40 Years of Memories

I was fortunate to travel to Zambia, Zimbabwe and Swaziland with Dan and Wilma Wiens in the winter of 2004. It was an amazing experience, with many memories. A few that come back repeatedly, with the feelings still attached, are as follows: I remember clearly arriving at a village in Zambia (Chongwe?) and our van being instantly surrounded by women singing and dancing with such joy and abandon, and I remember then thinking: “They have so little and are so joyful, and we have so much and forget to be joyful.” I remember how the women in Chelstone came around before meals, with a basin of water, and how they washed our hands, and I thought of Jesus as Mary Magdalen washed his feet with her tears. And how we had only a few pieces of meat in our dish, and then realised that they themselves would not have any meat to eat. So we too did not eat our meat. And the grandmother who was looking after her 20 grandchildren because the parents had all died of AIDS, and how she looked up at us with tears in her eyes and said: “How can I do this?” I remember the distribution site in Zimbabwe where thousands of people sat on the ground in the blazing hot sun waiting patiently for hours to get their bags of grain, and how we of the tour all had our cameras out taking advantage of this wonderful ‘photo-op’. And then how I realised what I was doing – making a travel ‘memento' out of this experience of hunger. As I put my camera down in shame and embarrassment, and looked around, I saw that all the members of the tour who had been doing the same thing, were all now too putting their cameras away, looking chastened and humbled. These and many other memories and experiences of that study tour stay with me to this day, almost 20 years later.