New People and New Training Sessions

With the months of June and July come a new group of people to Zambia: the summer missions teams. You see them all over town, and they are so easy to pick out. This summer we have two such teams at the Jubilee Centre. One group is from Wheaton College in Chicago, of which I am an alumni, and the other group is from a church in England called Holy Trinity Evangelical Church. The Holy Trinity group arrives today and stays for two weeks, but the Wheaton College team is working with the Jubilee Centre for two months.

I love observing these groups because I have been in their situation many times before. The first weeks of your trip you are constantly questioning, “What I am doing in this strange land? What do these people at the Jubilee Centre think that they are doing?” Though the students may not say it, the questions are written on their faces. I do love the student’s questions about poverty and the way the church should deal with these situations here. I also love when the students experience something that rocks their world. It is hard to see an orphan for the first time. Even if you have a cold heart, I am confident that talking to an HIV/AIDS patient or an orphan will affect you. Those are the difficult issues that you have to wrestle with when you come to work with the Jubilee Centre, but our goal is to help people process those experiences and what it means for them.

Part of my job for June and July has turned to helping coordinate the activities of these groups so that they can experience the ministries of the Jubilee Centre. For example, last week the Wheaton College group taught in one of the community schools in Mapalo. I trained briefly them before they started teaching, but the overwhelming response from the group members was that teaching is a lot harder than they expected. Spending time with the Wheaton team also allows me the opportunity to tell all of my Wheaton stories. After my story times, they probably think I was some sort of heathen who only goofed off at Wheaton. That conclusion is probably an accurate one...

In regards to teacher training, we just finished a training session for another community school in Mapalo. For this session, I just supervised as Emmanuel and Samson, my two instructors, ran the entire training. It has been very fulfilling to watch them take over the training sessions. I think the program is in very good hands as I prepare to leave Zambia. Over the next couple of weeks, there are still things that I need to do to ensure that the program is on firm footing when I leave, but I am very confident in the future of the program. I have attached two pictures of Samson, the one with his eyes closed, and Emmanuel, the one standing behind me in the yellow shirt, so that you will have an idea of who will be running the program once I leave.