Today I left Zimbabwe

My country, my home for the past three years, the place I love more than I can comprehend, is struggling through the most difficult situations it has ever faced. That is saying a lot. We are talking a country that has been through colonization, war and genocide. Today we are not at war with another country or rebels, but with a force so dark that it permeates our entire nation and it even contaminates the world: we are battling corruption and injustice. It is no longer Zimbabwe that is impacted, but every person, each individual who knows what is going on and doesn’t try to help. Injustice is like that. We can have opinions about war torn countries, we can say we are for or against and in our reasoning, we can justify why we aren’t doing something to help struggling people.
But can we ever rationalize injustice. We over looked a harsh dictatorship, we over looked a hyper inflationary economy, we over looked violence, exorbitant prices and escalating HIV raters, but today the people of Harare do not have a clean water source. Today if they drink their water, they die. Today there are no teachers, today there are no hospitals. The nation is collapsing. There is no provision for basic human rights: water, health, education, food, shelter. Things that most of us don’t have to think about are the things that consume the thoughts of the people of Zimbabwe. We spend our entire days planning where we will get food or water.
I know it is hard to comprehend, but it is real. There is a nation of people:11 million of them who don’t know what to do, or how to move forward. I love them all. I want to give them a solution, but there isn’t one. The best I can do is to grab one individual at a time by the hand and share a meal with them, or provide them with safe water, for that moment. What do we do in the long term? It is hard not to lose hope. They ask me how I stay positive, how I can really believe that things will turn out alright in the end, and inside I laugh because I see myself in the moments where I am not positive, where I feel the situation is hopeless and I hurt and I cry and I lash out. But I also how others see me and so I tell them, there is no hope without God. If you know the one true God, then you can have faith that no matter how hard this life is, it all turns out fabulously at the end.
My country is at its darkest point and I am leaving. I am so excited to see my friend Lori. I am spending her first Christmas in Australia with her and I can’t imagine a better gift for me than 3 weeks with my best friend, by sister. Before I get there I am spending a week in Hong Kong. IT will give me time on my own to spend with God, to process through what my brain has seen this year. What my heart protected itself from. I still cry some days in Zimbabwe, but it is like the overflow that my heart can’t contain. Or it’s on the rare occasions when one of my best girls: Christie, Jesika or Lori either step off a plane to see me or get through on the phone to talk to me… I am not sure which is more difficult: travel or calling!! But in reality, I don’t process through the reality of what is happening, I move from day to day on God’s strength and then He gives me opportunities like this to let it all out. I am going to try to do that before I get to Lori, so that I am ready to just enjoy a holiday.
My brain tells me that this trip around the world: I am going to South Africa, Hong Kong, Australia, then back to the states for 6 weeks before I head to the UK and then back to Zim, is so exciting that I am so blessed and I am going to have a great time. My heart tells me that I am a traitor for leaving NOW. My selfishness is afraid that a miracle will happen in Zimbabwe before I return and I will miss it. I am on an airplane right now flying to Johannesburg where I will spend a couple of nights, and I am starting to feel the emotion well up inside of me. My feet have touched Zimbabwe for the last time for a while and I wish I could explain the connection that I feel to this place. It is like a piece of me comes alive when I am there and it dies when I leave. I have never felt that way about a place before. I am glad that I don’t have to leave Africa until Thursday. I can see some of my Zimbo friends that live in Jozi, Arnold especially… I can eat Sadza and call it pap, I can listen to African drum beats and hang on for just a little longer.
My eyes pour over with tears. The man sitting next to me asks if I am ok… I tell him I am, that leaving is so hard. He looks at me like I am strange. He is South African, he is going home. He tells me he can’t imagine living in Zimbabwe, that life is too hard, that you can’t even buy food. I smile and say that even with all of the problems, there is no place else I would want to live and my heart laughs at the irony and I know that it is true. He asks if I have a boyfriend in Zimbabwe and I tell him no, that I have a different kind of love for the place. And he nods and goes back to his magazine.
Tonight I will start to feel the pain of MY hurts for my country, but I will also get to relive the memories of the miracles. This has been a good year in so many ways. I am not listening to the voice in my heart that condemns me for leaving. I am being called away for a little bit, the work that I do when I am on the road is important as well, I know that. MY country and my friends and family are going through difficult times in America as well. My best friend needs to see me, I need to see my dad and my brother, miracles in my own family. I know that this time away will leave me refreshed and that I will be strengthened. I will come back to Zim even more prepared for the battle that exists in each of our lives.
Today I left Zimbabwe, but I carry her in my