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