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Dateline  Haiti. Feb 7, 2010 We have just completed four days of in country assessment for ERDO’s response to the crisis in Haiti.  We spent considerable time with PAOC’s global workers, Michel and Louise, Bob and Tammy.

Michel drove us through the heart of downtown Haiti.  We were left reeling by the complete destruction.  CNN images only supply a small slice of the reality.  Through the busyness of our documenting, observing, and evaluation; we stopped in the realization that people lived here, died here and still remain under the concrete.  We paused for a moment.  A child’s photograph lay on top of the rubble outside of a broken prison wall.  A Christmas tree, white with dust, lay wedged under the weight of two floors collapse.

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Nov 09 marked the end of a highly successful food aid response to 21 000 of the most vulnerable people in the war-affected areas of eastern DR Congo.

If you have read any of my previous posts on the subject, you have already heard of my first of three visits to the region, during a visit into Nindja, we spent 8 hours on the road. That got us to and from a one-and-a-half hour meeting.  The total distance we travelled was probably about 269 kilometers - 130 km each way, and about 9 in climbing in and out of potholes.

During our drive to the community, at first we passed other four-by-fours, large transport trucks with crowds seated on top of the mass of products, and small Toyotas with the suspension about to burst.  Eventually the vehicles dwindled down to the occasional motorcycle, until finally we met no other car on the road, no one passed by, except on foot.  Later we discovered that we were the fourth vehicle into the region that year.

We passed some of the most beautiful country in the world, gentle mountains, lush and green, gave way to groves of banana, tea, pine and countless small farms.  The hillsides were alive with countless women, men and children, each hard at work with worn shovels and smoothed hoes.  The observable evidence of a return to normal cultivation is on the rise.

Still, the problems of DR Congo are significant;  Continue reading »

I  was reading through a friends RSS feed, and thought I definitely have to poach this story.  Jayme and her husband Lynn work in Southern Africa with HIV/AIDS orphans.  I find their story inspiring at the best of times, but this story illustrates so much better than words such as ‘inspirational’ can.  I hope if you have never gone to do Short-Term or Mid-Term mission that this moves you to engagement as well.

There are so many reasons why you cannot do short-term mission – it costs a lot of money and time,  it will interfere with your career path, relationships and family – these are true.  But there are also reasons why we can get involved.  Which reasons do you listen to?  Here is Jayme’s story:

We were asked to stand in a line, still, eyes shut. He told us there might be people putting things on us—dressing us—but we weren’t allowed to move, weren’t allowed to say anything.

Little did I know how hard this request to stand still, stand still and just receive, would be.

He told us that no matter what we must accept what they were going to give to us. We must accept it so that they can receive their blessing.

An amazing 3 days lead up to this point. A group of Canadians, mostly newly graduated doctors—some of the most highly educated people in the world—together with a group of volunteers from a slum in Zambia—some too poor to pay the $6 a year to send their child to primary school. Two groups thrown together by God, serving each other, learning from each other, freely giving and freely receiving.

It was the last night of this 3 day event together when James made this request of us, this small request: to stand still and receive.

Eyes closed, we heard singing, yelping, shuffling of feet, and when we opened our eyes they were standing in a line in front of us. Smiling widely, James started speaking again. He told us that they had talked about what they wanted to give us to show us their gratitude. This expression of gratefulness was a surprise in itself, they were the ones walking the hard miles every day in their communities, visiting the desperate, trying to encourage the broken, building a school and road to the school and gardens for the kids, and… They were the selfless ones that had taught us so much about loving our neighbor. And now they had decided to give again, from what they had.

They came forward and started dressing us.

Gertrude came towards me, took off her own Zambian cloth wrap and wrapped it around me. Then she took off her head scarf, and dressed me in it. Loveness followed her and gave me her shirt…it just kept coming. It was overwhelming I thought, too overwhelming… and then came the dress. Lovenesswho had just taken the shirt off her back, Loveness, a mother of 5, with no income, spending all her time and energy cooking for orphans in her community.

Loveness, who had the sincerest smile. She came to know love through this community program. She had turned her life around. Kicked out of her rented one room because she could no longer afford the rent after falling ill, almost to the point of death. Loveness made her living as a prostitute. She was found by James and Sukai through her starving and desperate children. Now she is not only healthy, she is beaming because of the love inside of her. Now she spends her days cooking for other vulnerable children. It is hard work with no credit. She said to me once that if she was doing this for man, she would have given up a long time ago, but she does this for God. I could tell by the smile on her face and the light in her eyes that she wasn’t just saying it—Loveness.

This was the Loveness standing in front of me now pulling purple silk out of the package tied around her waist. And with the most genuine smile and a special light in her eyes—like it was Christmas or something and she got the best gift of all—she pulled this beautiful silk dress over my head. Could this be the most precious thing that she owned?

I felt like some one had just spilled the most expensive perfume on me. I will spend my life trying to give as much as she gave me that night.

Follow Jayme and Lynn Chotowetz (as I do) at unhushed.com

Mark Crocker

Rwanda is green and clean, a marked difference from the yesterday’s serving of Kenyan diesel and red dust.  You are either walking up or down, as the nation is made up of a collection of hills, not quite mountainous, and yet more than the foothills of the Rockies.

Most peoples first thoughts of Rwanda must be of the genocide, particularly for Canadians who have listened to General Dallaire’s memories of his time here during the 100 days.  I suppose this is why my first stop today was at the genocide museum.   Situated on the side of a hill (like all buildings in Rwanda), the museum walked us through the history of the divide created between Hutu’s and Tutsi’s.  People formally known for their integration, were actively reruited by foreign government policy and interference to discover that which divided them.  Measurements of noses, and the amount of cattle were the defining differences.  With that, the minority Tutsi were elevated and the remaining 82% Hutu and 1%Twa were relegated to secondary citizenship.

Eventually the majority revolted, a new system of discrimination was instituted to replace the old.  The radio called for the cockroaches to be exterminated – dehumanizing the Tutsi.  Militias were trained, they practiced on smaller groups, killing a few dozen here, a hundred or so there.  Eventually you get good at what you practice, you don’t even need to think about it anymore.  The new 10 commandments of the Hutu were developed and promoted in 1990.  1. No Hutu should marry a Tutsi.  Then nine more of the same. This document seems strange to me, it resonates much more strongly than similar lists.   If I had first seen this list of rules in Auschwitz, I wouldn’t of blinked – the Nazi atrocities are so well known that it is easy to simply consign them to evil in the abstract. I can’t do this as easily with this document, it feels to immediate, too modern – I can’t ignore it as ancient since it was written so recently,

The video showed men, women and so many children brutalized and burnt.  the trace of a bullet across a child’s face, the grainy swarming and hacking death of men by neighbors who carried the machetes.  Yesterday, they had fed one anothers children, today they cut off their fingers.

After walking past the images, we heard the voices of survivors, wondering why they are still here?  Guilty somehow, as only a victim can comprehend.

The footage of the Gacaca, the traditional community court, is so unpretentious.  A man in a pink shirt stands and faces the community.  He recounts his story, of who and where he cut his neighbors daughters with his knife, he tells the names and is asked to slow so the official record-keeper can write everything down.  He speaks so matter-of-factly, listing the others who were with him, the people he collected, what they did.  The community listens, it seems to me impassively, perhaps the horror has been so common, too common.  Perhaps the silence is simply the best response to the unasked questions why?  Maybe they have learned that you cannot ask why, there is no rational reason.  Is evil rational?

The wall of photographs only carries the images of  2000 people, of the more than 1 000 000 who died. It seems a pitiful percentage, and yet their faces fill four walls.  They are similar in their commonality, these are not the mugshots of bureaucracy, not the efficient record of a system recording the inputs of the machinery of death such as Cambodian memorial walls.  Instead these are photo plucked from the albums of everyday life.  Young men standing outside a shop, a crate of bottles in the foreground.  A woman, obviously cropped from her wedding photo, the dislocated arm of her husband encircling her waist.  People smiling, posed and unposed, unaware that they were all soon to be images on a memorial of murder.

I pass through the children’ memorial garden and read their bewildered questions, we head towards the car, and as I am about to walk away, a final small wooden sculpture is revealed, the simple caption, “I did not make myself an orphan”

Mark Crocker

I am heading out to the DRC this weekend, with a stop in Rwanda on the way in, as well as a trip to teach in Edmonton on the way back home.  While there, I am looking forward to helping build capacity for an ERDO project with CFGB and CIDA funding for a variety of program participants including OVC’s and  IDP’s.  In case you were wondering, the FBO or NGO we are working with is CEPAC. 

Today I was on the CDC site to check out what vaccines I might need to catch up on.  If you are a traveler, you should know the CDC site is a great resource, in fact i am adding it to my site now.  check it out.

So … how many of the above acronyms were you able to translate?  Send me a reply with your answers, i would love to hear from you. Get them right, and I will send you a dozen more to translate … Get them wrong, and you get the same prize!

Mark Crocker

Renewal. Whenever the Mission of the church is reduced into caring for the ‘spiritual needs’ of weekend participants, or co-opted into anything less than the beautiful entire renewal that God has in mind, He invites us back to participate in the story He is still authoring.

Spending time in another culture forces us out of our comfortable shorthand, bias and uninformed opinion. As we travel we often find ourselves both learning from the most resourceful people on the planet, as well as finding levels of frustration we had no idea could exist.  Our too simple solutions are proved false.

Cross-cultural partnership often means that failure suddenly exists not simply as a concept but as an actual reality.  Frequently, the beautiful idealization of partnership has been intractably dismantled.  Both parties are angry at the other for diminished expectations and it is normal for people in this circumstance to grieve a little.  Now comes the tough part … are both willing to continue the difficult path of reconciliation?

What began in the initial excitement phase of cross-cultural engagement, has now been stomped by the cruel forces of the rejection phase. It is important to realize that this is the right moment when an true and honest engagement might actually become possible.

If participants are willing to push through into growth, to commit to the hard work reality of cross-cultural relationship and effective partnership – in more than word alone – a truly engaging partnership may emerge.

New people are invited to trust the story of the kingdom.  Others, who have already walked this way, hold their hands out to new-comers as they choose to take their first faltering steps.  The practice of the kingdom becomes natural when the hand-holding and support goes both ways, developing mature partners.  Cultures around the world share the beautiful stories of how the Kingdom of God is relevant anew, as it wrestles in the Kingdom of Caesar, or in the Kingdom of Sudan, or in the Kingdom of Capitalism, or even in the Kingdom of Canada.

Here is the second part of three:

Settling in. The church was born. In time the movement developed systems to transfer their vision, songs and creeds gave language to basic theology, buildings and teachers reinforced the message, slowly the movement became a community and then an institution. The first believers faced anger and mistrust, many were killed, others recanted, some ran. Everyplace they ended up, the followers of Christ would dream dangerous dreams. They dared to ask what the world could look like if everyone made everyday decisions between the kingdom of God or the kingdom of Caesar.

The historical story of this body reveals moments of wild success as well as dramatic failure in their mission, often it happened at the same time. Great social oppression as well as great political acceptance each carried painful compromises. Sometimes the problem was from within, their mission was at times ignored and forgotten, its leaders grasped for power in the name of the kingdom, the church made horrific mistakes, and blamed it on others.

Still it stumbled along, voices from the centre called out to the margins. Power was laid down. Everyday people made the little choices that would reject Caesar and attempt to live the new kind of kingdom. The mission carried on: people believed in the dream of the kingdom enough to act as though it exists, and continue to find others peculiar enough to join the movement. The cycle of passion, settling in, discontent and then renewal continued and still carries the Mission forward.

Discontent. Every generation is newly made aware of how simply the Mission of the Kingdom (and the Church) can be forgotten, or consumed by caring for the needs of the institution. At times the mission gets sidelined and rather than existing as the purpose of the church, it becomes a program of the church. It sits alongside the youth or kids club as a line item on the budget.

When Personal Spiritual Development became the Mission of the church, missions became activity. Noble and Excit!ng opportunities for Western Christians to practice and perfect their personal spiritual growth. In subtle as well as significant ways, Mission can be reduced from inviting others into the kingdom way of Christ, into a tool for pastors to use in promoting lordship development in parish members – the problem may be, that as a tool, it works too well!

It is natural, reasonable and even commendable thing to value and promote the spiritual development and care of people. Yet, while this goal is understandable, Mission as Program does pose a problem.

This “missions for the benefit of me”, has lead to the critique by some that perhaps the majority of recent missions dollars we spend is actually money spent on ourselves. There are legitimate concerns regarding the effectiveness or ethical responsibility of naming this ‘tourism with a purpose’ as the mission of the church.

Is mission really intended to be more for the one going than the one receiving? Some suggest that a trip is 80% for the participant and 20% for the host culture, others suggest an obverse in that relationship with the 80/20 reversed. Some suggest a 50/50 split is more equitable. 60/40?

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I will get the third and final section up soon.  Any thoughts so far? I love a comment or two …

Mark Crocker

AIDS is not your responsibility
The scope of the HIV/AIDS issue is so massive that numbers become meaningless.  We have heard them hundreds of times, and yet at this moment as you read – can you remember how many zeros to put at the end? Is it another 10 million orphans by 2020, or 100 000 a month? If you did a quick Google search you could certainly discover the most recent UN figures – but perhaps that is not the point. The numbers become the white noise of information, not as a way to possibly engage with the issue. The only way you can comprehend the situation is to see for yourself.

Hands at Work in Africa.
One day George Snyman decided to see for himself, and so this African IT worker left his computer and went for a walk – across the bottom of a continent. Over the next few weeks and months he visited the mud huts of hundreds of people. George was forced to face the realities of AIDS not as a concept, but as individual men and women with names and stories. Eventually he stopped in Masoyi and decided to take responsibility for what he was not responsible. He created Hands at Work in Africa

Hands at Work has developed an inspiring model of community development. Caring for 14,000 orphans: No orphanages. Children are directly cared for in their homes by mobilizing local volunteers and simple community resources where the pandemic has hit the hardest.

The incredible advantage to Home-Based Care is that it does not further split orphans from extended family members thereby increasing their orphan dislocation. Instead the children are supported in their childhood homes and remain close to their aunts and uncles, grandparents and friends. At present, Hands At Work is caring for over 14 000 children at a resource level that might not care for a tenth of that number in an orphanage.

Come with us
Who owns the orphans of Swaziland? Whose kids are they? Not mine of course!? I did nothing to create the problem, I do not live there!

We are right of course. They are not our responsibility. Still, Jesus invites us to takes responsibility for that which we are not responsible. As followers of the sacrificed king, we are given opportunity to make that most beautiful of choices, to answer as Jesus answered. We may step out and match his stride.

This spring the Short Term Missions Network is taking Canadian leaders to the front lines of the global AIDS pandemic. Stop feeling helpless. Grow your awareness and expertise with us. Join us to see how your short-term teams can participate in long-term results.

Details: As a Canadian leader you are invited to begin your participation at the 2009 Hands at Work International Conference. This conference is a chance for you to be inspired. Find out how you can bring a successful team to participate in solutions, and learn from the lavish mistakes of others. Leaders from around the world will gather with African leaders in order to dream possible dreams.

AIDS may be the defining social, justice and health issue of our generation, walk with those who have lived the solutions. Following the three-day conference, you will be immersed in the local community projects in order to discover what you can – and cannot – do to get involved. The remainder of the trip will find us in the community for:

• Orphan care training events
• Time spent in Child-Headed Households
• Feeding programs
• Walking the dusty roads to assist Community Volunteers
• Connecting with Schools and Churches
• HIV/AIDS relief
• Training from Hosts on Relief & Development best practices
• African Safari

Where: 15 days – 3 countries. South Africa – Zambia – Swaziland.

Dates: March 24 – April 8, 2009 (15 days)

Cost: $3850 per person includes all flights and transfers, ground transportation, accommodation, guides and meals. (prices may change according to Canadian city of departure)

Click here to request more information.

Feel free to forward this invitation to other leaders who could participate with us. If you would like a pdf file to print a poster, just ask.
Mark Crocker

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The scope of the HIV/AIDS issue is so massive that numbers become meaningless … I have heard them hundreds of times, told others of their scale on numerous occasions, and yet at this moment as I type – I cannot remember how many zeros to put at the end. Is it another 10 million orphans by 2020, or 100 000 a month? I am sure I could do a quick google search and discover the most recent UN figures … but that perhaps is not the point. The numbers are too massive for me to comprehend, and I am significantly involved in the issue. For most, the numbers become meaningful only as information, not as a way to relate or to possibly engage with the issue.

The only way in which I feel I might truly face the realities of the AIDS pandemic across Africa is through some sort of participation. There are many ways to do so, but here is my favourite.

Hands at Work in Africa. The individuals that make up Hands work very hard at starting Home Based Care initiatives in the small communities across the continent. Home Based Care does what it says, it keeps orphans in their homes while mobilizing the community to care for their needs.

The incredible advantage to home-based care is that it does not further seperate orphans from extended family members – instead the children remain closer to their aunts and uncles, grandparents and friends. Secondly the cost to maintain a child in their home environment is far less than the cost to remove them to an orphanage. At present, Hands At Work is caring for over 14 000 children at a resource level that would not care for 1400 in an orphanage.

It does not hurt that George Snyman, the director of Hands at Work, is an inspiring fellow. A former IT guy, a white South African, he one day went for a walk – over the next few weeks and months he visited the mud huts of hundreds of individuals and faced the realities of AIDS not as a concept, but as individuals. If you watch this video you can hear the story for yourself. Heather Yourex, a Canadian Mid-Term Volunteer and Journalist recently put this together:

One by One from Heather Yourex on Vimeo.

What do you call it when I give you money, and you give me a report and a receipt?

To me, the answer is simple. This is the relationship of a boss and an employee. A one-way street of authority and direction.

Strangely, in some circles, this exchange of resources for receipts is often known as ‘partnership’. Perhaps you also receive the same emails and direct mail campaigns that cross my desk every week or so; all seem intent in offering a strange version of ‘partnership’ with all kinds of people from Sudan to Sarnia.

Yesterday, as one of three guest panelists for a World Vision event, I was in sunny Vancouver. The organizers of the event offered a breakfast meeting in order to present some expertise on what effective partnership may actually look like.

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