Home

I returned home from Zambia yesterday afternoon. Safe and sound! I must admit that had my family all been there with me, I would have been tempted to stay and not come back. Mr. B did a fine job of playing Mr. Mom. The house was clean, the laundry and dishes all done, and my babies were excited to tell me about all the fun they had with Daddy. He survived, but assured me that he now knows how much our home requires a mommy AND a daddy to function smoothly. I was back to work today—hitting the ground running despite being a bit jetlagged and playing catch-up with correspondence and new matters that came in while I was out.

Zambia was beautiful, tragic, joyful, heartbreaking and everything in between. A part of my heart is still there, with precious children whose faces and names I now know and love. Perhaps all those anti-malarial medicines and miscellaneous supplements I was taking made me a bit discombobulated—or maybe it was just a bit of culture shock, despite the fact that I’d visited Africa two times prior—but the whole time I was in Zambia, I felt like I was having a sort of surreal, out-of-body type experience. I tried to soak everything up and savor every moment. But so much was going on on the inside of me that I never really felt fully present on the outside. 9 days in-country was not long enough to fully settle in, process what I saw and come to an understanding of why the Lord took me there and how it works into the plan He has for my life. Seems D and I have all these random dots in our lives. We are impatient to connect them and have the final picture revealed. But instead of connecting them, God just keeps adding more dots to the page. Now that I’m home, I’m dealing with culture shock in reverse as I continue to process the things that I saw and felt, both physically and spiritually, while in Zambia. Each time I turn on the kitchen faucet, the dishwasher, the shower and the washing machine, I think of all the people fetching their water from the wells on the Wiphan school campuses, walking long distances with bare feet and carrying the heavy filled yellow jugs back home to cook their food, bathe their children and wash their clothes. I snuggle up with my girls in a cozy queen-sized bed with fresh sheets my girls and think of sweet Fridah in a cold, mud house sleeping on a reed mat and tiny piece of foam, covered with a rough, dirt-caked blanket. I wonder why I was born into my life and the precious people living in Ndola’s compounds were born into their lives. I lament the fact that there is no simple solution to poverty and that it will never go away. I am inspired as I remember people singing, dancing and worshiping for 4 to 5 hours straight in a mud church with only rough wooden pews or the dirt floor to sit on. I am outraged as I remember Mumi, a 4 year old girl with a lump on her head where she was hit with a chair by her drunken father, Ruth, a 10 year old girl that was raped three times in three days, and Helen, a 16 year old girl with 2 children aged 5 and 3 (do the math!). And I reflect on the fact that whether we are surrounded by material excesses or whether we lack even the basic necessities for living, we are empty without Jesus.

Lots to think and pray about! I plan to share some reflections and stories from my trip in the coming weeks. In the meantime, here are a few pictures: