I discovered the book in January, less than three years after returning from my second two-week trip to Zambia, Africa.
Arise: Live Out Your Faith on Whatever Field You Find Yourself from the Major Leagues to Africa combined three things I value most: baseball, God and Zambia. It instantly became a must read.
Ann Higginbottom, the sister of one of the authors wrote this, “The more I saw, the more I finally understand the deepest part of my sister’s heart. Her heart broke, bled and rejoiced for Africa. I saw Africa because my sister taught me how to see.”
Getting off the plane four days after my summer break began I had no idea what was in store for me.
I was in AFRICA.
I was about to take off my first-world glasses and finally see.
Not many children dream of going to Zambia. But I did. If I could decide what clothes I wanted to wear, I could decide for myself that I wanted to travel. I traveled for the first time when I was nine, making the decision to be a foreign exchange student. I would spend three weeks crying my way through Southern France. I knew as a sixth grader, Zambia was the next place I wanted to go.
Zambia is off the grid. It’s the home of Victoria Falls discovered by David Livingstone. It’s the home of an AIDS epidemic that has taken the lives of 90,000 residents and leaves many more battling the disease. It’s the home of an estimated 1,250,000 orphans. It’s the home of Campus Crusade for Christ: Zambia, the organization my church has partnered with for nearly fifteen years.
My trip wasn’t a vacation or to merely see the world. I would be a member of my church’s first student/adult group. I was going to be a missionary.
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My luggage was a checked bag arranged by my church. It contained the things that the entire group would need like deflated soccer balls, t-shirts and puppets. My personal belongings were packed and sealed into Ziploc bags and fit into a 21-inch carry-on and my backpack. It was deemed “packing perfection.” I was Macgyver with a backpack similar to Mary Poppins.
Hidden in the recesses of my bags were items like an umbrella and poncho (we were traveling during the dry season and there was pretty much no chance of rain…) and the sewing kit that would save the entire trip for the high school youth pastor Jack.
Jack ripped his jeans two days into the trip. Late that night, long after the lights should have been turned out, he came knocking on the door to my room.
“Flipper, I ripped my jeans and they’re my only pair. Do you happen to have a needle and thread?” I told him that I had an entire sewing kit. I would stay up late that night talking to my roommate as I mended my pastor’s pants.
The staff from Campus Crusade adopted us for two weeks. They drove us to each school we visited, acted as our translators and worshiped alongside us day-in and day-out.
I had been in Zambia for less than 24 hours when I heard my first Zambian testimony. I found myself squashed into the window seat of the bus we traveled in. Alli, who sat to my left, turned to Idah Banda, who sat on her left, and asked about her story. At twelve years old Idah accepted Jesus Christ. She would become a prayer warrior and a spiritual inspiration. Her faith didn’t waiver as she began working with Campus Crusade and was face-to-face with people who would challenge her religion.
One day she arrived to the school we would be ministering at before the group did. In this particular area a beer truck headed into the village daily. She didn’t want the students, especially the female students, to be caught off guard by drunken Zambian men, so she began praying. She asked God to make the truck turn around and not go into the village that day. As she looked up from finishing her prayer, she saw the truck was pulling away in the opposite direction of the village.
This was the first time my view of Zambia wasn’t fogged by the American perspective – my glasses were coming off.
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My signature didn’t mean much until that moment.
As a 16 year old, what could I have possibly been doing? I wasn’t signing for my driver’s license or even putting the signature on the back of my debit card or first paycheck. It was preparation for bungee jumping on the Zambia-Zimbabwe border.
The rules and regulations waiver was a page long, front side only. The typical fine print, sign your name on the dotted line type stuff. There was a $100 fee. I had to get weighed to make sure the cord could safely hold me. The numbers on my arm looked like a fraction. 24/76. The first number was the order I would be going in out of my group. The second, my weight in kilograms.
I headed to the bridge we would be jumping off of with the rest of my group. I had birds flapping in my stomach. Twenty-six of us would be jumping. The fall: 111 meters in four seconds. Blink and you’ve missed it. The backdrop: Victoria. The crashing echoes rang in my ears. Our voices rose as we talked to accommodate the noise behind us. The river was a mile below the bridge.
David Livingstone made his first arrival to Africa when he was just 27 to be a missionary and physician. He discovered Victoria Falls in 1855. The exploration leading to this discovery started in 1852 and lasted four years. He traveled from the upper Zambezi River to Africa’s coast on the Indian Ocean. This expedition made him the first European to cross the width of Southern Africa. Exploration wasn’t the main goal of his journey though; he wanted to introduce the people living in central Africa to Christianity while attempting to free them from slavery and the slave trade. Livingstone spent 30 years in Africa. At the time of his death in 1873, he was searching for the source of the Nile and had travelled over 46,000km of Africa. His body was buried in Westminster Abbey, but his heart would forever be in Africa, as it was buried under a mpundu tree.
I was jumping second to last, twenty-four of twenty-six. My stomach didn’t settle. It seemed as if the eagles, not butterflies, that filled my stomach were flapping their wings even harder. I watched everyone go ahead of me. Some jumped as soon as they were allowed. Others waited, gaining the strength to jump. Others didn’t jump at all and were pushed by the staff.
I stood on the platform. My feet were strapped together and I wasn’t sure I would be able to move them if I tried. I said prayers to God that some freak accident didn’t happen just as I was getting ready to go. Four years after my jump a traveler from New Zealand made the same jump and the cord snapped sending her crashing into the river. She survived, but with a broken collarbone and many cuts and bruises.
I was strapped in, attached to a cord that I was supposed to put 100% of my faith in. I stood on the edge of the platform. I shouldn’t have looked down. I felt like my stomach was jumping ahead of me crashing into the rushing river below the bridge.
The staff said, “We’re going to countdown and if you don’t jump, we’ll push you.” I nodded, afraid to speak because the next word out of my mouth would have been no. I kept telling myself, don’t blink, keep your eyes open, you don’t want to miss this. “Five … Four … Three … Two … One … BUNGEE.” I didn’t jump. I was stuck standing there. I felt the pressure of a hand on my back; they pushed me.
Growing up my cousins and brother always let me join in on the rough housing. We’d jump between the two twin beds at our grandpa’s house. We’d play tackle football in the yard. We’d play tag and run through our houses. We’d get in the lake during our family camping trips and wrestle. Even though I was a girl, nothing stopped them from including me. I was strong enough to handle it. And they never went easy on me – I never wanted them to.
My great-grandpa committed suicide in the basement of their home and it was in that basement that the children played when we visited great-grandma. One time, my cousin Alec and I were jumping on the bed that was in the center of the room. Why was there a bed in the middle of the room, I have no clue. But it was there and we made it our playground. Alec and I were using the bed like a moon bounce: laughing and trying to get higher than the other. Alec won. In his victory his elbow collided with my nose. I fell onto the bed, a much softer landing than the concrete floor. My head was pounding as though someone was knocking on my skull like a door. A stream of red flowed down my face from my nose and collected in my hands. This was when my mom decided to the emergency room.
I had to get X-Rays of my face to make sure my nose wasn’t broken. The doctor walked into the room where we were waiting and asked if I wanted to see my face without any skin on it.
I screamed.
I fell from the platform – eyes wide open.
Surrounded by cliffs, if I looked towards my ankles all I saw was blue sky. If looked up all I saw was the greenish white mix of the rushing river. It was like those moments growing up on the monkey bars with knees bent around the bar hanging there. Kids on the swings looked like they were flying; kids on the slide looked like they were going up instead of down.
As I walked underneath the bridge, my adrenaline still pumping, I thought about doing it again. I vocalized that to my close group of friends. But bungee jumping in front of Victoria Falls is a one in a lifetime thing.
Why do it a second time and make it less special?
I was seeing the world in a new way. Upside down.
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Each morning, we’d meet for breakfast at the hotel, return to our rooms to get our backpacks and then wait outside the main entrance for the bus to pick us up. During our daily trips to the schools, we’d lather on the sunscreen and sing worship songs preparing ourselves for the mini performances we’d do for the children once we arrived. Sometimes we’d break out the puppets, but we mostly just sang.
As we filed off the bus we’d leave our backpacks and instantly be swarmed by children. “Muzungo. Muzungo,” some would chant. “White person. White person.” is what they were saying.
We were celebrities. I embraced my newfound celebrity status much like a starlet would as she approached a movie premiere from the red carpet.
Then we’d all disperse: groups of students would sit and talk, some of the boys would play pick up soccer games while some of the girls would let the Zambians play with their hair.
I liked to walk around and talk to the stragglers – the young adults who stood off to the side watching, unsure about what we were doing. I, like them, was unsure. Would I say the right thing? Would they understand me? What if I mess this up?
On that particular day a young man about 17 approached me to talk about Christianity. He challenged me to return home and tell everyone I could about what I saw while in Zambia. The longer we spoke, the more the ten little children that had surrounded me grew impatient. They wanted my attention too and tried to get by grabbing at my hands. I apologized to the young man for interrupting him and told him to wait a moment as I grabbed a hand of each one and placed it around one of my fingers.
That moment, as I looked at my hands, the white of my skin mixing with the red clay covering the black of their skin, I was finally seeing myself in Zambia.
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Matt, another student in the youth group, had gone on the student trip a couple years before I did. He told my friend, Sarah that “Zambia will not only make your whole world bigger, but your Jesus bigger, too.”
I returned home and much like David Livingstone had left my heart (or at least part of it) in Africa. I walked into my high school as a religious minority and wrote about my experience in Zambia much like that 17 year old boy asked of me. I was labeled “that Christian girl” and avoided the typical things the other students at my school were doing while discovering who I was on Wednesday nights at youth group.
I could never see the world the same way again.
When I looked at my bed, I saw the children of Zambia sleeping beneath the stage Campus Crusade set up for us to use for our performances. When I looked at my bathroom, I saw a hole in the ground and a well of water they bathed in. When I looked at the car on the way to school, I saw the children walking miles barefoot on uneven, rocky paths to attend their own classes.
I saw everything as upside down