My South Africa Testimony
Before I left for my South Africa trip this year, I had mixed feelings about the fact that I would have to spend my 32nd birthday in South Africa. Little did I know, God had different idea about my birthday this year and I could never have imagined what it was that God would teach me and show me 32 years after he had breathe life into me. He taught me that day a birthday is a celebration of the chance that he had given me to live. For the first time in my life, He helped me to realize that a birthday is a chance – a chance to live my life to and for the “Utmost for the Highest.” What made it so blessed was not just the fact that he spoke to me about the true meaning of what a birthday is, it was how he showed me what it meant on the first day that we spent in the Swaymani Valley, on my 32nd and most blessed birthday ever.
I, along with my 5 other teammates, saw valleys, mountains, and landscapes to die for. Hidden away in the depths of its grandeur, were pain, destruction, devastation, and death that are impossible to imagine. The faces of men, women, children and infants that I saw smiled to feign the death that surrounded them and as much as a chance to live a life for something other than death alone. As I gazed into vacant eyes of some of the Zulu men and women, it craving for just one chance, a chance to live, a chance at a little bit of dignity, a chance at childhood, a chance at a smile that comes from the depths of their hearts, a chance at what babies cry for and men die for – recognition.
On April 25, 2009, 32 years after I was gifted with life and breath, I was given a greater gift of what a birthday truly is all about. I met a 9 year old boy in Swaymani. Mildred, a social worker in the Swaymani Valley, tilted his head and showed us a swollen gland on the right side of his face and told us that this is the first signs of he was born HIV positive and/or with AIDS and it is finally showing. As we visited his house and discovered that nobody was home, we left the food parcel with him and as we left tears just flowed down my eyes. I remember I could not stop thinking about that boy.
What did he do to deserve that? What, if any, explanation could be logical or make enough sense on why he would or could be afflicted in such a way? No matter how I tried to fathom the nonsense of the situation, I could not make heads or tail of it. I kept trying to remind and tell myself, even though it made no sense, that God is still sovereign. The more I thought about it, the best conclusion my finite mind could come up with is that this boy was born into, not a chance of life, but for the purpose of death.
Where is the justice in this? Why is that little boy’s story, only one of thousands upon thousands of children in Kwazulu-Natal, who have no voice with no one to hear their bleeding hearts? Why are we not doing more about it? Kids are dying day by day and why is it that God is letting this happen. In the midst of all of my questions, anger and tears, it just seem so insufficient that I had to just accept the fact that God is sovereign and that he is and always will be the great “I AM.”
The last day of our trip, we were in an area of Kwa-Zulu Natal known as Tugula Ferry, a valley where desolation is the only hope, and devastation is the only life that they know. We visited a family of 15 (mostly children) that lived in a so called semblance of a home that was about the 500 square feet. We saw a mother lying the cold hard mud floor, huddled under a blanket with her infant, both of whom who were sick, and there was also a grandmother who was also sick. As our Pastor Peter cried out to God on behalf, he begged God to give them one chance, just one chance to live their lives, and for a chance for us who were visiting to somehow have an impact on their lives for the better.
My challenge to you Metro is, “God has given us a chance at and with life. What are we going to do with that chance?” In so many ways God has given me many, many chances in life. His mandate is that I be a vehicle of giving chances to those that don’t even have one chance. Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King said in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of bad people but for the appalling silence of good people.” Will we remain silent in the midst of this kind of pain, injustice and death or will we become the medium for the limitless possibilities God wants to use us to impart?
