[muse]

            Yes, I know it’s been a bazillion years since my last blog, and yes, I do know that blogging is supposed to be a somewhat consistent, if not habitual action, but I’m of the opinion that spam-clogging the blogways with random rants is less admirable than seldom blogging at all and putting out some pretty decent thoughts, dare I say gems.  All of that stuff aside, I want to share with you a thought I had last night.

            Those of you who know me very well at all know me that I rarely go to sleep before eleven o’clock, and most of the time, I’m still up past midnight.  Last night was no different.  First of all, I spent ALL day at the office (because my Mondays just roll like that) and I desperately needed to go grocery shopping.  Thanks to my self-destructive dieting behavior (in which I aimlessly walk the aisles of the grocery store, lusting after all the food I can’t eat) I spent an hour and a half in Wal-Mart, which put me home at about ten thirty. 

            I also needed to do laundry, so I put on a load while I hopped in the shower, and by the time all that was washed and folded and put away, it was looking more and more like one o’clock.  So it comes time for me to go to bed, and you know what I do?  I go and lie down on my couch.  That’s right, the couch.  Are you ready for a startling confession from yours truly?

            I haven’t slept in a bed for about three months.

            How weird is that?  Honestly, how weird is that?  I don’t sleep in beds, at least not mine, anyways.  It’s not that my bed is bad, it’s not.  In fact, it’s incredibly comfortable with my $50 mattress pad and posture-pedic pillow and super-soft 300-count sheets.  So why can’t I sleep on it?

            Instead, I crash on the old secondhand couch I got on the cheap, bargain bin slipcover I put over it to hide the atrocious green, burgundy, and tan plaid pattern it has on it.  Every night, I think “boy, I’d really like to sleep in my bed” and I just end up on the couch.  You know what, though?  Last night, it hit me.

            I’m a couch person, and that’s okay.  It’s not normal, but it’s okay.  It’s okay that I watch shows that I’m embarrassed to admit to people: Grey’s Anatomy (too girly), Battlestar Galactica (too dorky), Kyle XY (too adolescent).  It’s okay that I sometimes wear the same shirt twice without washing it and that I sometimes forget to shave.  These little nuances that I obsess over are just part of who I am.

            You see, the truth is, I want to be a bed person.  I want to be a bed person so badly that I have been guilty of misleading people into thinking that I’m a bed person.  However, facts are facts.  I’m a couch person.  That’s the truth.

            Maybe one day I’ll be a bed person.  Maybe that day will come.  I pray that it does.  For now, I’ve decided that I’m comfortable with being a couch person.

            Some of you out there are wondering what in the heck I’m talking about.  Here’s the translation:  I am not a cool person and I do not have it all together.  So many times, I’ve bowed to the cultural pressure to suppress my quirks, those things that make me different from the status quo, because to be different is to be strange.  The most effective way to connect with people, after all, is to be vanilla.

            I’m not, vanilla, people.  I’m some strange bacon-flavored ice-cream.  If you think that’s strange, then that’s fine, it’s just who I am.  It’s only self-destructive to make myself anything else.  I am the way God made me, and it’s time I started accepting that He knew what he was doing.

I am a couch person.  Hear me roar!

The Africa Blogs II

Africa Part II: The City Won’t Feed Itself

            Durban is a paradox, a catch-22, a living, breathing contradiction of terms.  It houses the largest mall in the southern hemisphere, a veritable monolith of capitalism, complete with Armani, Gucci, and Prada shops.  You can get your hair done, a manicure, and go to the bank while your made-to-order bread bakes at the bakery and (for a small price) have a supermarket staff member do your shopping for you, all while your kids play at the interactive science center (complete with adult supervision).

            In the shadow of Gateway Shopping Centre, Durban sprawls out over the beautiful coastal landscape, a city that almost manages to look as if it actually belongs in the First World.  That was my opinion, at least, until the rickety old van pulled into the abandoned soccer field where nearly seventy men, women, and children waited patiently for the Missions Ablaze mobile soup kitchen.  They stood there, like some ragged troop of deserters from the fight of their lives, perfectly in line, perfectly quiet, perfectly behaved.

            “We’re their lifeline.”

            Roger said this without pride.  It was more a grudging and embarrassing fact that barely merited saying.  Still, I got the picture.  Many of these people might not make it without Ablaze’s mobile soup kitchens.  As we got out of the van and unloaded the buckets of soup, the ragged troop struggled to their feet, all of them bearing their makeshift soup bowls.

            These soup bowls ranged from cardboard boxes to soda bottles with the top cut off.  My heart broke for the little boy (who couldn’t have been more than seven) who only had a dirty plastic grocery bag he’d found on the street.  We unloaded the crates of bread, and set up for the soup line.  To their credit, the hungry folks waited patiently until David and Lauren nervously took their place at the soup buckets.

            They dipped their pitchers into the soup and began to pour it into whatever strange container was thrust into their face.  Lauren was a little messy at first, spilling a little soup.  The little boy she was serving nearly spilt his whole soda bottle-full trying to make sure none of the precious food fell to the ground.  Lauren looked as if she might cry.  I got to hand out the bread.

            The one little boy with the plastic bag actually managed to hold it all inside long enough to come to me.  I snuck him an extra loaf of bread when no one was looking.  I wish I could explain the feeling that the look on his little face gave me.  Imagine for one moment being at perfect peace with everything around you.  If you can imagine that, then you’ve come close to how I felt.

            I was all smiles after that.  I grinned like an idiot at whoever dared look at me, totally convinced that if I didn’t do anything else, that I’d made a difference, even if it were just an extra loaf of bread for a little boy.  I felt absolutely amazing until I saw the little boy go and sit with his friends.

            He shared the bread.

            The warm, fuzzy feeling went away immediately, and I knew immediately that I’d helped to kill his hunger today, but what of tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that?  It was like staring at every single hungry mouth on the face of the earth and not having nearly enough food to go around.  It was earth-shaking.

            He shared the bread.

            “They’re like family,” Roger said, noting my stare, “most of these kids have been abused in ways you can’t imagine.  They don’t trust anyone else but others like them.”

            Roger knew.  He had once been on the police force before he had gotten hooked on drugs and forced into life on the streets.  He can appreciate the work of Missions Ablaze.  He was, after all, rescued from the streets by them.

            “Sometimes, you can find something like a little village of these kids.  They replace one family with another.”

            There were so many of them.  Probably 1/3 of the crowd was under the age of 12.  The rest were men aged by hard times and disappointments.

            “He was a university professor.”

            The man sat by himself near the gate of the soccer field, attacking his bread and soup.

            “You get too specialized in a field here and sometimes you can work yourself out of a job.  Many times, all you need is one person better than you for you to lose your job forever.  Then, you can’t make rent, you lose your home.  You lose your home, so you lose your family.”

            Roger’s face darkened.  That’s when I knew he was speaking from experience.

            “Some people want us to stop.  They say we’re only keep the bad element in the city alive by feeding them.  You know, making it easy for them to not work for their food.  Some people think that we shouldn’t be doing this.”

            Roger stared at me, daring me to agree with them.

            “How can this,” I said, waving my arms around us, “be wrong?”

            He nodded and smiled.  Apparently, I’d answered correctly.

            “Well,” he said, slapping his knees  and standing up from the bucket he had sat on, “we’ve got four more stops to make.”

            “FOUR!?!?”

            “The city won’t feed itself.”

The Africa Blogs I

Africa, Part I: Smoke

            I’ve seen worse poverty than the squatter’s camp.  I’ve seen the fifteen-acre dump in Nicaragua where people dig homes out of piles of trash, praying that the constantly-burning fires don’t consume them in the night.  I’ve seen the barrios in Honduras where people scrape together a home out of sticks and tin.  I’ve seen the villages in Paraguay so full of desperate poverty that mothers will kill their children so that they don’t have to grow up in it.

            None of that seemed to matter as I helped the little boy in my arms put on his brand new shirt (from the big bags of clothes we had brought with us).  He didn’t ask for another piece of clothing, but he did start fidgeting when they started handing our the cake.  I laughed as I let him down.  What possibly could I offer that could compare to cake?

            I watched him scamper off over the broken glass and trash, wincing until I remembered that his little feet had felt like leather.

            We should have brought more shoes.  Truckloads of them.

            I kicked at the hard African clay, a little disoriented because I couldn’t find the fire that kept filling the air with the smoke that kept stinging my eyes. 

The kids in line for the cake and/or sweets were starting to get a little restless, so I went on crowd-control.  It’s amazing how quickly poking, proding, funny noises, and goofy faces will completely capture a child’s attention and make them forget that they’re standing in a line to get treats that they might only receive once every three months or so.  That is, it was quick for some.

There were other kids who broke my heart.  There were children in that line who stared at me with empty eyes, never once smiling.  Many of them were carrying a child, a younger brother or sister.  Many of these children, Roger (our guide) told me, had to raise their siblings on their own.  I bent down and kissed a little girl who couldn’t have been more than ten on the forehead and tickled her infant brother under the chin.  She stared at me suspiciously, gripping her brother tightly as I backed away.

“It’s the smoke,” I said, wiping my eyes.

Just then, a short, stout lady grabbed me by the hand and urged me to come with her.  She grinned at me, laughing and yammering away in Zulu.  I just nodded and followed her down the winding path that led to the lip of the hill that dipped down into the valley.  She brought me to a hot-pink structure that still smelled of fresh paint and with a theatrical flourish, she beamed: “My house.”

Her house was built out of mud and sticks.  It had a thatched roof, and the walls were covered with what appeared to be tin that had been painted hot pink.  The woman was thrilled to show me her home, and I was thrilled to see it.

“It’s beautiful.”

I heard the voices of my students coming down the hill.

“Guys, come look at this lady’s house!  Isn’t it beautiful?”

They all agreed.  The woman beamed, showing the some three-odd teeth in her head.  I backed away so that she could give them the grand tour.

“Stupid smoke,” I muttered, wiping the corner of my eyes again.

After visiting the pink house, we went deeper into the valley.  Basically, the deeper you lived in the valley, the poorer you were.  Ironically, this is where the village bar was.  The bar was a cinderblock building (a luxury in this particular community) without a roof and an American stereo system.  I tried to block out some of the familiar songs that pumped through the speakers (powered by a generator, the only electricity in the village).

That’s when I met Andrew, a little seven-year-old who had a trumpet made out of PVC piping.  I immediately thought of the $500 Selmer Bach rusting in the case back home because I’m too embarrassed to admit that I used to play it back in high school.  (Yes, I was a band geek.)  I wished then and there that I had that trumpet to give to him.

We gave out the more practical food here, the bread, the soup, and fruit.  The kids weren’t super-interested in that, but their parents came out of the woodwork, or rather, the bar.  I’m pretty sure that almost every man in that village was in that bar.  Roger had told me earlier that there was a 90% unemployment rate among the men in the community.  I asked him how the men could afford to drink if they had no work.

He laughed bitterly.

“They can’t.”

I looked out over that crowd of fatherless children.  Sure, they had genetic fathers, but they had no real fathers.  Their genetic fathers drank away all the money that their mothers brought home from working.  Their only contribution to the family was fathering more mouths to feed.

“Boy this smoke is killing me,” I muttered under my breath.

I wiped my eyes quickly, looking around for that stupid fire, but there was none.  I could have kicked myself for not charging the battery of my DV-cam.  There was so much that I saw in that village of mud huts that I wish I could have brought back with me, but I guess those images are captured only in my mind.  The day finally drew to a close and it came time for us to leave.  The kids tugged at our arms, begging us not to leave, and God help us, we didn’t want to.

As we climbed in our vans, the sunset at our backs, we all felt the dull pain of guilt.  Guilt for not doing more, I guess, or for having more, maybe.  I stared out the window as we drove away.

“You alright, Ben?”

I wiped my eyes one last time.

“Yeah,” I said, “It’s just smoke.”