For the past ten years, Adam and I have grappled with one nagging question: “If Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God,’ shouldn’t we start looking for that kingdom amongst the poor?”  This calling to meet Jesus’ poorest friends has brought us to a series of beautiful corners of his kingdom, and most recently a spot in South Africa where the HIV rate is 40%.  We have volunteered, worked, wandered, and carried our two children on a lot of plane rides, but one common thread for me is always hearing people’s stories.  Even with an MBA in economic development, I still see God’s finest work happening when we of the developed world stop trying to solve problems, but just look poor people in the eye.  In people’s stories we can see a continent like Africa not as a suffering mass of emaciated HIV cases covered in flies, but as individuals—each dignified, brilliant, and beloved by God. 

With this in mind, I have begun putting together a series of articles titled “Faces of Africa.”  Each piece offers the true story of an African individual whose life demonstrates God’s grace and compassion.  They’re written with a Christian perspective, but not with the aim to preach, just to show Jesus where I see him in the faces around me.  The stories grapple with the challenges in our part of Africa, but they touch issues that apply across the world. 

My original intent with these articles was to email them directly to anyone and everyone who would read them, share them, or in any way benefit from having an African face in your email box every couple weeks.  I also contacted Relevant Magazine, and they want to post the articles on their website.  We’ll start the articles in January 2008, and they’ll run every two weeks.  As many of you know, Adam and I have enjoyed more and more writing opportunities over the last couple years (there’s an article about Phoebe in Relevant’s November issue), but this is still one of my favorite projects.

So you’re all welcome to find the articles at the Relevant site, www.relevantmagazine.com, or you’ll be able to get there through a link from our website (www.jeskelife.org).  But if you or anyone you know is interested in receiving the stories emailed directly to you, please send me an email and I’ll be happy to set that up for you (it’s free, in case you’re thinking there’s a hook here!)  You’re welcome to put these in church newsletters, use them for related classes, or however they apply. 

I have included below a sample of a “Faces of Africa” article, the story of a dear friend Charmagne.  Plus below you’ll find more about how I became interested in telling these stories.

For the Faces of Africa Series:  The Blooming Flower House

            One morning, an American nurse visiting South Africa decided to take a new side road home from the AIDS hospice where she had been volunteering.  She had heard rumors of a woman, very sick, possibly abandoned, living down that road.  Carefully steering her car over potholes and ruts as deep as her axels, she hoped to avoid what would be a third flat tire this month.         Little did she know, God was protecting more than her car that day. 
Not a mile from the hospice, the road disappeared beside a tiny house.  She stopped the car and took the keys from the ignition.  She paused, staring at the yard scattered with leaves and weeds.  There was something strangely lonely and the house.
            Meanwhile, inside, a withered body lay on a bed.  She was awake, though she did not know what time it was nor how long she had slept, nor when she had last eaten.  Over a month now, probably.  Her elderly mother brought water sometimes, poured slowly down her throat, but offered no food to spare for the dying woman.  She knew faintly that it was Thursday.  Yes, just that morning she had for some reason been moved to pray.  She did not know what disease caused her sickness, or whether treatment existed.  She knew only that death hung close.  “Lord, if I don’t get help, I will die this weekend.  This is the end.” 
But now, was that the sound of a car door?  By some strange force, she lifted herself to sitting and peeked out the window.  A woman, a white woman, walked toward the door. 
            A stream of light flooded into the room.  The woman sank back onto the bed at the sound of the door.  The nurse knelt beside the bed, clinging to the wrinkled hand of that jumble of skin and bones, whispering, soothing, now praying.  Yes, this body was alive.  And she was weeping. 
            It is this moment that Charmagne loves to tell and retell.  “She prayed for me,” she says.  “She didn’t do anything else.  Just prayed.  And promised to come back.”
            She speaks in English so clear it hides the fact that she never learned to read or write.  But she tells little about the hospital visits, the ARV drugs, the healing of her physical body, or the pounds she has regained.  What she speaks about is God, and the healing of her soul.
            “You know the next day, the day after the nurse came, I woke up and looked at my curtains.  I said ‘these curtains are so dirty.’  And I walked outside.  I saw the sun and the sky, and how bright the world is.  Honestly, the nurse still hadn’t done anything for me.  I hadn’t eaten in a month.  But I stood there and it was like walking in heaven.  I just saw everything new and I kept saying ‘It’s so beautiful.’”
            Since then her life has been about letting that beauty grow.  The nurse would visit again and again.  One day she brought paint to make bright red and white stripes down Charmagne’s door and shapes around the windows that welcome visitors like blooming flowers. 
            The day I met Charmagne she wore a bright red sweater, and even after six months of steady weight gain it hung loosely from her shoulders.  With black slacks and her kindly wrinkled face, she reminded me of my own grandmother.  She has two grandchildren, but I would guess her age at no more than fifty. 
            The darker elements to her story are typical of HIV in South Africa.  Her own mother lives just three houses up the road, but still doesn’t know Charmagne is HIV positive.  “We discussed it once and she said, ‘No, Charmagne, not you.  You don’t have that disease.’  I don’t tell her any more.  She doesn’t want to know.”   
            Charmagne shows me a photo of her nephew, a man in his twenties.  She describes her horror when she found him nearly by accident one day, hidden in a back room of her mother’s house.  Refusing to get tested for HIV, he came there to die.  Charmagne’s own mother shouted away a nearby church’s pastor when he came to insist that the young man get treatment.  The young man died over a year ago. 
            Charmagne’s family still isn’t sure what to do with her.  Her mother visits occasionally, not mentioning the months she ignored Charmagne, refusing to give her own daughter food.  Charmagne shares what she has been learning of God.  She prays especially for her mother and her son, who will be released from a several-year prison term soon.  She wants to build a house for him and his children.  Her alcoholic daughter-in-law often locks Charmagne’s grandchildren at home while she goes out drinking and sleeping around. 
            She does not give up hope for them.  “I know God changed my own life.  I drank all the time when I was young.  I lived a terrible life.  I tell you many of the people I knew have died now.  Some shot, some sick.  But even when I was drunk, I would go in the toilets because no one could find me there.  And I would pray.”
            Her latest prayer is for the means to start a sewing business, in addition to learning to read and write.  She had a sewing machine years ago but it was stolen.  “I’ll save until I can buy a sewing machine.  God has answered all my prayers so far.  I just wait and know he will answer the next ones too.”

Ways to Pray:

• For medical professionals, that they not become overwhelmed by the great demands of HIV, but have energy and compassion for each individual.
• For the breakdown of stigma around HIV—that people would get tested, discuss it openly, and find supportive family and friends.

 
My Story: Discovering Stories

Nearly 15 years ago I arrived at the University of Wisconsin with my parents to register for my first semester of classes.  Paging through the course lists, I joked with my parents, “Maybe I’ll take Swahili.”
            The idea of going to Africa seemed totally absurd.  And yet in the next four years, something changed dramatically. 
            The University of Wisconsin happens to have an excellent African languages and cultures program, and along with that a class that has gained some local fame.  Harold Scheub, a wiry little white man with more energy in the classroom than most college students on a Friday night, taught a class called “African storyteller.”  I heard rave reviews, but also that the class was always filled to capacity at 500 students.  On a whim, I tried to register.
            I got in. 
            And so began my first love of the stories of African people.  This professor had carried a tape recorder up and down the African continent recording stories from anybody who talked—witch doctors, grandmothers, and children.  To me this was a new way to see Africa—not as a dark continent of cannibals and tigers, or as a suffering continent of malnourishment and HIV victims, but as a treasure field of dignified people, brilliant and beloved by God. 
            I craved more.  By the end of college I had completed majors in English and piano performance, but squeezed in classes like “Survey of Africa,” “Malnourishment and World Hunger,” and “Sub-tropical Agriculture.”  I started applying for the Peace Corps, but ended up marrying Adam and we headed to Central America together. 
For the next eight years, Adam and I would piece together service opportunities in Nicaragua, China, and the U.S.  Finally in 2006 we ended up in the continent I started out interested in—Africa.  With that first memory of “African storyteller” class always in my mind, I expected Africa to drip with culture—folktales told around fires, children singing and dancing to century-old stories, orally passed traditions holding people together. 
            But these stories were nowhere to be found in the Africa I met.  A South African woman my age told me frankly, “No one ever told me stories, especially not about Africa.”  A fifteen year-old didn’t know that elephants or impalas ever roamed free in her country.  I held my old copy of Indaba My Children, a 500-page collection of traditional South African stories written in 1964, and considered chucking it across the room.  Why had people misled me to believe that these stories mean anything to a people smothered by the forward push of time and Western culture?
            The Zulu people I met in South Africa wore T-shirts and jeans.  They aspired toward jobs as graphic designers and taxi drivers.  They believed a strange mix of secularized ancestor-worship, often as distant from its origins as Easter bunnies from the crucifixion.  Most difficult of all, I found no local spokespeople for their culture.  I met plenty of people talking about the black people.   And in our job as microfinance directors, I found myself coming at the people here.  Even with our well-intentioned efforts to provide a hand out, not a hand up, we were joining a world of foreigners trying to solve Africa’s problems. 
            After eighteen months in Africa, I still felt disconnected from the people we had come to serve.  I resolved to sit for over an hour in silence to consider why it was we came to Africa.  Finally that afternoon I wrote in bold letters on a scrap of paper: “SEEK FIRST THE KINGDOM OF GOD.”  Not “seek a successful project.”  Not “seek the end of poverty, or HIV, or orphaned heads of households.”  Seek the kingdom.
            So I started looking.  I remembered another Bible verse about the kingdom of God: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20).  If I wanted to see God’s kingdom and his blessings in action, I decided I had better start hanging out with the poor. 
Sometimes just meeting people in their daily life gives more than enough fodder for a story.  Other times I tell people I have come to write their story, and you can just read the light in their eyes:  Someone wants to hear my story?  My story? 
I titled these pieces “Faces of Africa” not because they have any right to represent all of Africa.  Let me be clear—these are people I meet in a relatively small geographical space.  KwaZulu-Natal Province of South Africa where I live is mostly rural.  The majority people group is Zulu, but whites and other minorities struggle through their role here, too.  Unemployment is high, people scrape by on welfare grants, and the HIV rate is nearly 40% of the population. 
But Africa is an enormous continent, over three times the size of the United States, with 54 countries and over 1,000 languages.  Across that continent cultures will vary as much as between Canada and the tip of Argentina.  I can not offer details on every country from Swaziland to Libya.