Samuel

Here is a story I wrote about a trip to Ethiopia in 2010 that I wanted to share:

Samuel Sata was one of many new names and faces that I met during a two week trip to Ethiopia. The first week was spent as part of a conference on HIV/AIDS work done by our CIDA funded program, and included delegates from our projects in Canada, Ethiopia and Niger. There was a lot of great information sharing and idea sharing, but the most impactful thing for me (and I think most of the attendees) was meeting with the beneficiaries and seeing how their lives were being affected by the work we were doing.

We met Samuel at his shop. He was stationed in the middle of a busy market in Sheshemane, manning a shop that was well stocked with food, drinks, oil, and various other common items. We got to meet his son, who was hanging out nearby. We didn’t get to meet his wife, as she was in another corner of the market selling vegetables.

Both Samuel and his wife are HIV positive. Their son is thankfully not positive. Samuel greets us and thanks us for coming, and through an interpreter he begins to share his story.

A few years ago, he was on the street. He was lost, and felt hopeless. He was contemplating suicide. Fortunately, through the advice of a friend, he found himself inside the EKHC church (our partner in Ethiopia). Once there, he found Jesus. He began to turn his life around.

The project the church is implementing with CIDA funds is a comprehensive HIV program. He was able to get tested, and once he realized that he was HIV positive, the church was able to provide him with the necessary medication and nutritional needs to allow him to live productively. They were able to furnish him with a loan to allow him to start his small business.

To me, this was a powerful picture of how the church should be running. EKHC was able to minister not only to his spiritual needs, but to his physical needs as well. They were able to help him see a future, not just in eternity but also for this life as well. I am grateful to be involved in such an encouraging project. And I am humbled to be in the presence of people like Samuel who have overcome so much adversity just to continue with the basics of daily life.

This experience also showed me a couple of the challenges associated with HIV education. First off, I learned that there are different strains of the virus, so two infected people still run the risk of causing each other further damage if they do not protect themselves. I was also reminded of how confusing it is for someone to be told that the result of their test is positive, when the news is anything but positive. I am thankful that we have good follow up counselling in our program to help with this confusion. It seems very likely people elsewhere have misunderstood the news of their test because, in everything else in life, something positive is good.

As I reflect on my time in Ethiopia, I am challenged, but encouraged. The work seems vast and impossible. The disease seems impossible to stop. But I hope and pray that we can continue to do what we can, one life at a time.

My Africa Story

(This is a reprint of an article I wrote for EI UK in 2009)


“Where your treasure is, there your heart will lie also”

Five years ago, I began to live. No one who met that 26 year old banker would have ever guessed that I would be called to serve the people of Africa, least of all me. I was settled into life in busy downtown Toronto, making good money as a banker on Bay Street. But I knew something was missing. As I sit here in Malawi, vacationing in my second home, I think back on a story that could only be written by Someone other than myself.

It all started with a phone call, and the words “How would you like to come to India?” I had just quit my job as a commercial banker, unsure of the next step but knowing that I wanted to find a job that gave me more than just a pay cheque. Two days later, I held my first passport and prepared for my first international flight. I didn’t know it then, but those three weeks in Calcutta, serving the poorest of the poor, were the start of a journey that is still beyond my comprehension.

A year later, another call informed me of the need for a Finance Director in Malawi for Emmanuel International. Unlike many of my colleagues, I did not have a lifelong desire to work in Africa. In fact, the idea never occurred to me before. So, I stepped out in faith, and trusted I was being led somewhere. And that somewhere was a land that I have now grown to love deeply. Someone recently asked me why I love Malawi so much. First of all, it is a beautiful country, full of stunning beauty and lovely people. The pace of life is relaxed. There is a simplistic beauty to things. It truly is the warm heart of Africa, and my heart is warmed every time I get a chance to visit again the place I called home for a year and a half.

One of my first memories of Malawi was a field visit to one of our water projects. We were helping communities by rehabilitating wells that had been installed by the government, but had been neglected. We were teaching the community how to maintain the well. I remember thinking that this was great, but if the people that we taught all died of AIDS and starvation, it wouldn’t be sustainable. This was my first lesson in the complexities of attempting sustainable development. There were many more to come in the year and a half I spent there, more than I can relate here.

After a year and a half in Malawi, I found my next calling in the form of Finance Director for FAR in Sudan. As many of you know, FAR (Fellowship for African Relief) was started almost 25 years ago with a partnership between EI and SIM as a response to the growing needs of the people of Sudan.

In north Sudan, the problems are very different from what I was used to in Malawi. Whereas in Malawi, the main problem was extreme poverty due to lack of resources (and for many years, lack of rain), the problems in North Sudan (from my limited perspective) seem much more related to the effects of generations of conflict. We are trying to help people rebuild lives, communities and families, and sometimes just to survive, all in the midst of a country that ranges from areas of tenuous peace to areas that are still involved in full scale conflict.

I find myself overwhelmed by the issues that surround me. All I can do is take refuge in prayer. I search hard for God in the midst of so much pain and suffering, and more than once I find it easy to relate to the disciples who wanted a conquering hero and not a suffering servant.

Working in relief and development can be very challenging and humbling. I must constantly remind myself that I am here to learn as much as I am here to teach. It is the most difficult yet most rewarding work that I have ever done. Somehow I get the feeling that this is how it is supposed to be when we choose to follow Him and do His work. As Paul says “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

A day in the life

I saw on my friend Lisa’s blog that she had posted “A Day in the Life of Lisa”. I thought this was a cool concept and thought I’d give it a try. If you’re reading this, it means that I decided it was worth posting and not just scrapping. So, here goes my day:

7:00 AM – I’m up. I don’t know why I wake up at 7 whether I’m working or not, but I do. As per usual, I start my day by scanning emails and reading the important news of the day (ie the hockey preview section on tsn.ca. Looks like my beloved Canadiens are considered a strong contender this year. Too bad Sudanese broadcasters can’t spell hockey, let alone broadcast it) BTW, am I the only one who gets excited to get email, and then disappointed when I discover that most of it is spam? I guess this is the modern equivalent of expecting a letter from a friend to come in the mail, and having to wade through weeks of flyers and hydro bills and past due notices for your cable bill. (I just had a sudden flashback to university when one of my idiot roommates didn’t pay the cable bill and it was cut off during exams, causing my other roommate great anguish as he scrambled to find another way to procrastinate). Maybe I shouldn’t write this before I’m fully awake. But then any of you who knows me well knows that this is how I think.

8 AM – finish reading the headlines, and decide to finish writing my vacation stories blog (which you’ll find underneath this one, I presume). Start to get hungry for breakfast, but decide to hold off until my guests (friends who work in rural Sudan and have come to the city for a break) wake up.

9:20 – realize I’m getting more hungry, and decide to start my new morning routine. 4 days running of the rowing machine, followed by some stretching and strengthening exercises for my back and knee which had been bothering me a bit lately after intense squash games. Let’s hope I can keep this up.

9:50 – finished cleaning up. Have just enough time to grab a quick breakfast before heading off to church (since Friday is the Muslim prayer day, it is also my day off and thus is the day I go to church)

10:35 – arrive at church 5 minutes late for worship practice. Surprised to discover that others are showing up on time now, and slink into position behind the microphone. For those that don’t know, I have been singing as part of the worship team now, and have been teaching them a few new songs on guitar during our practices. It is quite fun!

11:50 – I got word during the pre service that the speaker today is known for his longwindedness, so I decide to make a run for it, since it’s 45 degrees outside and the church is not always well cooled. I justify it by saying that I have to get caught up on work, despite the fact that I have to get caught up on work mainly because I haven’t gotten much done in the last couple of days (which I justified by the fact that the rest of Sudan, including everyone else on my staff, was on holiday to celebrate the end of Ramadan. I, however, had grand plans of using this time to get caught up on work that piled up while I was away on vacation.)

12:10 – get home and have some leftover peanut chicken for lunch that Chris and Bev made the other night. The night before that, I made them a teriyaki stirfry. I love having guests around. Cooking is so much more fun, and I eat better and healthier.

12:30 – contemplate going up to the office. Decide to pause to update this journal, and remember that I was having trouble transferring music to my mp3 player. Decide to investigate this.

2:00 – finally made it to the office. I discovered that some of my music discs are scratched and don’t play properly. No matter. I have thousands more songs. While I was trying to load my mp3 player, I decided to watch an episode of Spin City to kill time. Time for serious work now though.

4:00 – well, that’s enough work for my day off. Looks like I’ll have to put in some time tomorrow though. Gonna catch another episode of Spin City, and then head off to squash.

4:30 – on my way out to run some errands when I ran into Tim online, a friend who is getting married next year. It’s sad to miss weddings, but it’s not cost feasible to make it back to Canada all the time. We’ll see what I can work out.

5:15 – ran out of time for the errands. Head to squash with Edwin. The squash game wasn’t all that great. We had a good game on Wednesday, but both ended up a little stiff and sore today. Still good fun.

7:00 - had some more peanut chicken for dinner. Got to use up the leftovers. Ran into Mike and Leah (two fellow African travellers that I met in a mission prep course in Canada before I went to Malawi) on line and chatted for a bit. It’s fun to keep in touch with fellow travellers.

8:30 - Decided to put on a movie, and watched The Bucket List. I really enjoyed this movie. Two all time great actors, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, tell a great tale of two guys who just found out that they have less than a year to live, and decide to live out some life long dreams. A lovely little film.

10:00 – Chris and Bev (my visitors and houseguests) come back and ask if I want to watch a movie. I figured I might as well (Chris makes great popcorn), but didn’t want another heavy drama, so we settled on some really light, cheesy 80s romantic comedy called “Can’t Buy Me Love”. Totally cheesy and sappy; fun for the whole family.

And there you have it. A day in my life, that strangely managed to cover much of my Sudan experience. Hope you liked it!

European vacation - Fall 08 edition

Well, I finally made some time to write out my latest adventures in travel. For my first stop, I travelled to Belfast to visit my friend Jane whom I had met in Sudan. I enjoyed the warm hospitality of her and her family and was reminded of the peacefulness and simplicity of rural living. And she was very tolerant of my need to cover my two main cravings that go unfulfilled in Sudan: bacon and beer. Made for a great breakfast every morning :)

On the first day, we headed out to check out a rope bridge, and to check out the Causeway. It was a fun day of exploring, in spite of the cold rain. We then warmed ourselves by a fire before finding a great thai restaurant for dinner (another one of my cravings that I fulfilled quite frequently during my trip.) The next day, we went to a different city (I'm too lazy to go find the names) where there was a lovely walk along the water that led up to this mountain:

After that, we headed to Belfast to check out the Botanical gardens. Though not as impressive as the ones in Cambridge I saw last year, they were still quite beautiful.

After dinner in a great Mexican place, we went to see the movie Get Smart, a rather witty and entertaining piece of mindless fun (I also miss movie theatres in Khartoum)

On Sunday, I got to check out her church in Belfast, both the morning and evening services, which were excellent. In between, we had a lovely Sunday afternoon meal with the family which reminded me of family Sunday meals of years gone past. And we also went for a walk around a beautiful pond.

On Monday I was off to Galway to visit my friend Melissa, someone I met in Toronto years ago who is now managing a hostel on the Aran Islands, just of the west coast of Ireland. We met up in Galway and enjoyed a night of live music (yet another thing I greatly miss), before heading off to the island the next day. However, we also made the mistake of settling on seeing the movie Step Brothers when other movies were sold out. I could rant in great detail, but in short I cannot state strongly enough that you should not EVER see this movie. Unless you want to see 40 year old men acting like 8 year old imbiciles for 2 hours, with a generous helping of offensive, inappropriate, and not particularly funny jokes. But I digress.

Out on the island, I enjoyed 3 days of fun, relaxation, good views, good food, good company, good entertainment, and good Guinness on the island. I also got to watch the movie The Commitments in Ireland, thus accomplishing a loosely defined life goal. On Friday, I stopped in Dublin for a night and explored a bit of the bar district, checking out some traditional Irish music. Saturday I made a stop at the Thomas Beatty library where they had a very interesting and informative presentation of the major world religions, including some very ancient writings and artifacts. I loved it.

Saturday afternoon I headed to England to link up with Andy and his family (one of my coworkers in Malawi who has settled back into farm life in England) I always enjoy seeing him and his family, and it was fun to see the kids all a year older. Kezi into some of the music I have listened to, watching Caleb grow into a soccer player (I’m glad he’s found an outlet for at least some of his seemingly endless energy supply). I enjoyed some wonderful home cooked meals, and I always feel like I’m part of the family when I’m there. Andy and I also snuck away one night to see The Dark Knight, the latest Batman film. I generally avoid the superhero films as I don’t buy into the genre (I’m not a comic book guy), but I had heard so much press about this film that I had to check it out. I thought the movie was very good, and probably as good as it gets for this genre, but I think that the people who talk of it being an all time great movie are overstating things.

On Tuesday, I ventured down to London for a meeting with one of our partners, Tearfund. On the way, I was able to grab a quick lunch with my friend Karen, another friend from Toronto who had just the day before finished her work as a grad school student at UCL. I’m glad I got to see her before she heads back to Canada. The meeting was productive, and worth the trip. I also got to link up for drinks with one of the Tearfund staff who came to Sudan to do some training. I love that it can be such a small world sometimes.

The final stop on my journey was a long weekend in Utrecht with Lisa, another friend from my church in Toronto who moved out to Holland the same time I moved to Sudan. I was proud to discover that I was the first repeat visitor (and glad to be welcomed back and to see her again) We had more amusing, interesting, and thought provoking conversations about God, living abroad, the changes at our old church in Toronto, and what the future may hold. I love getting her perspective on things because she has a way of communicating things that is honest, unpretentious, amusing, and thought provoking all at the same time. I got to meet a few of the friends that she has made, by going to movies, drinks, and being part of a dinner party she hosted. I also got to meet up with one of my best friends in Sudan (Edwin), who is a native of Holland and was passing through on his leave. And while Lisa was at work, I got to explore some of Holland, including the Corrie Ten Boom house. For those of you who don’t know who Corrie Ten Boom is, read the Hiding Place. It’s a great book. Here is a picture of the hiding place itself, for those that know the story.

All in all, it was a great trip. A few random side benefits of the trip included:

- a useful meeting with a physiotherapist to discuss some lingering knee pain. She helped me identify the problem and showed me some good stretching and strengthening exercises that have helped solve the problem. Which is good, because I was missing my regular squash games. :)

- I had lots of airplane/bus times to get through some reading. I read a bunch of books on the trip, ranging from the light novels of Jeffrey Archer and John Grisham, to a classic by Oswald Chambers (Gems on Genesis), another good book by Philip Yancey, Fever Pitch (not one of Nick Hornby’s best), and finally Perelandra by CS Lewis (considered by some of my friends to be the best book they have ever read)

- I discovered the wonders of sweet chilli sauce, which is quickly becoming part of many new recipes for me. I discovered it at a very punnily named place in Dublin called Abakebabra

- I met a couple of South Africans during some long layovers at airports, so I now have a couple of connections if/when I ever get a chance to travel there

- I got to walk for miles a day at a leisurely pace in places that weren’t boiling hot and seemingly endless plains of sand.

- I got to visit my 12th country. I’ve still got a ways to go to catch up to my boss’ 90 something countries (don’t know that I really have the desire to attain that though.) I knocked Ireland off the list. Now, the tops on my list are Italy and Australia. All in good time.

Field visit the second

Well, I finally had a chance to get out to one of our field sites again. I really enjoy the field visits, as it is nice to get out of the bustle of Khartoum into some open spaces. It’s also very useful to meet all of the field staff, and to see firsthand some of their constraints and challenges.

A couple of amusing tales that arose out of my visit:

- our first stop was at a school, and it reminded me of Malawi in the best possible way. In Khartoum, foreigners are commonplace, but in the villages here in Sudan, foreigners are a rarity, and I was treated to being surrounded by thousands of curious eyes that followed me around wherever I went. Not something I want all the time, but it was fun to be surrounded by children again and see some of what my cheque signing pays for

- at another site, we were sitting under a tin roof when it sounded like rain had started to come down. As it turns out, in very hot conditions, you can actually hear the roof expanding. You may think I’m crazy, but I found this fascinating.

- Even more fascinating was a story I heard from our Program Coordinator as we were driving around. I was commenting on the dearth of chickens around, and talking about how in Malawi I was used to seeing chickens running wild in the villages. He told me that in Zambia, they actually paint the chickens to camouflage them so the eagles won’t swoop down and eat them

Anyhow, it was a fun visit. The next big thing on my schedule is a trip to Europe for 2-3 weeks in September. I’ll be visiting Ireland for the first time, and then travelling onto Holland, possibly stopping in London if time and money allows it. All for now!

Life in Khartoum - random snippets

Well, it seems my blog has been suffering from neglect. I just rarely find the time to write something that I think people would want to read. I was originally just intending to use this as a vacation blog, but since I haven’t had a vacation in a while (not counting a month back home in Canada), I haven’t had much reason to write. But I’ve been asked to provide a few stories of life in Khartoum, so here are a few anecdotes:

- the driving here is horrendous. People with no regard for road rules, and the bizarre contradiction that everyone seems to drive around like they are 30 minutes late for their wedding, but yet everyone seems so laid back and inefficient. I can almost guarantee that the guy at the phone company/government office/internet provider probably tried to sideswipe me because they were in such a hurry to get to the office, but if I want service this week, they seem to be in no hurry at all. Can't figure this out.

- Fortunately, I just moved into a flat attached to the office, so Idon't have to deal with the crazy morning traffic commute. Makes my life much better. And I have internet at home now so I can do things like catch up on personal email at 11 when I can't fall asleep rightaway.

- the heat is almost manageable again (down to the high 30s some days, low 40s in others). It’s really unbearable here for the better part of 3 months, but fortunately I have AC at home and in the office. And the rest of the year it’s quite nice, with not a hint of that minus 20 nonsense we get in Toronto.

- Me and my expatriate co workers derive constant amusement from the language mistakes that are made. Most of you have heard me tell of Malawi, where they mixed up l’s and r’s quite frequently, resulting in a headline in the national newspaper “General Erections to be held across the country on May 18th”. Now, nothing that funny has come up yet in Sudan, but the other day I got a list of our staff from HR, and it seems they didn’t know that the abbreviation for assistant is ASST. So, I was looking at our list of ass. Mechanics and wondering why we had so many proctologists on staff

Ok, that’s enough for now. I’ve got to give a shout out to my best friends Dave and Colin, who gave me the fantastic banner (pictured above my desk) for my birthday (you get extra friend points if you pick up the reference)

Random Facts about Me

So, it seems I’ve been meme’d. I don’t actually know what that means, but I assume it is blogger lingo for telling me I’ve been asked to do something. On my friend Lisa’s blog (http://lisatheknitter.wordpress.com/) there is a post of 7 random facts about her, and a request for me and 6 other bloggers to do the same on our blogs. Now, I wasn’t going to post this since it didn’t really fit in with my blog theme, but I figured 1) I haven’t really posted anything in a while anyway, so I guess the theme wasn’t working, 2) I was too lazy to start up a separate blog for random musings, and 3) attractive women can talk me into just about anything.

Mom, you can probably not bother passing this one around to the grandfolks. I’ll try to write a proper update later. Anyhow, without further adieu, here are some obscure facts about me:

1) I can solve the Rubik’s magic puzzle in under 5 seconds. Not the cube, the puzzle. Never bothered with the cube cuz I only like puzzles with defined beginnings and endings.

2) I can name the last 50 Stanley Cup winners, and more useless sports trivia than I’d care to remember, and this is the reason why I feel compelled to memorize Scripture.

3) When I was 15, I narrowly missed out on an invitation to the math Olympics.

4) I don’t drink coffee or tea, don’t like vinegar (and thus, most condiments). I like cooked tomatoes and cheese but not raw tomatoes and cheese.

5) I actually derive enjoyment out of aspects of my accounting job like reconciling the books, making fun and functional spreadsheets, and finding obscure patterns.

6) You know that dream some people have where they show up to school in just their underwear? I have an occasional reoccurring fear that something like this actually happened to me at one point.

7) When I was finishing school, I lined up a series of investment banking interviews, before realizing that I had no interest in investment banking. This led to a rather amusing stream of interview events, including:
· Quoting a book in an investment banking interview that basically talked about what a miserable profession it was
· Miraculously getting a second interview with the above company, and deducing that I had little chance of advancement, proceeded to take advantage of the free alcohol and issuing an open challenge at pool
· When another interviewee called me to inform me that I was being passed on, I responded with “That’s ok. I’ll probably see you in a couple years, working for your competition, and making you regret your decision. How do you feel about that?”

Sadly. My efforts were all outdone by a friend in a similar position, who: in the middle of the interview, recommended that the interviewers chase down the previous interviewee (the top student in our class) instead of wasting their time on him; and juggled in another interview, and when asked why, said “I figure this is all one big dog and pony show, so why not?”


So, there you have it. I don’t know if anyone really reads this blog, so these facts may remain obscure. If you’re reading this and you have an active blog, let me know, so I can actually follow the rules of this ‘meme’, which are:

The rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog. - DONE
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird. - DONE
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs. – NOT DONE (I don’t know 7 people who have active blogs)
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

Have a good one!