I Learned All I Needed to Know in Africa

What is it about a continent of people that makes this middle aged women want to sell everything, give everything and risk everything? Even after I spent almost 2 years fighting for my life due to various diseases from my last visit, still my thoughts are consumed with going back. I spend countless hours advocating and raising awareness for it. I am driven to help...but it's the people and their faces that drive me. What is it about Africa that makes me feel alive and yet gasping for air? Africa is like a drug. It fuels me, transforms me and leaves me quivering for more. Africa has changed me inside and out...and even the small amount I have done for Africa is nothing in comparison to the indebtedness I feel. I owe everything to a continent that is plundered, forgotten, lost, and robbed. A place where children can be groomed to kill, babies raped for a cure, villages turned against each other for power that is handed over to the rich man in a different country, female circumcision is normal, breast ironing is done to "protect" daughters, ...where 1 in 11 women die due to pregnancy related causes, where parents of twins would rather "give" them away than watch them become a statistic, a place where babies die everyday and mom's bury their children and babies grow up orphans, girls as young as 6 prostitute themselves for daily bread....
I do know this Africa. I am not naive....yet, this is not what I think of when my heart wanders. The Africa I love, the Africa that beats within my heart, the Africa I know and choose to see...
Is the Africa that taught this mother of 4 bio kids to be a mother of 6. The Africa that showed me what it meant to be a mother. Yes, I knew how to kiss booboo's , give birth, do play groups, change diapers....but when I traveled to Africa to pick up my 10 pound two year old twins..everything changed. I sat there quietly with tears pouring down my cheeks and watched as their mom kiss them goodbye. She possessed a strength I have never seen. She cried. I cried. We cried for two different reasons. Both of us cried tears of gratitude...
yet only one of us cried the tears of a true mother. So, when I get frustrated at real life...life with 6 kids..two who are very needy...I see her..their mom and I take a deep breath and remember what it means to be a momma.
Africa taught me to worship. I have never in my life seen true worship until I went to Africa. If you have been to an African church then you have been touched by the people who live outside the walls. To me church is active. It is living the gospel. It is believing. It is reaching out. It is love. Inside the church, it was alive. People were praising, believing and worshiping with all they had. It was beauty in motion. I was lifted and moved. They had nothing...yet everything.
What changed me was not what was in the church, but it was those clinging to life outside. Outside one church I went to people were dying. I remember coming across what I thought was a dead man (I had seen a few). He was prostrate in front of a cross, under a sheet. I went to him, covering my nose from the smell of death...he moved. We sat him up. He knew his life was at the cross, he was surrendered. Ready to die. We lifted his head up, gave him water and prayed with him. Yeah, I learned how to worship in Africa.
Outside the same church..I met a mom to 13. She need not tell me her history. All kids looked different and some were considered, "unclean" due to disabilities. She lived in a concrete structure outside the church. They were all beggars and outcasts. I visited with the kids and got slobbery kisses from the "unclean"...They welcomed me with open arms and undeserving smiles...they taught me humility.
And many of you know the story of Gedese..the pregnant mom I met there. She had just lost her baby due to something very preventable here...pregnant again, scared and hopeless(even though she was an Olympic marathon runner). I brought her home with me and my very sick twins. The twins almost died while Gedese received care. 7 months later she delivered Christiana and they both almost died. After living with her for a year..I learned about perseverance. In spite of everything...you fight. You fight for the life of your baby. Even if you move halfway around the world with a stranger....

Motherhood
Humility
Worship
and
Perserverence

Just a few ways that Africa Schooled me