Hippos, Crocodiles, and Me

They say that the most dangerous animal in Africa is not the crocodile, lion, cobra, or black mamba, but the hippopotamus. More people are killed by hippos each year than by any other animal (unless you count malaria-carrying mosquitoes). Hippos seem surreal in their size, giant cartoon balloons bobbing in the water, bouncing on the river bottoms like astronauts walking on the moon. But hippos are fiercely protective of their personal space, and the space of their offspring. They are like pressure cookers ready to blow at any moment, and when they do they become a blur of white-hot rage.

Even so, I will never forget a visit to a particular village when a local elder stood up and thanked us for coming. "If there is anything you can do for us," he said, "please help us get a well so we don't have to keep going down to the river for our water." In the past few years, several women from the village had gone down to draw water, as usual, for cooking, washing, and drinking, and were killed by crocodiles. Just as they reached down toward the water, the crocs exploded from just under the surface and took them. Their orphaned children were there in the church. The people's only defense was to go to the river in groups so that if someone were attacked, the others could beat the animal with sticks in the hopes that it would relent and release its victim. We talked with one young man who showed us the scars from multiple gashes on his legs thanks to such a rescue.

Stories like this remind us that Africa is in some ways truly another world. Challenges like these, the conditions that many villagers live in, the abject poverty, from our rich, Western, point of view can be appalling. To tell the truth, it can also be  fascinating in its lurid details. It can break our hearts with compassion and sympathy; it can also confirm us in our wealth and comfort. (I remember a teenager once asking me to support him in his upcoming trip to Mexico. I asked why he was going. He said, "Because I want to know how lucky I am.")

But here's the deal: The Outreach Foundation is not working in Tete Province simply  to help people have lives that are more like ours. They are working to invest in people, to treat them with dignity, to share the gospel in its many implications, and, maybe most of all, to learn from them. Some people think of mission as "us" going to help "them." Certainly, there are needs, here and there, that need to be met as we reach out as the hands of Christ. But what I discovered is that "they" have more to teach "us." The poor simplicity of their material life does not get in the way of the spiritual reality of life the way our material obsessions do so often for us. This is not to romanticize their poverty, or to settle for conditions--like the need for clean water--that can and should be addressed; it is to recognize the truth that the lives of so many church members in Tete Province is brimming with joy and hope and peace in a way that eludes Westerners (okay, me) so often.