three years later

It's been 3 years since my last post and a lot has changed. What hasn't is that I can't wait to get back to Africa, and it might be happening at the end of this year God willing.

So where is Mark Safe these days. Well, I am a Paediatric registrar at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne and I absolutely love it. God willing if the results from my exam that come out on Monday are good, I will have finished my basic specialty training and will aim to do my advanced training in Gastroenterology and Adolescent Medicine.

What's left is to see what God has planned. And I'm still waiting to see. The last few years have been so tied into my training that I'm relishing being able to focus on some other stuff, so let's see.

London, and arrived in Malaysia

This is going to be a very quick post. I'm back in KL airport about to connect to Kota Bharu to get to my paradise island to learn to scuba dive :-)

I still need to finish the post before this one and post up photos, but I promise that perhaps by a few months after I arrive back in Melbourne, I'll have a complete blog of my trip.

It was really great to be back in London and see everyone again, but it was tainted with a deep sense of missing what I had just experienced. It was an interesting transition back to the one western world but one that I had been praying about and tried to prepare for. Thank God that I was still able to spend time in fellowship with such great friends here to encourage me. It was particularly great cos so many of my friends in London have experienced service in Africa also.

The weather was great and London in Summer is a completely different place. Everyone is so much happier and brighter. Went to Southbank again for a day which was really nice. The sun was shining, the place was buzzing and there were street performers everywhere. I met a really cool busker called Addy (go figure huh?) and he's gonna email me some of his stuff.

I do have one funny story to tell quickly before I have to dash to my connecting flight. Most of you know that I can sometimes be a bit scattered, but usually when it comes to traveling, I'm usually relatively switched on. Well, it seems that booking connecting flights from Zambia is a bad idea. Basically, I left Heathrow for KL at 1200 on the 20th and had apparently booked my connection to Kota Bharu for 1010, also on the 20th. So when I tried to check in for both flights together I was told I had missed my connection and needed to buy a whole new one for 120 pounds ($250). Quite a pain since that was 5 times how much the original flight cost. Anyway, I'd better go now so I don't miss it.

Can't wait for scuba diving and chilling on the beach. Also can't wait to see everyone back in Melbourne next week.

God bless u all,
Mark

Reflections

Wow, I can't believe it's all over. The last 24 hours preparing to leave were so surreal cos I was really starting to feel at home in Zambia. Now I'm sitting in Nairobi airport trying to survive a 7 hour transit, so it seems like a perfect opportunity to reflect on this amazing period that God blessed me with. The tough thing is, I really don't know where to start, so I guess I'll just have to start rambling and see where i end up.

When I first arrived, I really didn't know what to expect, and really wasn't to sure what my purpose was in Zambia. I don't think I've shared with you yet the circumstances by which I ended up planning a trip to Zambia, but I'll just say that it was fairly random. I was originally thinking about joining a mission trip to Mexico and somehow that just didn't happen (thank God cos it ended up being completely cancelled because it was right when the whole swine flu thing started). Then I spent a long time thinking and not knowing where I would go and someone mentioned a hospital in Zambia, but not where I ended up going. It was when I was researching this other place that I remembered Fr. Abraham whom I'd met in Nigeria, and once I got in touch, it all just seemed to happen. The long and the short of it is that I feel quite confident that God intended for me to spend the last 3 months with the Coptic Mission in Zambia. Anyway, back to what I was saying, I couldn't really figure out why God had brought me to Lusaka. On my first day, I sat down with Fr. Abraham and the one thing he told me was that if I was willing to step out of my comfort zone, then great things would happen and it would be a growing experience for me.

Stepping out of my comfort zone ended up being something I was almost forced to do, cos it was all so new. I felt so overwhelmed by so much (in fact I remember saying that a few times in my first post). But honestly, there was a crowd of new people to live with, an expansive mission with so much to do, a huge congregation to meet and medical work that I felt completely unequipped to manage. I would often find myself in situations where I didn't know how I was going to pull off what was required of me; caring for critically ill patients all on my own, doing 48 hour on-call shifts, dealing with problems from any and every specialty, treating a disease (HIV/AIDS) that up until then I had had no experience of. Add to that the service with the church and the school and visiting groups from overseas that I was literally thrown into. But all that brought me to the first lesson that I learned; relying on God to provide. Later in the trip, Fr. Abraham said something that crystalized it for me. True faith only exists when you are doing something that you know for a fact that you can't do. If you're aiming for something that you know you can achieve then there's no room for faith. When you aim for something beyond what you can do, then you have to believe that God will step in. And the amazing thing is that He absolutely has. For my whole time in Africa, I have seen amazing things happen. I read a couple of verses from Proverbs right at the beginning of my trip that came up again in the very last week "Commit your works to the Lord, and your thoughts will be established." "In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths."

to be continued....

Kenya - Part 2 - Safari and general chaos

Right, part 2 then.

It would've been a bit of waste to go all the way to Kenya and not do a Safari in the Masai Mara, so the group who had come from England were organising a trip and I was going to tag along with them. The organisation of it seemed to be a little haphazard because everyone was so focused on the conference and the mission, and it seemed they had to change companies a few times so there was always a chance it would go a little pear-shaped. The rest of the story is where the TIA (This is Africa) comes in.

We had to go in two seperate groups due to different flight times etc. and I was with the first group leaving on the thursday. The plan was that we would leave where we were staying at 8am and drive straight to the Masai Mara, have an afternoon game drive through the park and then go to our accomodation to sleep and have another game drive early the next morning as the sun rose. I wasn't particularly fussed about facilities but the group had apparently booked a deluxe campsite with a perimeter fence, electricity etc. Unfortunately what actually happened was a little different.

The bus that came to pick us up was too small, so we spent a while jamming all the people and the luggage on there. Then we had to go to another town so that the driver could do some banking and find another minibus to take our luggage, which was crammed all around us. We stopped for other random pointless reasons along the way and ended up arriving at the Masai Mara after 9pm. In the pitch-dark and on fairly awful roads our drivers couldn't find our place and when we finally did find it, it was a little more basic than was expected. No electricity, relatively simple tents and no perimeter fence. To be honest, I loved it, cos the stars were amazing and instead of a fence we had Masai warrior guards, which was way cooler, and the tents were pretty spacious and we had actual beds in the tents. But, the rest of the group were not so enthusaistic at first and all stayed on the bus while a couple of the group went to work out why it was so different to what was booked (in the end it turned out that the person we had dealt with had passed on the booking to someone else and had "mis-communicated slightly). What happened then was really great. Everyone was cramped, tired and a little cold, and someone decided to start singing, and we spent the next little while singing hymns and songs and praying and sharing from the bible. It really lifted spirits and we settled down for the night after having a delicious dinner of spaghetti bolognaise.

The next morning we got to the gates of the park just before 7am for an early morning game drive and ended up spending 3 hours sitting in our buses outside the gates. It was another part of the "miscommunication" that our guides had been given enough money to pay for us as residents when in fact as tourists, the fee was more than triple. So the whole morning was spent trying to convince the park reps to help us out and then waiting for the tour company to wire money. It was all a bit of a mess, but worked out to be a bit of fun cos there were a few large local school groups waiting to go in who we got to hang out with and they were quite a laugh. We eventually got in and started driving around in our open-top bus. I won't take too long to describe the safari, cos the pictures (which I promise I will eventually post) will speak for themselves. It's pretty amazing to be so close to such amazing creatures and we saw some great stuff. We were 2 metres away from some sleeping lions who didn't seem too fussed to see us when they woke up. We saw (albeit from far away) hyenas trying to hunt some wilderbeast (and failing), and more that you'll see in the photos.

In the end, thank God, the whole trip worked out really well, despite the initial set-backs, and by the time we got back to Nairobi we were all a bit exhausted but very satisfied. Since a big group of us had to get to catch flights early the next morning we just stayed awake through the night, prayed a liturgy and packed the bus that would take us to the airport. I forgot to tell you that just on the last day of our trip, two of the group who were flying back to England had become quite sick and when we got back to the Coptic Centre they tested positive for malaria. By the morning when we were at the airport they were so weak from it all that we needed wheelchairs to push them through to the gates. It was kind of a bonus cos we could skip quite a few queues, but I guess they didn't see it that way. Thank God, I've heard back from them and they felt much better after a few days.

So that left me back in Zambia, very glad to be back to my quasi-home, but knowing full well that I had only 3 weeks. Well it's taken me two weeks to post this so now I have a week left and I really can't believe it's going so fast. I'm not going to reminisce just yet. I'll leave that for my next post.

God bless

Kenya - Part 1 - Villages, Prisons, Monastery...

There is so much to tell you about the last 2 or so weeks that I'll have to split it into two posts. The reason I've been out of touch for a while is that I've been in rural Kenya with no internet access. Which brings me to the story of what I've been doing

I travelled up to Kenya with Fr. Abraham, and Dalia and Fr. Mark for the 1st Annual Mission Conference in the Coptic Orthodox Diocese of African Mission. When we arrived in Nairobi, we were driven to the Coptic Centre there, which is much bigger and busier than ours in Lusaka. The Hope Centre for HIV in Nairobi is one of the biggest infectious disease centres in all of Africa and is supported by the US Presidential fund. It was pretty overwhelming, but we were only staying there one night because the next day we had to get to Maseno in the Western part of Kenya. Unfortunately, it seemed no-one had told them I was coming so they had prepared 3 places to stay the night and 3 seats on the plane to Maseno in the morning. Still it wasn't a big problem, they found me a place to stay and the next morning I was taken at 5.30am to the bus station to get a seat on the 9-hour bus to Maseno, which was survivable.

When I arrived, everyone was already out on mission; the conference didn't start officially until the day after I arrived, but the majority of the group had been there for up to 2 weeks already and were right in the swing of things. Even though a lot of people were out, there was still lots of work to be done at the monastery we were staying at, and I had to get right to it with the others. What was quite amusing was that as my old friends from London would arrive back at the compound, I would run up to greet them and be met with a puzzled and at times slightly frightened look. I forgot that no-one had seen me with a beard (which is quite thick now) and it was taking everyone a few moments to figure out who I was.

Anyway, the conference itself was absolutely mental, but really amazing. I think the monastery had never taken more than 30 or so people before, and there were now over 200 from all around the world, sleeping in 3 level bunk-beds and wherever we could find room. The water, electricity and boiler systems didn't exactly cope with the extra load of so many people, so we often went without those things. But still, none of this dampened spirits, and with so many people, we could really do a lot in the local area. A few things stand out:

For the first time, we were granted access to the local high-security prison in Kisumu and the experience was amazing. The justice system in Kenya is not always the best unfortunately, so a significant proportion of those in prison are innocent of any crime. Several of those who are guilty have committed crimes under the influence of alcohol or out of poverty or desperation. The people there were really quite inspirational, often very honest and decent and with an incredible determination and strength of character. When we first entered we were greeted by 2000 prisoners who were assembling in the grounds. What they wanted more than anything was to hear the Word of God, so it became a sort-of massive open-air church service with singing and praying and preaching. We also distributed some food from the outside world to them and on the three occasions that we visited, we ran a mobile medical clinic to supplement their usually poor access to health-care. One small group (unfortunately I was busy with the clinic) went onto death row with one of the priests to visit the prisoners awaiting execution. I've been told that they were truly amazing people, and that they literally jumped at the opportunity for Fr. John to take their confessions.

Visitations in the Maseno area were amazing. I've had the chance to visit plenty of homes in my stay in Africa but this was the most rural place that I had been, and it was truly village life. Visiting the people there, you just get blown away by their kindness and generosity. Three groups returned from visitations with live chickens as gifts that they simply were not allowed to refuse. The meal that I shared with one fellowship group was one of the best I have ever had. Ugali (the staple diet of a lot of central and southern Africa, a softish stuff made of boiled maize flour and eaten by hand) with spinach relish and sweet Kenyan tea. Very simple but delicious. And of course, the singing was amazing; at one fellowship the locals had gathered into a small choir and been practicing for when visitors come.

Another part of village life is that not necessarily all the churches have a building. Two of the churches in the Maseno parish are simply shady spots under a tree and I had the pleasure of praying a liturgy in one of them; St. Moses. It was like nothing else to be have a service out in the open, able to look up to the sky or look out over the rolling hills. We also had the chance to drive down to Lake Victoria to spend the afternoon, and it was pretty stunning. Actually getting there was a story in itself. With so many people, we had to come up with new ways of carting everyone round. One method was to cram 80 or so people into our 28 seat bus. The other was to make use of the massive articulated lorry that the monastery has, with almost 100 people standing like cattle as we drove to Lake Victoria. Fun times.

The one thing though that blew me away more than any of that was the way that God was working in people's lives during the conference. When you're out in the middle of nowhere, doing things outside of your comfort zone, you rely on Him so much more and then amazing things happen. Also being surrounded by so many amazing people and so many great priests is really spiritually uplifting. There were so many people I spoke to, for whom this was their first real experience of service and spending time with God, and the way that it changed them was truly humbling. It's so easy to get caught up with life back home and live just for ourselves, but here in the mission, you feel the power of something bigger than yourself and realise how amazing a life of love and service to others can be. I thank God every day for the opportunity to be here.

Ok, I think that's enough for Part 1. Part 2 coming up.

More Zambia Mission

Hey everyone,

It's getting longer and longer between posts, mostly because I'm finding myself with less and less time to sit on the internet these days. Now that I am well and truly settled in here, the magnitude of the need in the mission is very obvious. If it isn't crowds of sick patients needing care then it's a number for projects needing to be started or continued for the people or just basic day to day service.

For the last 2 weeks we have had another group from the states and it was a really great change of pace. When the visiting missionaries are around it allows us to step away from all the administrative things that we get caught up in and instead get stuck into real service on the ground. We spend the time working with the orphans, visiting people in the surrounding villages, building things and also sharing in the spiritual revival that so often comes when you're placed here in Africa. It was particularly good to have this group because they've just finished high school and to see the enthusiasm for service so present in such a young group was incredibly encouraging.

The other great thing about being here with a group is that we get to get off the mission compound that we spend so much of our time on. Since it is where the hospital, school, church, housing and all of the services are based, we usually rarely have to leave, but with a group here we spend much more time in the surrounding neighbourhoods and villages, and it is another world completely. Sharing with people going about their daily lives in such simple conditions, buying food from baskets or little stands by the narrow dirt roads and joining in with the powerful local music all helps to bring you down to earth. I'm slowly learning more of the local songs and it's so wonderful to join the people here in singing because they have the most amazing voices and spirits. The most fun is seeing the bemused faces of passers-by as a muzungo (foreigner) breaks into song in Nyanja or Bemba (two of the local languages). While the group were here we had a gathering of all the youth from the church for an overnight service. It is the most amazing thing to experience and it really shows the fire and joy in the hearts of the people here. Basically we stay awake from sunset (6pm) to sunrise (6am) singing praise songs, sharing from the Bible, learning from each other and about each other, watching an inspirational movie and spending time in prayer. It was brilliant, and I tell you what, we raised the roof with some of the songs.

Anyway, I'm going to have to cut this one short because now that the group have left, Fr. Abraham, Dalia and myself are frantically preparing to leave the day after tomorrow to Kenya for an international mission conference. It promises to be pretty crazy, so I'll have to tell you all about it when I get back. I decided to give up on the overland idea because there simply wasn't time so I'm flying up but I'll stay there a couple of days extra with some friends from London and we'll go on Safari :-)

Ok, gotta get back to work, God bless you all,

Mark

Livingstone, Vic Falls, and more Medical Mayhem

I have so much to write and so little time. The more I get engulfed in life here the harder I find it to sit down and write things, and the longer I leave it the more I forget. But perhaps that means you only get the really great stuff that lasts in my mind for a long time :-)

So I'll try and pick up from around where I left off. It had been a pretty full program for the group visiting from overseas so we decided to organise a trip down to Livingstone which was absolutely fantastic. Like I said before, I hope that eventually I will be posting up photos to go with the words so check back on old posts to see some more. Thankfully in the meantime some of the group who are now back in America have posted photos with me tagged so you can see some stuff :-)

After a 7 or 8 hour bus ride, almost leaving one of our group behind at a toilet stop, we arrived in Livingstone and a quick taxi rider later we were at Zig Zag hotel, a beautiful little place owned by a friend of the church. We felt prettty spoilt having big comfortable beds and high flow showers. We didn't hang around long though cos the majority of the group had to leave the next day so we went straight to Victoria Falls. It seems like the obvious thing to say, but the falls truly are a magnificent sight. It's pretty mind-blowing to be standing next to such an awesome creation. When you walk closer to it, it's as if it's a hurricane downpour but all the water is the spray from the falls. It also makes a pretty amazing rainbow. After seeing it from the top we took the trail down to the river at the base, which was also brilliant. The whole way down, there were baboons everywhere :-). After all that we were pretty wet and pretty exhausted so we went back to the hotel for a quick rest and wash and then out to dinner for our last big meal together as a group. The majority of the group had to go back to Lusaka the next day to meet their flight to America.

The next morning we got up at 5am to go back to the falls to see it by moonlight. The time of year we were there, there was a chance to see a rainbow caused by the full moon, but unfortunately it turned out to be really cloudy, but we did get to watch the falls as dawn broke. The next actvity for the day was a chance to walk with lions and cheetahs. They were fairly young, but still, words can't really describe what it's like to see a trio of young lions bounding out from between the trees and then being able to walk with them and pat them. I think it's something no-one in the group with forget.

After we saw off the main group, the four of us that remained went and had a late lunch at an Italian restaurant that is part of an orphan training program set up by some Aussies. The orphanage system tends to fall apart once a child passes 12 years old, so this organisation was set up to take them on and train them in a vocation, like working in a restaurant. Brilliant place.

Then we went to a crocodile park, where the guide kindly provoked the 850kg crocodile named Godzilla with a stick so that we could see what he was like when he was angry. TIA (This Is Africa) has become our standard response to crazy random things like that. Then he invited me to exit the railings and come and stand next to another 1 tonne croc, reassuring me that as long as his back feet were flat on the ground, he wouldn't attack. I know I said I'd post photos later, but this one I had to put up now.

That evening, an Aussie we'd met called Michael took us to the 5-star hotel on the Zambezi river to have a drink and watch the sunset. It was a really beautiful place inside and out and one of the group who is an interior designer from Egypt was so exciting that she spent about an hour taking photos of the place. Michael's actually a really interesting guy. He used to play for Carlton in the mid-90's (for any crazy Carlton fans, I can't remember exactly but I think his last name was Ravino). After he tore his achilles he went into business and IT design and then met a guy who was starting a conservation project in Africa. Basically they encourage local farmers to use chilli pepper smoke instead of violence to keep the Elephants away from their crops. The company sells the seeds and infrastructure to the farmers, teaches them how to make the elephant deterrant and then buys back the remaining chillis to make into sauces etc. that they sell around the world.

Anyway, we had dinner back and Zig Zag and Michael organised a boat trip for us down the Zambezi river for the next morning. It was a great way to end the trip, floating down the river between Zambia and Zimbabwe, drinking tea and eating cake and biscuits. Our guide was great and took us down to see a big pod of hippos as well as a croc, some impala and a few other little creatures. And then we hopped back on the bus to Lusaka, and thus ended the nice relaxing holiday.

From then on, it's been absolute mayhem, and I've only just now found the time to sit and right this. Essentially the whole government health network in Zambia is on strike, and since we are one of the better private hospitals in the area, we have been flooded with patients. Our little in-patient unit has been constantly full and during on-calls I've found myself looking after critically ill patients on my own in spare rooms in the out-patient building. We also been stretched because one of the more senior doctors has been away doing a course, and another one has just given birth. At the same time, we've also been doing one of the main data collection sessions for an Africa-wide HIV study that we're taking part in. Finally to top it all off, one of the Electricity substations in our area exploded so the power and phone networks have been incredibly sketchy.

And that's basically summed up my recent times here. Today, all of the doctor are back and the study is over for now so I have time to get away from medical stuff and get back to helping out the church with some things, which I've been missing. I'm also hoping to get more involved with the youth group here. There's a plan to set up a youth centre for the area, which is really exciting. The one thing I've learnt through all the busyness is that the more things are feel out of my control, the more I have to rely on God and other people for support, and the great thing is that both have come through in a big way.

So, now I'm going to get back to work and also start preparing for the next group coming here, also from the States. In a couple of weeks there is a big international mission conference at the Coptic church in Kenya so I'm planning out how to get there. I may ditch the flight and instead go overland through Tanzania and explore a bit on my way. If anyone has been through there and has suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

God bless you all, I miss you :-)