Sustainable Families & Free People

[Written in Ghana, revised and posted in U.S.]  In this final week, I’ve had a chance to meditate on Africa as scenes of life in the capital city drift by.  On the road, jammed bumper to bumper, one finds people-moving tro-tro’s [ancient Benz vans fuming diesel] and 2010 Benz cars with single occupants.  At every stop, street children run up to the window, offering gum, handkerchiefs, water.  The smell through my window is a combination of diesel, dirt, garbage, stagnant water, and peanut soup at every corner ‘chop bar.’  Africa lives in Hi-Def.   Unlike the West, where the only place we find Hi-def is in our living rooms; here, the Hi-Def is everywhere – turned up to 11 on the volume dial, cranked up in reds, golds, greens, the smell of death and the fragrance of life.  In the West, we live under the century’s weight of refining and automating ourselves into blandness.  We take out the garbage on Tuesday nights.  On one level, humans are the same everywhere, the same needs, the same basic desires.  But Africa in Hi-Def means you can’t escape the gritty details, even with the window rolled up and the AC on. 

It brought back a memory from last week when we rode the bus the 700 Km from Bawku to Kumasi, a bus so crowded that our bags were on our laps.  I sat on the right side, which means (if you know your geography) that we were travelling due South with sun on me the entire day.  Crammed into the back of the bus with Dad, myself and Elisha (the sem student travelling with us), were two young men and a girl, probably about 15 years old.  The girl, whose name was Adiza, was sent by her mother to Kumasi to live with an uncle.  She was given a phone number for the uncle, but nothing else.  Elisha bought her lunch because she was out of money.  He visited with her as the trip went by and found out that she didn’t even know where her uncle lived.  We dismounted from the bus on a dark Kumasi street, and hailed a taxi.  Adiza got down too, and just stood there.  She looked frightened.  Elisha asked her where her uncle was.  She said the phone number she was calling was turned off.  At this point, what do you do?  You’re standing on a dark street in the second largest city in Ghana, with a girl who has nowhere to go. 

This is a common story across the globe, not just in Ghana.  The global sex trade grows, in large part, because families struggle to survive forces produced by globalization, and children end up falling through the widening cracks.  After a generation, families don’t know how to be families anymore.  Maybe we never really did.  Still, Elisha was appalled that any African family would consider sending a child unaccompanied in this way.  She walked off into the darkness, and the three of us exchanged a glance.  What would you do? 

Our car pulls to a stop at a busy intersection in Accra and a young man comes up to my window and raps on it.  “You like phone card?  I sell you phone card.”  He says.  He, and a hundred-thousand other young men in this city.  But I’m still thinking about Adiza.  What she needed more than anything was a family that actually cared.  Cared enough to take care of the personal details, which is the whole point of family.  And in this, Adiza is not alone.  She joins a vast company of youth across the world with this single thing in common:  fractured families, surviving families, broken social structures, powerful forces driving parents to strange landscapes – all these work together to widen the spaces within our society, and the children fall first. 

I wonder if things aren’t even more soul destroying for young people in the West.  The cumulative effects of industry and technology have now been in place for generations.  We gave away our interdependence for a bowl of microwave popcorn, a remote, and an Xbox controller.  We didn’t notice losing one another because we had enough machines filling the gap.  We move rapidly from one sugar high to the next.  We don’t talk much about suffering.   In fact, our lives are built around escaping suffering.  And children -- the root and fruit of suffering -- are nice, we suppose, if they’re dressed in the latest fashions. 

I don’t know if you would consider the following an antidote, but it’s been one for me:  My family taught me that suffering is a part of life.  They breathed a sense of wonder into my days.  We were rarely in too much of a hurry to talk.  I was allowed to be creative, though much of my creation as a kid, I admit now, was lame.  We lived community and interdependence as a child.  The door was open, and whoever walked in got a meal.  Who, in his right mind, would spend a month sharing the same bed [actually, I counted, it was ten different beds] with his father?  I must be insane!  Most people here in Ghana still get it.  “Oh,” they say, “You are helping your father.”  Like, this is the way it’s supposed to be.  I am in my right mind.

It’s what I started calling a “Joshua Education.”  Joshua was a young man who got to follow Moses around for 40-plus years before he became a leader.  That’s a long time to be number two.  Yet, another ‘Joshua’ (Jesus’ name is ‘Yehoshua’) tells us whoever wants to be greatest must be the servant of all; whoever wants to enter the kingdom must enter as a little child.  Where’s the leadership development strategies that cover this approach?  My own University -- Concordia in Portland -- wants to ‘prepare student leaders to transform society.’  I don’t think Concordia University has a 40-year plan for this, though.  How can students transform society if they aren’t being transformed, themselves?

The car lurches through the tangled traffic, and I wonder if I’ll ever get the taste of diesel off my teeth or the image of discarded plastic bags filling the choked gutters.  Our driver, Nat, the Stephen Hawking-Albert Einstein-Maverick of taxi drivers all rolled into one honks his horn and yells at a guy blocking the intersection with his vehicle.  In the U.S., our culture is tuned so tight, none of us honk in rightful fear that the other man has a gun and will use it.  Here, Nat honks, yells, gestures, the other driver yells back, there’s a release of energy, a puff of dust, and both cars move on their respective ellipses, reeling between potholes and pedestrians like paper planes on a sudden breeze.  Nat mutters a curse, then smiles to himself, swerves and changes the dial on the radio.  Dad preps his class notes in the front seat, oblivious.

I think back to that night on the streets of Kumasi.  A young teenage girl with nowhere to go walked off into the darkness.  Three men made eye contact.  We all knew what needed to happen.  We were not going to let a girl wander the streets of Kumasi all night, hoping for a call from an alleged ‘uncle.’  I said to Elisha, “Go get that girl.”  This may have been the first time in the history of the dark streets of Kumasi that those words were followed by a free taxi ride, a free dinner, and a safe place to sleep.  For one night, we were the family that Adiza didn’t have.  [Epilogue:   her uncle finally contacted us, and we made sure the connection was made and she got to her family.]

I’m about to wrap up the written portion of this adventure.  A number of you have followed the journey.  One might ask, “Why is it important for your family to continue to be connected to the people of Ghana?”  I suppose, if we have reached a point where organizations and programs take care of everything, where families have no role in making a better society, then we SHOULD not go back.  We should leave the work to NGO’s, non profits, and corporations [when it’s all said and done, for practicality’s sake, we may have to start one].  But I hope what I’ve shared previously gives justification for this principle:  that families and family stories remain at the core of good change in society.  And our family is not finished.  We’re a bridge, and we hope to keep the span open. 

It’s fitting that as I end this piece, I’m sitting in a sweltering classroom with pastors-in-training telling their life-stories to one another.  Feel free to disagree with me, but I think our entertainment industry has removed all the wonder from our American stories.  We’ve CGI’d ourselves into an entertainment coma.  Among these men, I’m hearing phrases like, “Jesus appeared to me in a dream, and said ‘go and work for me, so I did;’” and, “I got an anonymous letter of invitation to come to the training school, but when I arrived no one had sent it, but I think it was Jesus;” and, “as a boy I had a dream about ‘gathering people’ and a mentor explained that I was called by God, so I started gathering children to hear bible stories when I was six years old…”.   And there are more.  Does getting everything visioned, goaled, programmed and prepped into an airtight strategy also mean that wonder and dreams – real, literal dreams -- get locked out?

This trip was no reminiscence.  Dad and I found ourselves challenged by the vigor of the people and the needs of the society.  Pastors and evangelists in Ghana have no pension plan, and they need one – if not for themselves, then for their families.  Many of them are too poor and cannot afford the public transportation to visit their parishioners who live beyond a day’s walk – motorbikes would help.  Most of them are missing precious resources for study – things we take for granted because we’re online.  The 14 students in the classroom all left families behind who need support while their husbands and fathers study. 

We were reminded that in our family, lasting work means investing in people.  We believe we are still called to serve people in Ghana in some capacity.  The best Good News these days is tied to helping people join sustainable family-systems and become free persons.  In fact, after watching Jesus, I’m unsure if there is any other kind.  Remember Jesus’ words to announce his calling, “. . . he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor” (Luke 4: 18, 19). 

Example:  My appreciation for the morning sunshine and the beauty within even this dirty city are intricately connected to the protein-packed breakfast I had this morning, the clean water I drank, my anti-malaria medicine, and my restful sleep.  Take away any of these, place me at the mercy of someone else’s whim, and you should not be surprised that I’m not thinking of the beautiful sunrise or the possibility that I can change and grow like a plant in sunshine.  To be free is to be free in every way, or none at all. 

So, here are some things in which you may see us engaged in the months and years to come [feel free to join us]:  sustainable communities that go beyond a classroom education, support for healthy rural living, technical skills training, care for neglected children and families on the margins, and more.  We’re not sure how we’re going to do it, but we’re sure of the need, and we’re sure of the supply.  To quote Hudson Taylor [first missionary to China], “God’s work in God’s way never lacked God’s supplies.” 

The ‘70’s, ‘80’s, and ‘90’s saw our family make lasting relationships with many people in Ghana.  We’ve returned after 15 years, and those lasting relationships are even stronger.  If you’re interested in hearing more or participating in some way, please be sure to shoot a quick email to mom at ellamum2@gmail.com with your details, and we’ll keep you on the list.  [And stay tuned for the final video!]