This is the fourth in a series of four reflections on my time in Africa:
When we first landed in Nairobi, I didn’t see it, but only because it was dark. However, the next morning, when we began our journey into the city to see some of the sites, I couldn’t help but notice the trash that was everywhere. At first, I thought maybe it was a just a consequence of having been in one of Nairobi’s poorer estates, but as we moved in towards the city, the trash didn’t go away.
A few hours later, as we were wrapping up our day of tourism, our driver, who’d picked up a coke, chucked his empty bottle into the bushes as we walked towards the attraction’s visitor’s center. My natural impulse was to pick it up and put it in a trash can, but, wanting to avoid offense, I decided to be discreet and seek out a trash can first. I quickly realized that there wasn’t one, so the bottle remained on the ground. But a short time later, I found myself looking for a trash can again while holding a small scrap of paper. More determined than before, I held onto the scrap and went looking for something that would allow me to throw it away without littering. A trash can, a dumpster, a fire pit … anything! Problem is, there was nothing.
The following day we left Nairobi and made our way to Accra, Ghana, where we were set to meet my friend Kwaku who would take us to Lome, Togo. In Accra, like Nairobi, trash was everywhere, a reality the driver of our cab contributed to on multiple occasions while taking us 60 miles to the boarder. As you can guess by now, Togo too was trashed (as are many parts of South Africa).
About three weeks into our trip we left Togo for a weekend in Ethiopia. Once again, we arrived in the evening so we didn’t get to see much, however, the next day, as we set out from our hosts’ home to explore Addis Ababa, we found ourselves amazed at the cleanliness of the city … and yes, trash cans were available in abundance. But there was something else that stood out in Ethiopia, the pride of its people. Where as my friend Kwaku had talked about African’s generally being people without hope who felt they lacked the ability to face challenges, Ethiopians, even though they live in one of Africa’s poorest countries, are confident in themselves and are determined to better their future. In an odd way, for Anita and I, trash cans became a symbol of Ethiopian pride.
As we talked with numerous Ethiopians that weekend, and then again as we spent time with our Ethiopian students at the Seminary in South Africa, I noticed two common points of pride. First, Ethiopians like to talk about their long-standing Christian tradition which links back to biblical events like the Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon (1 Kings 10) and the Ethiopian eunuch whom Philip baptized on the side of the road (Acts 8), and second, Ethiopia is one of two African countries that were not colonized, the other being Liberia, which was largely founded on former American slaves who returned to Africa.
At first, it was the second of these points that stood out, after all, it makes sense that there would be no hope after years of colonial occupation followed the Europeans moving out and leaving massive power vacuums to be filled by warring tribal leaders. It made even more sense as I came to understand how Western charity has worked to create a culture of dependence that has stripped Africans of their dignity. No wonder so many Africans feel hopeless, and no wonder that, because of it’s different historical path, Ethiopia is somewhat immune.
The more I thought about this the more I wondered how the Church, as people who have had their lives reoriented by the gospel (see the “laundry post“), could approach charity differently so that our works of service, rather than robbing Africans of their dignity and leaving them waiting for the next check or group of workers to arrive, would empower and enable Africans to address the challenges they face. The obvious example, and the first one I thought of, was what I found myself doing in South Africa as I focused, not on doing the actual ministry, but raising up Africans to be pastors in their communities. This then stemmed into thoughts on all kinds of mentoring and training, be it in construction, healthcare, digging wells, governance, or whatever else. But for the most part, this isn’t anything specific to the Church, and it’s becoming a widely adopted approach and a way to provide Africans with the “trash cans” that they need.
But what about something distinctly Christian? It wasn’t until last week when I saw this article by Matthew Parris, a self-proclaimed atheist, that I fully linked Ethiopia’s Christian history to how it understands itself today. As Parris points out, the gospel changes the way people understand themselves, and it’s a change he can see in their faces as he travels Africa. In a previous post, I described this change as happening in multiple tenses … the gospel frees you from your past, offers confidence as you face challenges today, and gives hope for the future. Freedom, confidence, and hope … “trash cans” for Africans and all the broken in our world.
For those of you who know my preacher / teacher side, you know that I’m huge on hermeneutics, that is, the art of interpretation. When doing this work, I follow what’s known as the historical-grammatical method, which, as the name would indicate, involves seeking to understand what’s going on both culturally and historically at the time the text was written and how this impacted what the original audience heard, as well as digging into the grammar to understand the how the author used various words, what the words meant to the original audience, and how the words relate to one another.
