love?

A teenage orphan girl recently asked me why my parents love me. My first thought was, “why would she ask that?” It seems like a question with an obvious answer but as I attempted to answer I honestly couldn’t think of a good reason. I think my response was simply because I was their kid and parents love their kids but for some reason that answer seemed inadequate for a girl who doesn’t have parents and is desperately wanting to be loved.

There are a lot of people in my life, including my parents, who really love me. The orphans I work with have picked up on this. They are incessantly complimenting my things and my usual responses are, “Oh, my mom made me this skirt- she’s pretty great.” Or “My friend made this friendship bracelet and gave it to me before I left for Africa so I wouldn’t forget him.” Or “My little sister gave me this for my birthday.” Their typical response: “They must really love you.” If love equals someone giving you stuff then yes, I am very loved.

Sophie wearing a heart necklace she bought herself

Most of the kids at the orphan center don’t have many good examples of love in their lives and you can tell they crave it. They don’t have the example of their parents’ love because their parents (at least one of them) have died. Most of them live with family (a grandma, an older sibling, an aunt or an uncle… someone who has taken them in by necessity) but they are not all treated with love and orphans in this culture are given very little and are always the last to receive anything. The kids in our program are cared for but that doesn’t mean they understand love. One of the best examples of love these kids have is the love their sponsors show them.

I’ve realized there is a simple element to love that many of the PHC orphans struggle to understand and I struggle to explain. There is something about it that doesn’t add up in our minds. Like, for instance, why my parents love me because even though they’re my parents they don’t have to love me. Or why God loves a whole bunch of dirty African orphans and widows (and commands us to do the same). Or how about why someone in America or Europe would choose to love a kid in Africa they’ve never met and show their love by sending money and letters and gifts. Why does anyone choose to love at all? I think the answer that I am struggling with is the fact that LOVE IS A CHOICE.

Merveille wants me to be her mother

My parents and friends don’t have to love me and there is no great reason for them to love me but they have chosen to and they show their love by giving me nice things and taking an interest in my life. There is no reason anyone has to support and show love to an orphan in Africa they’ve never met but there are hundreds of people who decide that they have been given so much and in return they will love someone who might not receive much love otherwise.

There is also no reason at all God should love any particular person or care about what they do but he does. He chooses to love us and he holds nothing back. He shows us his love in lots of ways but his biggest display of love was giving us his son. God didn’t have to send his only son to earth but he chose to because of his love for us. He set the example of what love is (John 3:16) and now we love because he first loved us (1 John 4:19). The desire to love and be loved is part of who we are.

Love is a choice. Love is an action. Love gives without expecting anything in return and true love does not go unnoticed.

So, my family and friends and everyone who has shown me so much love, I just want to tell you THANKS! The example of love you have been in my life is having an impact on a lot of kids’ lives here in Africa. And for all you sponsors reading this, thanks for choosing to love the orphans of the Central African Republic. These kids love you back more than you could imagine!

Learning the ways of African women: Cooking Edition

So a yeke legue ni ti awali ti Beafrika. This is the way of the women of Central Africa. 

Marie Claire, my Sango teacher, decided that if Caitlin and I are going to become good African women we not only need to speak the language but we need to learn the ways. Life for Central African women involves cooking. A lot of it! So yesterday we got down to business and spent the afternoon learning how to cook African style.

A pet peeve of mine is cookbooks without pictures. I'm a visual learner and if we're dealing with food, I need to be shown. Good news... African women don't use cookbooks without pictures when they cook. They don't use cookbooks at all! They learn how to make the traditional African food by watching their mothers and grandmothers and older sisters and neighbors cooking. Just my style! So I'm sticking with the African way and you're getting the picture book edition of my cooking lesson.

Step 1: Go to the market and barter for your ingredients. (unfortunately I can't get pictures of this. You'll have to use your imagination. Just think along the lines of crowded, dead meat smell, hot, loud, and colorful.)

step 2: prepare the nyama (meat)

cleaning the bagara (beef)

step 3: cut up the onions

our pot full of meat and onions! (yes I did use a big knife and no I didn't cut myself!)

Step 4: add a little oil and water and put the pot on the fire.

the outdoor kitchen

veke (okra)

Step 5: cut up the veke which will eventually get added to the meat and onion sauce along with some garlic, salt, and magic cubes. (yes, that's really they're called... magic cubes... or maybe it's not. It might be Magi. I can't remember. I think they are just bouillon cubes... but with a little extra magic) 

an enthralled onlooker

step 6: pound the gozo (manioc root) into flour

the cooks checking on the meat sauce

step 7: mix the gozo with boiling water

Marie Claire makes this look easy. It's not.

Gozo is made from the dried root of manioc plants and is rather gooey and bland. It's usually eaten with some sort of sauce and is staple food for the Central Africans. They love it!!!

Our fresh cooked gozo

the final product ready to be eaten!

There you have it! Seven simple steps to a tasty African meal. 

Living it up in Bangui: my random weekend

Bus ride from the orphan center to the market at Kilometer Cinq: 125 cfa

Knock-off Haviana sandals: 800 cfa

Lunch for 5 from a roadside African restaurant: 2,600 cfa

A couple dozen mangoes: 600 cfa

An hour of tennis lessons at the Bangui tennis club: 3,000 cfa

Orange sodas and fresh rolls at Café Phoenicia: 1,700 cfa

Boat ride on the Oubangui River: 2,000 cfa

Dinner at the restaurant on the rocks: 5,000 cfa

Hot chocolate from the Grand Café: 1,250 cfa

The experience of it all: priceless

Maybe I splurged a bit this past weekend but it was worth it. There are some things you just can’t put a price on. More than once I just couldn't help but laugh at my African life.

Here are a few snapshots of my random African weekend:

Christelle, Lisa, and Mylene

1) Me crammed in the back of a little bus with three high school PHC girls, a goat, a dead monkey, and a whole bunch of Africans all chatting it up in Sango as we head to the market to go shoe shopping.

2) Getting my hair braided by Lisa, Christelle, and Mylene. The process was a bit painful and I looked a little ghetto when they were done but whatever.

3) Overheating in the humid 100-degree weather. I was comfortably settled on my porch reading a book on Saturday when all of a sudden my phone started making strange ringing noises. I flipped open my phone and read the warning message: Calls or applications should be shut down to cool the phone. You know it’s really hot when even your phone starts freaking out about the heat!

Blanche in front of a random memorial

4) Playing tennis with Blanche. We should probably stick with soccer because it was painfully obvious we’re not tennis players. The workers at the tennis club laughed at us a lot but Blanche and I had fun and, thanks to all the coaching, by the end of our hour of tennis we could actually keep the ball in the court.

me and Blanche: Tennis experts!

5) Waking up freezing to a thunderstorm Sunday morning. It’s supposedly dry season but it rained for hours straight and I had to pull out my sweatshirt. I was supposed to play in a sports ministry soccer game at the university for True Love Waits but that didn’t happen and Heidi said it was raining too hard to go to church so I read, watched Psych, and ate pancakes instead.

6) Bartering for mangoes. It’s mango season and there are people darting all around town with long sticks picking mangoes off the trees and then selling them. There’s a row of mango vendors a couple blocks from my house. Why they all decided to sell mangoes at the exact same place I’m not sure but it made bartering a whole lot more fun!

7) Going for a walk with Matt and Caitlin that turned into a trip down the river. We met a random guy by the river who told us he had a dugout canoe and could take us for a ride at the great price of 2,500 cfa each. I had nothing better to do so I bartered him into taking all three of us out on the river for a total of 2,000 cfa.

out on the river!

Matt, Caitlin, and me

8) Eating out at the Ubangui Hotel restaurant on the rocks. Shortly after ordering we watched an African head out to the market and then come back after a while with the ingredients for the food we’d ordered. Nothing like fresh! Good thing there was live music and a beautiful view of the river to keep us entertained while we waited.

The Ubangui River

This is Africa.

Nothing happens fast and things rarely happen as planned. It’s random. One day you think you might die from overheating, the next day you’re wearing sweatshirts and making campfires in your driveway to keep warm. You barter for a pile of mangoes from a bunch of goofy young boys and then turn around and spend twice that amount on one cup of hot chocolate at the café down the road.

I’ve decided it’s best not to overanalyze life in Africa… 

Love it. Hate it. It’s easiest just to embrace it.

(p.s. 460 cfa = $1.00 us)

Bonne Fete de President!

Today François Bozizé was re-inaugurated into the Central African presidency… a great excuse for a national holiday (which was declared yesterday) and much celebrating. There wasn’t school today and around noon when I wandered down the normally lively streets to a café for lunch I could hear the inauguration speech blasting out of radios and televisions. Our guard, along with half the city, was decked out in the don’t-shoot-me orange Bozize campaign garb for the special occasion.

our guard listening to Bozize on his radio

There really has been a lot of hype and orange lately. I don’t actually know why people get so excited about Bozize. It’s probably his good looks and charisma. Or maybe the people were just excited the elections are officially over and they don’t have to worry about them anymore. The elections were originally set for April 25, 2010 and they only just got around to it last month.

I realized today I know pretty much nothing about President Bozizé… except that he lead a rebellion in 2003 against the last president and starting a civil war, which ended with him seizing power and becoming president and I’ve also been told that he doesn’t pay his government workers. Great guy. In an attempt to fix my ignorance and figure out why everybody loves Bozize I hopped onto the internet to do some research. I was not disappointed by Wikipedia’s long article outlining his life. It’s basically a list of military attacks, fleeing, him seeking refuge in France after a prison sentence, taking over Central Africa and ultimately becoming president. I still don’t know what he’s done as president. Not much I guess.

Bozize. photo credits to google images

But good news! He’s got plans for his next five-year term. In one of his quotes from the swearing-in ceremony today that I found online Bozize said, "For my second five-year term [or maybe it'll be a six or seven-year term if I can successfully postpone the elections again], my most absolute wish is to consolidate tirelessly the work of national reconstruction undertaken since the leap ahead of 2003." I have no idea what that is supposed to mean but it sounds positive.

What I do know is that after Bozize came to power his rule established a form of peace. After experiencing the terrible events of the civil war (I guess that’s what you’d call it) not very long ago, peace is something the Central Africans do not want to part with. I am praying, for the sake of these people, that this country will truly continue to experience peace and I, along with most everyone else in this country, am praising God that these elections were so peaceful (there’s a reason to celebrate). Happy François Bozizé day!

At last… a day full of football!

The black Adidas Sambas I brought with me to Africa are covered in red dirt and mango juice. My muscles are a bit sore and I am slightly dehydrated. I think I might’ve sweat more today under the hot African sun than in all my time in Africa combined (which is saying a lot). And… I don’t mind one bit because today I finally got to play me some African soccer!

True to the nature of living in Africa, even playing soccer comes in extremes. It’s all or nothing. Up until now, I haven’t been successful in finding people to play soccer with. I have been experiencing serious soccer withdrawal! Well today, like a rainfall after months of dry season, soccer finally returned to my life. I met a few Project Hope and Charité girls this past week that like to play soccer so we decided we were going to have a match at the center this morning. I showed up at 7am with a soccer ball and spent the next two hours slipping around the gravelly field with PHC kids playing a match of girls verse boys. I’m not sure who won but we all had a good time.

soccer at PHC

There’s more... In my search for girls (or anyone) to play soccer with I’ve been in contact with some soccer players at the university in Bangui. They keep saying there will be games and I keep trying to show up for them but they haven’t happened yet. What has happened is that I’ve made a new friend who loves soccer as much as me, a girl my age named Blanche. Today Blanche called me up and told me I should come play soccer with her this afternoon. YES! More soccer! So, after recovering from the morning soccer match, off I went to play a pick-up game in Blache’s neighborhood (we were the only two girls so it definitely wasn’t girls verse boys this time). It was great!

To top off the day of playing African soccer Blanche and I played around with some of her nephews in her front yard dribbling a partially deflated soccer ball around mangoes, chickens, and women carrying buckets on their heads and shooting on goals marked with rocks. If only every day could be like this!

Call me multicultural… call me a cultural misfit

Call it what you like: I’m a young, white, American girl living in the middle of Africa attempting to speak a tribal language and trying to learn French too all the while living with German and American missionaries, working with a bunch of really cool Africans who don’t speak any English, and hanging out with expat Europeans and Americans. I am so multicultural!

There are three main people groups I spend time with here in Bangui: Africans, expats, and full-time missionaries. It’s an interesting mix of cultures and, to put it bluntly, I don’t fit in with any of them. Maybe that's part of being multicultural but sometimes I feel like I’m a total cultural misfit missing my niche. It’s not all bad, just a little lonely and exhausting at times.

Me with two of my African friends: Matilde and Williame

I definitely don’t blend in with Africans because… well… I look different for one. I stick out like a French-fry stuck in the middle of bowl of cocoa puff cereal. I also don’t understand how African culture works and every time I think I’ve got things figured out I realize that I really have no clue. I guess there are just some things about African culture I will never understand. It also doesn't help that I’m not fluent in their language making it hard to have many significant conversations. Bottom line: being a white American girl, no matter how hard I try to blend in with this culture, I will always be treated as different.

Hanging out with the expat community I at least look like them. However, being here as an American missionary intern, I can’t say I fit in with the lifestyle of the affluent, well dressing, French speaking Europeans and Americans who go about their diplomatic work and hang out in their large air conditioned homes, eating at French restaurants, and going to cocktail parties with important people. They’re cool people and I like them and like hanging out in their air conditioned homes with them but they live a different lifestyle than I do here.

The third category is the full-time missionaries and this is the closest I get to fitting in. Most of the full time missionaries here are over 40, speak Sango fluently, go to bed early and wake up early to do lots of work. That doesn’t quite describe me so I can’t say I fit in with this way of life either.

Ellen and me hanging out at the sweet new park in town

I am very glad for the fact that there are other Americans about my age living in Bangui at the moment: Caitlin and Matt with GBIM, Ellen working at an international school down the road, and Sophie, the US ambassador’s daughter. We’re all very different but we have a good time exploring the city together and planning fun adventures. Maybe I do have my own little niche.

I didn’t write this blog post with the intentions of making you feel sorry for me… just to help you understand the unique situation I’m living in right now. I say I’m living a multicultural lifestyle and it’s true on so many levels. I’m learning the importance of being a person who appreciates many ways of life and loves many different types of people and also stays true to the life God has called me to live.