Zambia Children and Education (sort of)

In America school attendance is a right. If parents do not educate their children they can be prosecuted or have their children placed in the care of the state. In Zambia, however, there are no such rights. While education is free, parents must pay for a uniform and supplies. If you are making a dollar a day, this may be impossible. Parents are forced to choose between starvation and education.

This week I worked with the Reach 4 Life team. It is a Christian abstinence program. It also teaches life skills, leadership, and skills in decision making. The staff train student leaders, chosen by the school, and they facilitate the meetings. Once the students graduate school and return to their villages, it is the hope that they will teach other children what they have learned. The goal is to have programs all over Zambia. This program is in government run schools as well as Christian schools. This program is run without U.S. Aid. The reason, as you might guess, is that our government will not allow funds to be used for this program because it has a Christian foundation. That means all support must be raised by private donors. They have more requests for the manuals the students use than they can provide for. With more funding there would be programs in the villages where many children do not go to school. The question I ask myself is why would our government care when the government here does not care? Young people in Zambia have HIV/AIDS at an alarming and unbelievable rate.

I met a group of Reach 4 Life Ambassadors. These are young adults who have completed their education and the program and are now mentoring the next group of student leaders. I asked them what their hopes and dreams are, for not every Zambian youth has hopes beyond providing basic needs. Each of the twelve young people had a dream. One wanted to be a pastor, one a nurse, one an accountant, one to see the end of AIDS in his life time, and the list goes on. When I asked what they were doing to reach those dreams, only a few could answer. Very few children go on to college or a university. In an area where girls routinely get engaged or married at the age of 15 or 16, not one of these students was married, engaged, or had children. This program is helping them believe they can have more in life than waiting for the HIV virus to destroy them. Is it fair for us to give them a dream and not give them a way to realize it? Is it possible, that as I type this, the illusive cure for AIDS is in the mind of a student sitting in a Reach 4 Life meeting right here in Zambia?

I will end this entry with a common story in Zambia. Many girls who desperately want to go to school, but do not have the money will often sell themselves to earn enough to attend. They will have a “sugar daddy.” We laugh about this phrase in the U.S. but it is not funny here. I read a testimony from one student who had been raped at a very young age. She felt worthless and condemned to a life of prostitution. She made enough to attend school and began the Reach 4 Life program. They taught her the concept of 2nd virginity, a vow to keep sex from this point on until marriage. She was given hope in Christ that she was important to Him and that her life mattered.

Children should never have to sell their bodies to have the opportunity to attend school. I could not help contrast this reality with ours in America. I have spent eighteen years working with young people who cannot wait until they get out of high school. Many of them do not even finish their education. My first thought was to bring all my foster children to Zambia for a few months. This almost caused me to smile thinking of our girls surviving here with so little. Then my second thought hit me with a sobering force. Our children have also been sold, and they have sold themselves. Every time a judge sends them home before they graduate, where failure is almost certain, we have sold them to a life lived out in poverty and despair. When over half of the girls get pregnant with in one year of leaving state custody, they have sold themselves for free. When we fail to help them dream, we have invited them to continue the same cycle of abuse and poverty that put them in the care of the state to begin with. We tell an 18 year old good luck, hope you make it, and when they fail we point at them and say, “I knew you would.” It is the worst sell of human potential, and we do not accept responsibility for it.

It is so easy to come to Zambia and see the suffering and great needs. It is every where I turn. It is ugly and so big you can not hide from it. You can not pretend it doesn’t exist. I wonder, however, how many times we have been willing to send a donation to another country, but ignore the suffering in our own cities or even the needs of our neighbors. Do we offer hospitality to those who are different than us? Don’t get me wrong, we need to give our money, but we also need to give of ourselves. The Bible is clear in both the Old and New Testament. If we do not take care of the poor, widows, and orphans, He does not honor our offerings.

On a lighter note:
I am eating puppy chow one of the girls on the team made. It is made with corn flakes. In Zambia, you use what you have. It isn’t bad. It’s a little chewy. We have also discovered a new level of cleanliness. Laundry takes so long to do that we measure if something is appropriate to wear, not by how many times it has been worn, but by how bad it smells. We have also grown accustom to Cheech and Chong, our roaches who live in the kitchen.

Last night the power went out all around us. This happens often, but usually during the day. We were right in the middle of prayer. We got candles, finished our prayer time and then headed outside. The sky was blazing with stars. I have never seen so many. I guess the great thing about being the “dark continent” is that you can see so many stars. We girls had girls only time. We spread blankets under the stars in the yard and talked about things that girls talk about, like marriage. We saw a few shooting stars too. I have said many times, “Never miss an opportunity to look at the stars.” Until the lights came on, I was having so much fun. I was not 46 years old and they were not 20 years old. We were just women spending time together. Of course the romance of the evening was clouded this morning when I woke up with bug bites on my arms and legs, and even one down my shirt. It seems that the bugs live in the grass and they appear to have been hungry last night.

I still have not seen a snake, a fact I thank God for on a regular basis. One last thing, I was in Livingstone this week with the Reach 4 Life staff. We stopped to have lunch and I ate at Subway. I was so excited at the thought of having a vegetarian sandwich, all those green vegetables that I have missed. Let’s just say eating Subway in Zambia is a little different than in America. My team member that was with me was brave enough to eat caterpillars, a great source of protein in parts of Zambia. That was just gross to watch.

Let the SonShine,
Melinda