What I've Learned

I've been losing sleep over the last few nights, because I have 18 days left in this continent. When I come back people are going to want me to say things. I don't exactly know what things I am going to want to say.

I am vexxed by the complexity of the issues here in Africa. They're not fixable. This removes the possiblility of an honest rallying cry. I've heard rally cries about Africa. They're nonsense- Humanistic visions of a future filled with peace and harmony, saturated in guilt- as if it's every rich person's fault that people are starving. The only thing humanity can do to Africa is make it more western or more eastern. Trust me, both the west and the east are doing their best out here in Gabon, and both are making strides.

The problem is the corruption. The corruption birthed of human evil. The weed in the field, which if pulled up, will destroy the good plants around it.

The problem is actually just evil. I think Africa has a way of pulling back the curtains on life, and exposing the skeleton bones of what's going on. Evil in the United States is cloaked, or made beautiful, or joked about. But in Africa, the evil is raw.

In movies and television, evil is a thing. It is the bad guy. It is an entity seperate from the good guys. But in reality, evil is the filth we cover ourselves with, that we consume ourselves with, that we plant in our own hearts, where it grows outward through our veins and vanities to become a part of us.

No matter how many Konys you kill, there will be more. No matter how many dictators you overthrow, there will be more. Because at the end of the day, dictators are no more than people whose evils are centered around thirst for power.

So what I'm saying is, although a lot of unsavory things happen here, Africa is nothing but a gritty version of what is happening all over the world. People are evil.

This by no means implies that we should therefore not do anything- quite the opposite. But I think a new attitude is in order.

We need to shed the humanistic worldview that has formed a sedimentary crust over the Body of the Church. Humanity is hopeless. We the Church cannot, and will not, fix the world. We need to stop focusing on physical problems.

"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood..." Ephesians 6:12

One of my major challenges here was watching people disrespect the work we do. They have nigh upon zero respect for the money and work put into the hospital- they throw garbage around when garbage cans are but a few steps away. They horse on the preposterously expensive water fittings (that the hospital provides for free) They throw plastic bags full of waste into toilets, and then when the toilets inevitably clog, they just continue to use them until they are literally piled high with filth, caking the walls and floors.

But what I've come to realize as of recent is that the desperate frustration, and occasionally, the hatred, that I feel in the face of that is nothing more than my tendancy for humanism collapsing on itself.

The true Christian faith has no hope for humanity. The Christian faith hopes that humanity, as it falls, will choose to fall at the foot of the cross.

The Clunk Heard 'Round the Cave

There is currently a team of college age kids (hurray, people my age!) at Bongolo. They are here on behalf of Envision (a missions group) to help clean out a bunch of buildings.

Today, however, we decided it would be fun to check out a place called the Leopard's Lair. This was supposedly where the leopards hung out, back when there were in fact leopards here. It's a tiny little cave, formed in the side of a very steep hill (you can't stand on it without holding onto something.)

We traversed down, swinging from tree to tree like observant Georges of the jungle, and finally arrived at a giant rock formation, which was about 35 feet high, and almost unnaturally square and flat sided, jutting out from the face of the hill. Joanna Thelander mentioned that this is most likely the place where locals performed human sacrifice many years ago.

We came to a large split in the rock, wide enough to walk through, but not comfortably. We followed that to a sort of porch like room- open to the sunlight on your left, and leading up into a cave on your right.

I went ahead with another guy into the cave, just to make sure nothing had decided to inhabit the little cave recently (that same guy had been there an hour or so before to clear a path and make sure we could find the cave) Luke and Sarah, who I believe are 9 and 8, also went with us, trailing a bit behind, and then a girl named Keisha came behind them.

When we were going in, Luke was initially in front of me, but I put him behind me. He asked me why, and I said, "If anything happens in there I want it to happen to me and not you."

Foreshadowing, much?

Bret, (the aformentioned "guy") climbed up onto the higher level, to give people a hand up so they could see. The room is maybe 15 feet tall, and 10 feet in diameter. I was still on the lower level. Sarah and Luke were nearish to me, and Keisha was maybe 3 feet to my left.

To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what happened. Bret stepped some way somewhere, and a big ol' rock fell down.

It was about two feet by one foot by 3 and a half inches.

I think I blinked- then I saw a little flash of white, then my head started hurting, and my neck felt squished, like someone was playing accordian with it. My only thought was "is this really happening?"

At this point, it gets a little blurry for me. The way Keisha and Bret tell the story, it went like this:

The rock broke over my head. Straight in half. My karate instructors would be proud.

The rock missed hitting Sarah by about 6 inches.

I bent over and took a step to my right, to try and avoid getting hit more.

Then apparently I straightened up, saw a flashlight, and started walking toward it. (cuz that was the brigtest source of light.)

Keisha saw that I was in a state of shock and headed me towards the exit.

I remember feeling a trickle of thick warmth coming down my face, and thinking "there's no way that I am ok right now"

It was at this point that I started saying (over and over and over again) "I have to go, I have to go..."

I made my way out of the cave, and gained the ability to think. We didn't have any bandages, and so thinking about the fact that headwounds can lose a lot of blood, I whipped my shirt off and pushed it onto my face.

Several things happened then that were really remarkably convienient.

First of all, Keisha is a nursing student. She knew the basics for head trauma. She checked me for concussion and all that jazz.

Second, Joanna's phone got reception, at the mouth of a cave, deep in the jungle, in a valley. She was able to call for someone to bring bandages.

Third, Bret is actually Superman. That whole Clark Kent thing was a falsified diversion, to hide his identity. He ran up the hill (the one you can't stand on)
to get the stuff from the person Joanna called, and then essentially fell down the hill to bring it to us. He had to do the falling with a bunch of stuff, so he only had one hand to catch himself on various trees as he tumbled.

And Fourth, the rock didn't hit little kids! Remember that foreshadowing I was talking about?

God really protected me. Dr. Thompson said the whole thing could have very well killed me, and here I am writing a blog post.

Panga- Camping on African Shores

The waves lazily meander to their happy deaths at shore, becoming bright white bubbles floating along the coast. The grass rustles, pestered eternally by the naive wind, which cuts through the screened porch without thought.

The distance is dizzying, and the blurry blues of sea and sky call into question the beginning and end of both.

Above the ceiling, bats peep away their grievances with one another, bickering day and night.

A lizard crawls across the vast expanse of screen in search of nothing in particular. Having found it, he scurries back the way he came.

The sea heaves an eternal sigh, never pausing to take part in the trivial act of inhalation.

The strip of green trees between the grasslands and ocean looks like a monk's haircut, blue baldness stretching out to eternity. I am perched on that monk's nose.

We went to a church service on Sunday, which was in a cement building across the road from a little cluster of wood and tin shanties. These are separated by a bit of distance from the rest of the village, more wood shanties and a couple nice cement buildings. Maybe thirty structures in total, if that.

I use the word shanty because for me it calls to mind a sort of seafaring motif. These villagers are hardly seafaring, despite their proximity to farable sea, but the things that they scavenge off of the beach often make their way onto houses. Nets, buckets, plastic stuff, etc. Furthermore, the wood used to make the houses takes on a weathered driftwood look, either because they got it off the shore, or because of the salty atmosphere.  If it were not for the people, the village would look like an abandoned fishing town.

I digress. Church. We drove up just as they were starting singing. There were two women, one man, one girl slightly younger than me, and a guy about my age. Also a large pile of children, varied ages, all elementary to early middle school. I found the demographics curious.

I got the standard awed look because of being a giant. We sat directly behind the kids. The kept peeking at me and then hiding their faces, giggling and embarrassed.

One chunky little girl, toddlerish age, gave me an unabashed stare. I blinked at her and smiled.

The face she returned can only be described as flirting eyebrows. She looked at me, serious as a heart attack, and waggled her eyebrows, maintaining her grim facade. I laughed as silently as possible, and a game was born, except now she smiled when she made eyebrows, knowing that it would get a reaction out of me.

Meanwhile, the pastor of the church was delivering a message in French. He was dressed in an understated pinstripe white and tan shirt, and khaki pants. He spoke quietly. The woman next to him translated into Nzebe, the local language, shouting every bouncy consonant-heavy word into the soul of all twenty or so audience members. She wore a bright green and blue dress, with ribbons of spicy yellow running about. the two of them were quite the pair.

There was also a little girl with a bump on her belly. It was concerning. It didn't seem to cause her pain though, and she seemed to have a fun time poking it. That was a weird combination of worrisome and adorable.

The beach is the sort of picturesque paradise that's been written about so many times that it's tough to say something new. The sand is white, and as fine as sand gets. When you stomp down on the dryer stuff, it makes a protesting squeak, like wet rubber brakes. The sand is graduated from soft powder near the trees to perfectly flat hard surfaces at the edge of the water. The sand constantly moves about, but never changes shape.

A while's walk down the beach, there are piles of volcanic rocks, with a glistening black shell like bubbly oil, and a center the color of dirty blood.

There's a non-permanent stream cutting across the beach in a preposterous diagonal. Small sandbars make water hills, which seem to defy gravity staying upright. In the deeper portions, the water takes on a tea color, which is decomposing plant matter washed out from the treetops. It actually smells nice, like tea,  but very subtle.

Juxtaposed against the bright white of the beaches, the dark green of the jungle, and the lively blue of the sea, is the dull white, gray, and black of driftwood logs.

These massive logs get cut down somewhere inland along the river, and are drifted out to the ocean to be picked up by big rigs. Some miss the mark and hit the beach.

Alone, these logs would look very dreary, but next to all the other colors of the beach, they add unique character to an ocean's edge that would be otherwise cliche.