Yearning to Personalize Africa
These are pictures of the shrine the girls and I made awhile back for Sudan. We’ve been following the extremely sad situation there for about a year now. Sometimes it weighs heavily on us. Sometimes, to be honest, we hardly think of it at all. It’s just somewhere to send money…someway to teach the children about tithing.
At other times the various awful things that are going on in Africa break our hearts. This is one of those times, when the reality of what is happening to God’s children there — and what we as Westerners are causing to happen there — stares us in the face and dares us to blink.
We are in a stuck place. We know we must somehow move forward, but we don’t know how. So we’ve written to two or three friends for advice and cousnel, for connections and ideas. And we write to you as well, knowing that six degrees seperate us all, and you never know from whence help will arrive.
An Open Letter from Breaking Hearts regarding Africa
Dear Friends,
As a family, we have been increasingly touched by the various plights facing the nations of Africa. For the past year our family has been studying the genocide in Sudan, and we have been financially supporting relief efforts there. We are also supporters of DATA and the ONE campaign and deeply mourn the loss of life in Africa due to AIDS. The voice of Bono has been ringing in our ears — when he said that the thing our generation will be known for is that “we watched a whole continent go up in flames while we stood around holding watering cans.”
Last weekend was our 13th wedding anniversary, and one of our housemates watched the girls so we could go to dinner and a movie. We chose watch The Constant Gardener. Seeing the facts we already new about Kenya and the Sudan played out in such a finely wrought film brought us to a stand still. We couldn’t move after the movie. We drove home in silence. We sat in the driveway unwilling to get out of the car.
We are tired of holding watering cans. What more can we do?
It ceases to be enough for us to simply send money. We would like to be involved in the tragedies in Africa on a more personal basis. But we are stymied. What can we do? How can we do it?
Rachelle is fixated on adoption while Paul is interested in assisting in making systemic changes. We know that both of these impulses smack of white imperialist pride. We don’t know what we should do our how we can help. We do know, that as western colonists we must offer our repentance and our apologies. But we are not sure what any of that looks like.
We are writing to you because you are among the handful of people we know who are directly connected to an African nation or an aid program in an Africa nation. We would be interested to hear what you might have to say to us…what God might prompt you to suggest to us…as a course of action as our hearts continue to break for this beautiful, struggling continent.
We await your advice and counsel.
Sincerely,
Rachelle and Paul Mee-Chapman
If you can, please share what your friends say in response to your email…
I’m very curious to hear your responses as well.
Our group is continuing to stay in touch with our photojournalist friend and the people working with the Anuak tribe who has escaped after genocide in Ethiopia by crossing the border into Sudan, but needs fresh water sources and livable conditions in their refugee camp.
For more info on this particular group, feel free to email me or go to my blog and search for “sudan”, which will be a starting point. Or check out this article in a Spokane area paper:
Link: Anuak in Spokane visit refugee camp
I’m very curious to hear your responses as well.
Our group is continuing to stay in touch with our photojournalist friend and the people working with the Anuak tribe who has escaped after genocide in Ethiopia by crossing the border into Sudan, but needs fresh water sources and livable conditions in their refugee camp.
For more info on this particular group, feel free to email me or go to my blog and search for “sudan”, which will be a starting point. Or check out this article in a Spokane area paper:
Link: Anuak in Spokane visit refugee camp
I will also be interested to see what suggestions you hear. Since coming back from working for 2 months in Africa earlier this year, saying “I will never be the same,” I’ve watched as the thick cocoon of American privilege and apathy has wound around me again. I’m more on the “systemic change” side myself after having seen the situation, but what I saw affected me on the personal side, of course, and put a face on things like trade justice and antiretrovirals. I’m doing things like signing up to fast and pray for the World Summit this week, and writing my legislators and calling the White House whenever an issue that’s related comes up… and buying fair trade whenever possible… and creating all sorts of Google alerts to help me keep up with stuff the media don’t cover in America… but I don’t feel as if all this is truly enough to stay resonating with God’s heart on the issue.
My guess is the best advice for now is self-education. Then a visit. Then lots of prayers. Who knows? Maybe God wants you to live there for a while
Many people have email in Africa now. Foster some kind of community link with projects that exemplify interaction and collaboration between developed world and local initiatives. Try to avoid building a link with a western-focussed operation which would simply be about talking to ex-pats living inside a compound, making a foray into real Africa from 9-5.
I can give you some such links if you want.
my friend neritia had a brilliant post about this back around G8 time. here’s the link:
http://neritia.blogspot.com/2005/07/grrrrr8.html
hey all,
i didn’t hear back from any of my directly-connceted-to-africia friends via email. but you all came up with some good information here. i especially loved neritia’s post (the link is in comment 6). thank you bobbie for referring me over to her site.
shalom,
rachelle
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