How did you start your year?I spent New Years Day traveling north with some friends to Mulanga, a heavily populated compound fraught with poverty, HIV/AIDS, violence, and alcoholism. It is also home to scores of vulnerable children and orphans. We went there to visit James, one of our CBO managers who started a feeding program for 20 orphans as well as a home based care with volunteers visiting the sick in their homes. After they started home based care at the beginning of 2008, there was such a spiritual response in the community that one of the volunteers, Pastor Blessings, started a church in Mulanga that has grown to over 40 members.
While we were there we visited the little house that James rented in Mulanga for a widow to live in and feed the childen a meal each day. James and Ma Junior told us some of the individual stories, how there was a little girl who lived far on the other side of town but had walked all the way to the house and spent the previous 3 nights there with Ma Junior without anyone caring enough to come looking for her. They told us about another young girl whose father had just been killed on the nearby path a couple weeks earlier and they were trying to figure out how to include her in the already maxed out feeding program.
We had previously asked James to dream big. If he could do anything, money aside, what would it be? He was a bit hesitant, almost as if he was afraid saying it allowed would crush the dream. A school. He mentioned one of the girls in the feeding program who was 12 years old and had never been to school. He wants more for her future just as he does for his 18 month old daughter and the other children he cares for. He even found a plot of land near the feeding point that the town is willing to give him for free, but he had no way of taking the dream further.
In the 2 weeks since that visit, Hands at Work has secured sponsorship from a church in the US to support the work James is doing as well as for building a community school in Mulanga. He came to Kabwe on the 9th (my birthday :P) with George (Hands CEO) and he was still trying to process that it was actually going to happen! Stories like these are what make me excited, I don’t know about you…
Now another fun (aka frustrating) Zambian story about visas! The work visa that Alisha and I have expires on Tuesday the 20th and when we went to the immigration office on Wednesday to get temporary permits we were told that we needed to apply for those at the headquarters in Lusaka. Luckily Alisha was heading there on Thursday anyway with her parents, so she took my paperwork and all but when she got there in the afternoon they told her they only take payment in the mornings. So she went the next morning. Then they told her no, they don’t take cash, they need a check. Problem: we’re not allowed to open bank accounts with work visas! Figure that one out. Anyways, a few hours later she somehow managed to get a bank check (still waiting to hear that story) and they told her that they can’t do anything now until Tuesday! Being that it’s the last day of our visa, it had better go through or we could be facing fines for overstaying our visa… oh yes, and it is left up to the discretion of the officer how long the permit lasts, he could say 10 days and then we’d have to pay again or he could give us the full 6 months. And these permits are not cheap…
Another challenge Alisha and I are facing is that Zambian Airways recently went under and that’s who our return flight is with. Some friends of ours were trying to get back here from Tanzania when it happened and are now out $1400 after having to purchase new tickets with another airline. Zambian Airways has taken their phones off the hook and locked their doors, no chance of working with them to get reimbursed. We are still trying to see if we can get anything back through MasterCard, but your prayer and support would be greatly appreciated!
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