Watching Africa Blow Away

We drive across the East African plains and wonder at the moonscape they have become. Along the roadside, the trees stand brittle and covered in a heavy coat of dust. The faces of the little shacks along the way are the same. Fine, powdery dust has lifted easily in the dry wind and painted everything a lifeless brown. The monotony of color is strange and disturbing.

Even from my desk by the window in my bedroom at our house set in a watered garden, I can see the dust. Carried on the tired wind, it billows against Mt. Meru, the quiet volcanic mountain that our city sprawls at the base of. Instead of misty blankets of moisture, Meru is shrouded in a gritty cloud of dust. Though I don't see it coming through my window, I feel the build up on my keyboard and stop to wipe it often.

Africa, it seems, is blowing away.

Even the elephants are skinny. We passed four or five herds as we traveled last month and I was saddened by their sunken contours. BBC reports that livestock and wildlife alike are dying in droves. We pray, asking God to protect them and to not allow human life to be lost.

"The worst drought in ten years." That's what they're saying.

Now, everyone knows that East Africa experiences cyclical droughts, but this is different. A combination of man-made and natural factors have collided to set up the perfect non-storm. No rain of significance over the last couple of years and 2 harvests in a row have failed now.

"And, what will happen?" I wonder to myself. Will East Africans stop felling the trees that draw their rains? Will the farmers finally learn to protect their topsoil by ploughing with the contour of the land instead of up and down the hillside? Will the pastoralists who have lost so much grazing land reduce their herds and stop stripping the fragile environment right down to bare earth?

And will the world notice?

The middle aged folks in wealthy western countries are the kids who passionately attended or at least watched the Live Aid concerts back in the mid-eighties. Stirred by famine in Ethiopia, Bob Geldof's dream event raised about 150 million pounds in financial assistance. Those who hold the world's discretionary funds have been here when they were young and unstoppable.

But what came next? HIV/AIDS followed on the heals of famine and while it spread quietly at first, it spread quickly. By the end of the nineties, Africa was in full blown crisis and Bono was asking that we drop the debt. In a staggeringly massive effort of evil, Rwanda invited her citizens to kill each other and, en mass, they did. Since then, that bastion of stability, Kenya, has shown the real shape of her heart by dividing along tribal lines and killing several thousand of her own during elections. And Zimbabwe... What a mess. Corruption of all sorts all over the continent? Yes. All the while, global warming and global economic crisis have piled their burdens of destruction onto this continent that should be plenty able to feed herself.

Geldof's concert-going activists are tired and in financial crisis. They've grown up and have all the mortgages and car loans to prove it. They have kids with expensive education bills and many of them have lost their jobs, their homes and/or their retirement funds. Their sure foundations have crumbled underneath them and there is fear in its stead.

BBC can tell us this is the worst drought in East Africa's last decade, but does anyone out there have the stamina to help her face it?

I sit at my desk, watching Africa blow away, and pray mercy.

The Famine and Michael

Last night I sat in a Chinese restaurant in East Africa with a group of Californians while cable television beamed Michael Jackson's memorial service above us as we ate our Szechuan Beef. The Tanzanian waiters were attentive, though their real focus was on the screen. We munched our Spring Rolls as I pondered it all...

The memorial service and the entire giant "event" of Jackson's passing, felt both very close and very far. I return to LA every 2 years and I just drove past the Staples Center less than 3 weeks ago on my way to LAX for my flight back to Africa. I can easily imagine the buzzing helicopters overhead, the snarled freeway nightmare of traffic, the way all else seems to be on hold until LA decides to move on again.

But our group of 12 was out for dinner after a day of prep for some days in the wilderness. Byron, my husband, is leading them today into a remote area of Maasai-land on a reconnaissance trip, if you will, to visit different projects we are involved in. The team is on a journey of discovery regarding how they might build involvement in Africa.

Initially, we planned this time to include some interaction with the local church, the local primary school, a well-digging project we have going and a fair trade artisan group we work with. But the April/May rains failed in this area of the country and our friends in this community are now struggling for their lives. There is widespread hunger and the "f" word is now being used regularly. Oh, lest you think we're losing it, the f word in this case is "famine."

Famine. I hate that word. I hate what it does to my friends. I hate the demeaning, ugly reality of lack of food.

As I sat there passing the rice, (with way too much food on our table) I thought about those thousands and thousands of people gathered in LA to honor a celebrity. The service was a mild distraction for us. We star gazed with the rest of the world. "Mariah Carey!" "Queen Latifah!" "Oh... who is that.... Oh! Lionel Richie!" But our hearts weren't into it. At least for Byron and me, our hearts were heavy with the anticipation of what the group might find as they assess the extent of the famine and the plausibility of doing something appropriate, immediate and lasting in response. But the thousands, yea, millions, watching the service weren't thinking of famine. They were grieving a man.

And that's when it hit me...

The millions of people watching that service were totally unaware of famine in northern Tanzania, but they were experiencing famine just the same. The total distraction of millions of people by the death of one terrifically talented, if broken and hurting, man reveals a famine in hearts. There is an aching famine of hope; a powerfully destructive famine of meaning.

I didn't resent the attention given to the death of one man any longer. Instead, I grieved that there is so much devastating famine all around me.