Dream Drive

Yesterday I had a lot of time to think, and by ‘thinking’, I clearly mean day dream. It was day dreaming and not thinking because as we were driving from Chipata Zambia to Sanga Bay in Malawi; I was lost. My eyes were open and I was looking out the passenger seat’s window, but I wasn’t seeing anything. From time to time, when someone made a comment about the loads of people packed onto Canter Trucks or the current Malawian fuel crisis; I woke up and realized where I was.

I was dreaming about our little organization. I was dreaming about what we wanted and why we wanted it and how we were going to achieve what it is we wanted. My Mom kept asking questions about the hundreds of young women that we passed along the highway. They all seemed to have babies ‘chitenge-d’ onto their backs. They were all going somewhere but it wasn’t school. They all looked so young. I was dreaming about the source of the problem and trying (like every other single person in the field of development) to think about how to solve it. I kept dreaming about how we cannot just build a school. There is nothing that four walls and a roof will achieve if we leave it at that and walk away. I kept dreaming about how vulnerable this situation is that we are trying to improve. We have the opportunity to help people make their own lives better, but what does that mean…”better”? I was dreaming about my own life and what it is that I wanted to make my life better. What makes me different from the desires and needs of the young mothers we saw along our journey? I know that I want love in marriage and love in children and love in family and love in friends. Don’t I want these things regardless of my level of education and the quality of my health care? I can have and I do have the best education in the world because of where I grew up, and yet I still need love. My life is nothing without it.

When reflecting upon my own desires, I recognized that we need to be so careful with our little organization and our big goals. What improves the world and changes the world and makes lives better is love, whether it is in Zambia or in Canada. It has always been about an individual, because love is so specific. The sort of love that I need doesn’t work for someone else. Love means knowing our future students. Love means not shuffling our future students into a curriculum that works for Ontario or that works for Northwestern Province in Zambia. Love means not tossing them into a learning grade that doesn’t cater to their current ability. Love means knowing the struggles outside of a classroom that youth face in rural communities like Kibombomene.

I thought about something an American woman I met at Lumwana said to me a couple months ago. She said that the people in Zambia were so poor and she said it in a way that she felt sorry for them. It was strange because I didn’t know what she was saying. I couldn’t understand why she would think that the Zambian people were poor. I know now, it’s because she was referring to their torn clothes and to their grass hut homes that she noticed when she drove by them. That’s why she knew them as poor. I have been living with these so called ‘poor’ Zambians for over three years and their poverty doesn’t even occur to me. I always think that there must be people worse off; and there certainly are. The people I live with in Kibombomene have love. My definition of poverty has to do with love. Poor people to me are those without love. The people in Kibombomene have homes and shelter and most of them have farms and eat at least one meal a day. They laugh and they play and they love. There are no guns and there are no fences and even when there is animosity, there are still handshakes and friendly greetings. I think about places where there is war and where there is a lot of hate. Some people in the world are waking up and before they even open their eyes, their hearts are filled with so much hate. There is hate for their governments and for other people’s governments. There is hate for their neighbours and for their co-workers and for their families and there is hate for themselves.

I think that we have an incredible opportunity here with SWSC. We have the chance to turn a community already raging with love into a community educated and properly medically cared for. The combination is explosive. It has the ability to spread like a wild fire AND it most certainly will. In our case, time acts like an inhibitor and a developer. Time will pass by youth in Kibombomene that are ready to learn now, especially the ones that are vulnerable to early pregnancy. Oppositely, time will encourage us to learn how to love the community and help make the right decisions about how to see it succeed.