Throwback Thursday!

I often get emails/ facebook messages from people who read this blog asking about how I came to live in Zimbabwe, or what it was like when I first moved here. This blog was started long after I moved here for a couple of reasons:
1. I didn’t really think the stories were interesting enough that people would want to read them and
2. The internet access in Vic Falls, where I was living at the time was atrocious and the effort it would take to post a blog would have driven me mad with frustration!

As some of you know, I made a commitment to a very special new friend, that I would write one chapter a month this year, so that at the end of the year I will have what might possibly be, my first book. As I am doing that (sometimes more faithfully and more skilled than other times) I am being reminded of some of the stories from when life in Zimbabwe was so new to me.

I am going to start posting one of these “old” stories every Thursday! I hope you enjoy them!

November 2005

(My first Zimbabwean experience:: On a two week short-term mission trip with ROCK of Africa to Victoria Falls, Gwaayi River and Livingstone)

I didn’t want to come to Zimbabwe. I don’t honestly understand how I got here, but I know that I don’t like it. I know that it is hot, dusty and I am sweaty.
Today my heart has changed. If I am honest, this place, Zimbabwe meant nothing to me. I knew nothing of its people, its history or its landmarks.

The first few days here, have been frustrating. I know that I am missing the big picture. I know that God is trying to show me something and I am missing it. I am standing in the midst of children in poverty stricken villages who are hungry and I am feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t know how powerful my selfishness was until now.

Today I met some boys who live on the street. They could draw sympathy from even the most uncompassionate heart, standing in a parking lot- dirty, smelling like a mixture of dust, sweat and gross beer. They are young. One of the first things I noticed is that most of them are barefoot.

For some reason my heart resonates this deep feeling of understanding, as if I have known them before, as if I am like them. I have never looked like them. I have never smelled like them. But after talking to them for a bit, I know that I have felt like them.

It might surprise people to hear that a girl obsessed with shoes would relate to a group of barefoot boys, but I did.

They each tell stories of abandonment or betrayal. Some have been abandoned because their parents have died; others have parents who left the country to work elsewhere. Some feel betrayed because their parents divorced and remarried and they don’t fit anywhere. One of them has a blind parent who sends him to the street to beg. I know that some of their stories are lies, some are true. But one thing I believe is that each of them, regardless of whether it is true or not, feels unloved.

I know that feeling. I have felt it since I was 8 years old. Since my parents divorced and left me and my little brother with my grandparents in 1987. Whether it was true or not was irrelevant, for more than 15 years my wounded heart carried a banner that said, “I am unloved”. And it made the world a much less beautiful place. This feeling caused me to run away, just like many of these boys. I sometimes physically ran away, but I often emotionally ran away- hiding in alcohol, drugs, sex or later shopping and food.
I sat with these boys for quite a while. I bought them a meal of sadza (the staple diet of the people in Zimbabwe- really it is a lump of corn meal) and beef with vegetables and listened to them. We might have looked like an odd bunch, me and these boys. But what people couldn’t see and wouldn’t know is the truth that stopped me dead in my tracks the first time I laid eyes on this group of street kids:

I am just like them.

What they look like on the outside is what I feel like on the inside.
They wear the truth of their abandonment on the outside in the form of dirt covered pee stained clothes. I wear the truth of my abandonment on the inside in the form of mismanaged emotions and the need for excess and control.
We are all the same, me and these boys, and my heart will forever be changed.