I woke my first morning in Swaziland to a voice message from Braden. My phone worked! It's frustratingly intermittent, but I can send messages to the kids, post to this blog, or talk to Joie about the things I found tugging on my heart and conscience here.
With my old connections safe and secure, I could start on what we all came here to do: make new connections. We're here to connect to the land, the people of World Vision and most importantly, the children we all serve.
Wednesday morning at 7:00 we met for breakfast: Ruth, our C2C coordinator from the US; Andy Smith, a World Vision staff member and former pastor on his first World Vision trip; Amon, the christian commitment coordinator for Swaziland World Vision; Bonginkosi, the tall, bespectacled, always-smiling International Church Partnership Coordinator for Swaziland; Nonjabu, the accountant for Mhlosheni ADP; and Musa Mayisela, manager of Mhlosheni Area Development Project (ADP).
We left the hotel for the hour-long drive to the office of the Mhlosheni ADP. In daylight the land seems even more at odds with itself than we first thought: Umbrella acacias, the iconic flat-topped thorn trees of the African Savanna, grow on the same hill as fir trees. Giant roses grow next to cactuses. The hills and low mountains seem jumbled together without a plan.
Rocks push through the surface everywhere, making the earth look the dogs we see running around here, with each rib showing clearly through their tight skin.
The blacktop ends a few miles from the hotel, and all travel around and through the ADP is on rutted red dirt roads. In a few days this would take its toll on all of us (especially our self-elected driver Bonginkosi) as we traveled throughout the ADP meeting our sponsored children and viewing projects.
We walked into the ADP to the sound of the staff and sponsorship promoters - about 30 people - singing a full-voiced African hymn in the conference room. They definitely knew how to tell us we'd finally arrived in Mhlosheni.
We learned that the ADP serves an area approximately 25 square kilometers, or about 15 square miles. In it there are 17 communities, joined primarily by dirt roads going up and down hills and crossing seasonal rivers on slab bridges.
In the ADP are some 5200 World Vision-registered children, and about 3670 have sponsors. The ADP's main focus areas for these children and their families is water purity and sanitation, food security in a place where half the population doesn't get enough to eat, HIV/AIDS education and treatment in the disease's hardest-hit area, and humanitarian efforts and emergency relief. These people are hard-working saints.
The ADP pays school fees for some 425 students who wouldn't otherwise get to attend. It helps secure water sources for people that frequently need to walk 4 miles to fetch water for cooking and cleaning. It helps sustain the home-based caregivers of AIDs patients. It builds Hope Centers for preschoolers, providing them with preliminary education while allowing their mothers to work or seek medical care. And so much more.
After our orientation we headed off to the first of two projects we would see that day. Driving deep into the Mhlosheni Hills we were shown a rudimentary milking operation with cows and goats funded by the ADP. The milk collected from the cows (and yes, it turns out African cows can understand Dave's "Yeah Boss" cow call) provides the Hope Centers with milk for the children. A local pastor milks the cows on his parent's homestead (who we also met) volunteering his time and experience to the project.
It doesn't sound as if watching a pastor milk cows could be a faith-assuring experience. But there was something in it that spoke powerfully to the way so many in the community rally under World Vision's banner for the sake of their children.
Andy shared with us an Ethiopian saying that defined the experience and gave it tremendous context: "Many spiderwebs spun together will capture a lion." I thought that our CRCC sponsors were webs, as were the pastor milking his cows and the volunteers who transported the milk to the Hope Centers. In my thinking the lion isn't AIDs or the persistent drought, though they're powerful enemies. The lion is Indifference.
We came back to the ADP office for lunch and then headed to a Hope Center in the afternoon. It was the first of many experiences we'd have in the next days with kids like these. Not sure how to deal with stone-faced, uncertain kids at first we began snapping their pictures on our digital cameras.
When we flipped the cameras around and showed them their own stony faces they invariably burst into giggles and laughter. The girls would hide their mouths behind their hands and the boys jeered and pointed at their own images. It was a great icebreaker and we used it many many times over the coming days.
With the day winding down everyone began thinking of the next day's agenda: meeting our own sponsored children.
I realized quickly that our time is too full here to be able to post blog entries every day. We meet for breakfast at 7:00 AM, come back and have dinner until 9:00 PM, and then get ready to do it all over again the next day. No wonder I'm so behind!
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