I slept better today…I think I slept till about 4a.m. and then felt wide awake after that. I got up and ready for the day. We drove out to the school we had visited yesterday and met up with Collin. Once we were there we hung out with some of the children as they played football and the girls play a game where they draw a circle on the ground and put a bunch of stones in the middle…they toss a stone in the air and pull some stones out of the circle before they catch the one they threw into the air…they keep throwing the stone in the air and each time they watch the stone go up and down meanwhile trying to shove all the rocks except for 1 back into the circle..this process is repeated until they have as many stones as they can get from the center. It takes some serious hand eye coordination and yet they seem so graceful and at ease with it. The kids at the schools love to wave and laugh and stare as we walk around because we are such a strange site to them. I watched as the “kitchen staff” basically a couple of ladies in an outdoor kitchen area prepared lunch for the children, a giant pot of some sort of stew. Once Collin arrived he went to one of the classrooms along with about 15 other students and they had their “true love waits” class. It was so encouraging to hear the students talk about their struggles and success stories with the opposite sex and how they are determined to wait till marriage. I love their hearts for God, it’s so rare to see in kids their age 13-16. We then packed up and went out to a huge area that was pretty much a landfill / garbage dump. It smelled so horrible and everywhere you look there were little smoldering fires of burning trash. The smoke would blow into your eyes and lungs as you try and look around at all the young kids and adults that walk through and rummage for food and things to sell. Collin explained how he and his “brother” (not blood, they call each other that because of what they went through together) used to live in this garbage dump and they would look for food and things to sell. As a new truck shows up to the site and empties it’s garbage, the crowd of kids and adults who by the way were all drunk and high would run with excitement to find the new things that were being dumped. There was a small pond about 100 yards away that we walked to as Collin and his brother explained how they would take a bath in it. Just along side the garbage dump is a cemetary… the Zambians don’t really keep their cemetaries looking nice so it mostly looks like the woods, with big mounds of dirt and maybe a few head stones here and there. We took Collin and his brother there and set up for an interview. They explained how they slept in the cemetary hidden from everyone and showed us the exact spot where they would sleep. The told their testimony of how they started going to the school at about 12 years old and they would show up drunk, but eventually started hearing about Jesus and True Love Waits. It’s so hard to image anyone living that way, I was struggling with the thoughts in my head of how people could be in such a horrible situation. They are now about 15 years old and you would never know they ever lived that life style. After the interview was over, we packed up and went to lunch, it’s such a bad feeling to walk through all of that and know that you get to leave from it, but that for everyone else there it is a way of life. Lunch was at about 2:30 so we were all exhausted but we still had another interview out at a place where people would go to be tested for HIV/AIDS and receive medication if they were positive. The interview went well with the founder of the organization and we packed up to head back to the mission house. We went out to a restaurant that was pretty decent, infact it had the most white people I had seen on this trip all in one place. We went and picked up 3 cases of bottled water and headed back to the mission. It has been a long day and I’m sure I will sleep well. Goto the photo album to view photos from this trip.
Tags: Africa, Italy, Lusaka, Rome, Sincera, Zambia, Zimbabwe