Will You Come With Me to Africa? (and Imperfect Prose)

I forgot to cancel the baby updates.

At first I just wasn’t able to because that would mean she was really gone–the daughter we’d dreamed of for a year, the one we’d felt God showing us with the chubby cheeks and brown hair, who danced in a white dress down the corridor of our hearts.

When I lost her in June, I simply moved the updates to spam, because I couldn’t let her go.

And I forgot to delete them.

This month I checked my spam folder, and it told me I was full-term and ready to deliver. 

I cried.

But then I wiped my tears and straightened my shoulders.

Because I may not be pregnant. But I’m still expecting.

I’m expecting the birth of a dream I’ve had since living in the Congo as a little girl. A dream to return to the place where faces laugh with the whites of their teeth. A place where Mum made jam from mangoes and papayas, where my brother was born six weeks premature, where he and I bathed outside by the old Acacia tree in buckets of soapy water. Where Dad taught blind men how to plant seeds and Mum knit colorful afghans with blind women and I couldn’t talk, but I listened. To the hum of the cicadas, to the laughter of children in the streets, to the thanks murmured through the trees. 

I’m one of a team of World Help Bloggers flying to Africa January 15th to 24th. We will be sharing what the Christian non-profit organization is doing in the slums of Uganda, amongst former child soldiers in Gulu, and within the hearts of genocide survivors in Rwanda.

I will be flying to Africa both as a storyteller, and as a mother (tweet this). As a woman who’s known both miscarriage and birth. And I’ll be meeting women who know suffering to a degree I can’t even imagine. Forced to watch their children die because they have no food or clean water and we’re to be ambassadors for them. To fight for them, to be a voice for them.

To birth hope, together.

Will you go with us, friends?

We’ll be making art in Africa. We’ll be taking paints and canvases and doing art with the orphans in children’s homes there, and you’ll have a chance to buy those pieces of art and help us raise funds for a new orphanage. Because there aren’t enough mothers and fathers for all of the children. There aren’t enough families for all of the lonely, so we’re building them a home (tweet this).

I’ll be telling their stories–stories of babies saved from slums, of women who’ve become caregivers to hundreds, of countries wrecked by loss and war. And together with the rest of the World Help team:

• Matt Appling, Author of Life After Art
• Michele-Lyn Ault, Writer at A Life Surrendered
• Noel Yeatts, VP of World Help and Author of Awake
• Dan King, CEO of Fistbump Media and author of The Unlikely Missionary

we’ll be painting a new picture of Africa—one rising from the ashes of poverty.

Will you read?

Will you share?

Will you give?

Will you come?

“Let us be the ones who say we do not accept that a child dies every three seconds simply because he does not have the drugs you and I have. Let us be the ones to say we are not satisfied that your place of birth determines your right for life. Let us be outraged, let us be loud, let us be bold.” ~ Brad Pitt

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Operation Baby Rescue | Jerry’s Story from World Help on Vimeo.