issues with HIV-positive patients is that good diets must be maintained to both stabilize general health and support the anti-retroviral medicine that comes free from the government.
This garden project and others like it were done through World Vision support in the form of seedlings, agricultural training and fertilizers. It produced cabbages, corn and beets for the 15 HIV-positive people who farmed it, giving them health, self-respect, and a sense of taking control of their lives.
The chair person spoke to us for some time about the garden's impact on his friends and neighbors. As a thundercloud developed behind us he talked about providing vegetables and produce to their non-HIV neighbors, and how it had helped them break down the barriers created by the disease. These neighbors had even come to the garden to help with weeding and harvesting.
He talked about a new project by the group, where they'd collect wild bees and sell the honey. He proudly demonstrated the collection trap and the hive box.
I watched the eight people sitting on the ground carefully. They were ordinary people, ranging in age from teenagers to elderly, and all of them seem robust and healthy. They looked down shyly or looked at us directly, in the same ratio that would occur in any group of normal healthy Americans.
One young man in the corner looked surly and sullen. He wore the ubiquitous blue jumper of the Swazi laborer. His eyes were angry and hooded, and he wouldn't look at us as the questions and answer went back and forth.
I thought that I would be bitter too, if I were sick and someone paraded a bunch of healthy overfed Americans through my garden.
And then the chairperson announced his final measure of success: "And in the two years we've been running this garden no one in our group has died."
What more could be said? The food, the direction, and the unflinching support of World Vision were keeping these people alive.
Andy asked the chairperson if we could pray with them and he said yes. We made a circle in the field, with every other person being a member of the garden or a member of our World Vision group, and clenched hands.
I looked over my shoulder and saw that the thunderstorm was almost on us. I could see the rain falling from it, and lightning jab downward. As Andy gave a prayer of thanks for the openness and warmth of the gardeners, and as he soulfully requested that God help them continue in their good health, the rain finally began to fall in earnest.
Andy's prayer was a psalm of thanksgiving for the rain that had begun to soak the earth and could perhaps bring forth its abundance, and for the openness of these people in sharing with us about the very thing that stigmatized and marginalized them. We broke our circle and each of us shook hands with each of them and gave our personal thanks.
The last person whose hand I reached for was the surly-looking young man. He stood level with me and smiled when I smiled. When he smiled his scowling sullen look disappeared, and I saw that he was just a young man looking for God's grace in a difficult time.
I said, "Thank you for helping us understand."
He said, "God bless you."
"And you."
When we were back in the van lightning flashed freely on the hills all around us and I remembered my little statistic about more people being struck by lightning in Swaziland, per capita, than in any other country.
Thinking about the HIV-positive young man in the blue jumper, I asked Bonginkosi for the siSwati word for Hope. He said, "Litsemba."
A day, I thought, of lightning and litsemba.
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The day wasn't done. This was our fifth and last full day in the ADP and we had things to see and understand.
We visited a bore hole water project that was partly funded by World Vision Reaching 41 meters in to the earth, the simple pump brought up clean fresh water year round, regardless, for now, of weather and rainfall.
The community was called Hosea, and the pastor who had worked so hard to get the well sited and dug gave us an explanation and a tour.
Situated on a dirt road (what else?) on the edge of Hosea, families still had to walk many miles up and down steep hills to fetch and carry water, but at least it was now clean.
I knew that by providing clean, fresh water to a community you could cut infant mortality in half. But the abstract numbers became real when the pastor showed us the watering holes that the new pump replaced.
Fetid and muddy water sat below steep banks. When this water dried up every day, the pastor explained, women would come and sleep by the hole, waiting for the groundwater to seep back in.
In a second watering hole further upstream we found two young boys filling water jugs for their mother. They looked at us in wide-eyed wonder, and didn't really understand why we seemed so shocked at the water they were drawing.
A girl came down and eyed us curiously, then took the filling scoop and drank from it.
How could we explain infant mortality, cholera, and water-borne microbes in a way that they could understand? This was a hard place.
Still, as we drove home I looked around at the sun setting below the thunderclouds, and at the wash of orange light on every rock and shrub, and thought that the hills of Mhlosheni were very beautiful.
These hills and valleys and kopjes are beautiful in the way that only really hard places can be beautiful. In harsh environments where the dividing lines between life and death are very narrow, beauty must present itself in novel ways.
We said goodbye to Mhlosheni for the last time and returned to the Nhlangano Sun. The next morning we'd drive to Mbabane and the Eelzuwini valley, to spend our last day in Swaziland learning a bit more about Swazi culture.
We were all a bit subdued. The people of Mhlosheni, from the children we sponsor to the staff who'd led us in our exploration of the place, had begun to feel like family.
They made one last attempt over dinner to teach us to say the name of the place with the proper accents and pronunciation. It was something like "um-ploh-SHEH-nee," but spoken in a seamless, unbroken stream of sound. I thought Susan came closest to the right intonation, but judging by the tears of laughter in Bonginkosi's eyes I guessed we still had a lot to learn.
I posted the Sunday blog entry through my cell phone.
Then I watched the lightning and the heavy warm rain, thought of my family, and fell asleep.
It was of course one of the hottest and muggiest days of our trip. What other day would be so ideal for sitting under a hot tent with 500 other people for three hours?
I don't have a narrative of that experience. The setting was beautiful but strange, and it's hard to rethink how one event led to the next one. But I have a series of impressions that are vivid in my mind, and I'd like to see if I can convey some of that clarity.
Women: Amazing! The women in the crowd wore bright hats in many vibrant colors, with fur or lace trim or with feaths and beads. Many wore traditional robes or priestly smocks. They wore every style of jewelry, from having dozens of dangling earrings to simple jeweled headbands. They smiled at the slightest nod in their direction, and were incredibly expressive in grasping our hands and greeting each of us.
Music: Unbelievable! We had been asked to sing a few songs during worship, and Dave and Amanda would lead us. We'd picked out Agnus Dei and a few other songs, but not really practiced them as a group. They saved our songs for last, and the best way to describe how powerful the other choirs were is that Dave leaned over to me during the first one and whispered, "They should have let us go first." In other words, they were awesome and we would surely be a letdown.
These choirs were incredible. Accompanied only by an inexpensive but highly amplified keyboard they belted out song after song in their lilting, soaring vocal style. Everyone gave themselves over to the music with abandon. One group of youngsters stood and sang their praises with one of their members serving as the entire rhythm section. Rick Berry would have loved it.
After all these beautiful, harmonic voices we stood and sang. I don't know what it sounded like, to be truthful. Dave kept us all singing in synch, coming in together and at the right time. Amanda's rich voice carried us through the loud speakers. But however it sounded, they seemed to love us. Everyone was smiles, yelps, and applause when we were done.
Children: The kids were great. They sat silently under the edges of the tent, patiently letting the younger, smaller ones kneel or sit in front. A whole flock of them pressed behind us, seated as we were at the edge of the tent. They grinned and whispered and fanned us. I glanced over and saw two trembling fingers tickling the back of Dave's hair, as if they'd never seen anything like it. He laughed at pointed them to Michelle's spiky hair, and pretty soon she had a small herd behind her playing with the blond spikes at the back of her head.
Message: Pastor Salatiel gave the message in ringing, poetic, fiery siSwati. Mandla Hophle, one of the ADP project managers, translated for us. It was difficult to follow with the visual distractions, the heat and the translation, but I was awed by the passion of the pastor. I was awed by the joyous spontaneity of the "Hallelujahs" and "Amens!" in English.
Ceremony: one of the members of parliament was at the service, and near the end he asked the CRCC team to come forward. He put a Swazi ceremonial robe around each of us, and a beaded Swazi necklace. We felt honored and humbled. And then we danced.
The singers and keyboard players burst into a joyous song of praise. They began to sway and move, and a dancing line started to form with Nonjabu, the ADP accountant, leading the dancing. All of us from CRCC joined the line, dancing and clapping and singing.
I am, as my wife will surely tell you, an ungraceful, uptight white guy when it comes to dancing. If I dance at home my kids will say, "Yeah, that's great dad. You can stop know. Please stop." But I danced in praise and joy, publicly and without shame. We all did, and it was beautiful. Not the dancing, but the spirit that swept into the tent, picked up strength from the ardent worshippers, and was transferred to us strangers as an unearned gift.
There was much more to the service. There was a huge lunch served to all who attended, and again the CRCC team took places of honor inside the building, out of the heat and with the pastors. I think it made us all uncomfortable to be treated in this way, but the food was phenomenal. I had a soda called Schweppe's Dry Lemon, and now I'm in love with it.
Family: Many of the sponsored children were at the service. Reed and Erin's Sisephile, Amanda's Thandiwe. Michelle sat down with both her sponsored children and also talked to her young boy's teacher about her worries. She's passionate about her concerns for them. Words can't do justice here, so I hope to drop in images when I get home.
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When the church service began to wind down Bonginkosi took us all to another project. To give us a sense of the impact World Vision can have on a single life, we met an older woman (sixty-four in a land with an average life expectancy of 33!) named Mrs. Simelane. Eight of Mrs. Simelane's ten children were dead, and one granddaughter lived with her.
She had been injured when her house collapsed in a storm, and after being released from the hospital she was forced to live in a grass beehive hut --- her former storeroom --- beside the broken house. Because Mrs. Simelane was influential in the lives of the local children and a respected elder, the local community petitioned World Vision for disaster relief. In keeping with their philosophy of empowering individuals rather than providing handouts, Mhloshene ADP assisted in locating the building tools and then split the labor costs with the community on an even basis.
We stayed in the old hut quite a while as the old woman recounted first the crushing losses, then the feeling of hopelessness, and then the new start World Vision had given her. It was easy to see --- in her wide smiles and firm handshakes --- why small isolated acts of mercy like this had helped to unite a community being ground to nothing under the burdens of HIV/AIDS and drought.
We drove back to our hotel over Mhlosheni's red dirt roads, passing dozens of finely-dressed people heading back to their homes after the church service. Many held small care packages of left over food, and we learned later that not a scrap of the lunch had been wasted.
Most of us learned for the first time on this trip how World Vision's visions statement reads:
Our vision for every child, life in all its fullness.
Our prayer for every heart, the will to make it so.
What we saw in the field gave meaning and context to this vision. Seemingly disparate acts --- feeding 500 attendees at an inter-denominational church service, rebuilding a house so that a community could continue to have a respected caregiver in their midst, sending the leftovers home to feed the husbands and little brothers and sisters who couldn't make it to the service --- these small separate acts were pulling a community back together that had splintered under the pressures of AIDS, drought, and famine.
We were beginning to see Mhlosheni ADP not as a magical provider of wonder works, but as the mortar that held a community's own inherent pieces together.
With their faith as their guide and their all-encompassing love of children giving them their focus, the staff and workers in Mhlosheni were quietly giving dignity to the broken. In doing so they were also bringing the love and message of Jesus to a stricken land.
It had been a hot day in Mhlosheni. There was no rain.
Over several conversations we'd heard the same message: the first rains had been good and made the brown land go green.
But if the rains stopped now the maize would dry up again before tasseling, just like it had the year before, and the suffering would go on. (When reservoirs are down to 37% of their capacity it takes a lot of rain to fill them to a sustainable level again.)
With the rest of the nation we prayed for rain.
* I owe that personalization of 2nd Samuel, where David danced unashamedly before his Lord, to World Vision's Andy Smith who is with us on this trip. Thanks Andy!
PS: I'm three days behind on our blog. As of this post the team is eating lunch at the Johannesburg airport, on our way home. I'll catch up on the plane. Here we come!
