Prayer Letter: Too Close for Comfort

I was asleep in my room this week when burglars broke through a window and got into my cottage.  Only a locked wood door separated them from me, snoring obliviously.

They nicked my LCD screen, my cell phone, my external hard drive, my camera and my flash drive.  They found two sets of keys, one to my front door and one to the C4L bakkie.  So they let themselves out and tried to start the bakkie… without success.  They appear to have left in haste, as I found my brief case behind the bakkie, open and all the papers strewn around it including my passport.  Later we found the car keys in the grass near the brief case.

Much of that day was spent tidying up… fixing the burglar bars that they bent to get in, police reports, the fingerprint team, getting a new cell phone and SIM card.

I knew these routines because the week before, burglars broke into the C4L Board room during the night and stole my laptop.  Worse of all was the loss of a lot of data.  It is really disorientating and you lose so much time with the aftermath, rebuilding databases, etc..

Prayer Partners

Here’s the thing…  I had taken my laptop to South Sudan, where I created a mailing list on it called Prayer Partners.  From there, I sent out weekly dispatches.  Even since my sudden return from Juba, I continued to keep the people on that list informed – at a more personal and frequent level than C4L Bulletins.

But alas… I lost that list with the laptop.  So today I am getting around to trying to replicate it – on my desktop at home.  Luckily that escaped the robbery… although later in the day when I could not print, I realized that the printer cable had been detached – so the burglars were interrupted and left before they could get the tower disentangled.  It's a thumb-suck... I can only guess at who was on that list.  And I can't ask those who were not to remind me!

Deteriorating Security

Sadly, I don’t see this government being very preoccupied about crime.  Former police commissioner Selebi is now in jail.  His successor Cele is now in court defending himself against misconduct.  The trickle-down to local level is that the police are fatalistic.  For example, when I asked the guy taking fingerprints what his recovery rate is – how many perpetrators have been caught this way – he could only remember 3 cases.  That’s not 3 %!  That is 3 cases.  He did not hold out much hope.

One Zambian colleague told me that no matter whether I was a missionary or a champion of poor and unemployed youth, I am seen as a “farmer” (boer) and C4L is seen as a “farm”.  He said frankly that this will not change, and that I should take the appropriate security measures.  He suggested a big electric gate at the entrance to C4L, which would forever change our ethos of openness and accessibility, especially for those on foot. (Which is the way most people arrive here.)

I can only think back to the years that I spent in Angola, during a war.  It was tense and risky, but we believed what a senior missionary there once told us there – that “there is no place safer than where God wants you”.  So this incident does not scare me away.

Comfort?

I have often quoted Dorothy Day’s philosophy ““comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable”.  That is our role as leaders of nonprofits.

So I guess that it is fitting, especially at Lent, to ask ourselves if our comfort zone is getting to big?

In Africa, especially in the context of poverty, the Prosperity Gospel is very popular.  It is to explain to someone who grew up malnourished, how St Francis of Assisi was inclined to give away his family fortune and take a “vow of poverty”.  Perhaps that is more fitting for some one who comes from among the “haves” and wants to work with the “have-nots”?

But neither do I buy poverty as a rationale for crime.  Certainly the disparity in South Africa must cause a lot of jealousy, resentment and temptation.  But who says that poor people do not (or worse yet, cannot) have their honesty and dignity intact? 

It seems to me that contentment is a virtue for both rich and poor.  John the Baptist’s ministry can be summed up in two words – contentment and sharing.  He did not say that if you had two shirts that you should give them both to poor people who need clothes.  His message was to give away what you do not need.  Is that not contentment?  St Basil the Great wrote:

The bread which you do not use

Is the bread of the hungry

The garment hanging in your wardrobe

Is the garment of him who is naked

The shoes that you do not wear

Are the shoes of one who is barefoot

The money you keep locked away

Is the money of the poor

The acts of charity you do not perform

Are so many injustices you commit

He was truly on John the Baptist’s wavelength.  Contentment can also work on the other side of the tracks, not as an opiate but to create the conditions for honest development.  This is what disturbs me about the talk of nationalizing the mines.  There may be some advantages in this, as it has been tried in different countries, and in some cases like Botswana it succeeded.  But some attitudes suggest to me that poor people would trade their dignity for wealth.  At that stage I preach contentment to them too.  Warwick put it this way:

He gives not best who gives most

He gives most who gives best

If I cannot give bountifully

Yet I will give freely

And what I want in my hand

I will supply with my heart

Crime is robbing Africa, not just of its wealth, but of its dignity.  This is a greater loss - spiritual burglary.