As a follow-up to my missions trip to Goma this past summer my teammates and I did a two hour presentation for our church, talking about what we did, and what we’re planning to do.
Normally I’m pretty skeptical about missions. I mean really – what depth is there to going out to beaches over spring break and walking up to random strangers to tell them about God? It’s pure proselytization. But over the past few years I’ve been taking development classes and talking to people in Ghana, and I’ve realized that missions are not purely evangelical; many of the schools and hospitals in Africa are missions in which people have devoted their time and skills towards God’s mission of feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, and curing the sick. But still.. what can one do with two weeks? Short missions trips are always ultimately for the benefit of the person going and not to the community supposedly being served.
This trip was different. We gathered together as a multi-disciplinary group of people who wanted to go to Goma to listen to the people there, to hear what needs were there, and to serve in whatever way we could. We preached, installed wireless routers, and taught workshops on how to play with children. We even painted a mural! I really think we made a difference… and I can’t wait to go back.
For those of you that are interested, here’s the text of the talk I gave at the trip report:
First, I want to introduce you to Bizi, the medical engineer
at HEAL Africa. Bizi was incredibly helpful, always smiling and always ready to help. His official job is to maintain and repair all of the medical equipment: incubators, oxygenators, etc. In one of my first interactions with him, he took me to visit a little premie in an incubator he was monitoring. He always referred to little Rebecca as “his” baby, checking on her often to make sure the incubator was still working, especially when the power went out. While he was there, he was also able to repair a second incubator, one that had been donated in 1976 to another hospital and re-donated to HEAL Africa recently. I could tell that his heart was very much broken with care for the shortage of functioning equipment – and the people unable to get adequate care as a result. Not only that, Bizi also strove to help people wherever and whenever he could.
I interacted with him mostly on the IT project. Together, we worked with the two IT administrators, Pytchen and Jacques, to set up a wireless link from the Jubilee conference center, to the main hospital grounds about 300 meters away. The hospital already has a wireless link to the local internet service provider, providing Internet to the 7 computers available in the “Internet Room”, as well as any laptops that want to connect using WiFi, but it’s not accessible in the main hospital It’s not in Bizi’s job description to help with the IT stuff, but he told me that he likes information technology, and he saw that I might have trouble communicating with Pytchen and Jacques with my limited French, and decided to step in. It’s this type of thing that made my time in Goma really stand out.
By this time I had already been in Africa for 3 months, trying to deploy IT solutions in Ghana and Uganda as part of my dissertation research. I’m a PhD student in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, investigating the best uses of communications infrastructure for healthcare in Africa. So I’m familiar with some of the resource shortages in rural Africa. Although my time in Uganda was incredibly productive, my time in Ghana was riddled with bureaucratic, technical, and logisitical struggles. By the time I arrived in Goma, I was frustrated and had almost become cynical about working in Africa, sure that any efforts that I put in would ultimately be weighed down by people trying to get their own piece of development money coming from the West.
Meeting Bizi after this was so encouraging to me – to see someone not focused on his own gain, but instead focused on helping HEAL Africa be everything HEAL Africa could be for Goma, and on being a blessing to his community. Together, we set up a wireless router in the Jubilee Center, and another just above his office. The second one had to be placed about 6 feet above the roof. Lacking telekinetic powers to make it float up there, Bizi came up with a great solution: he pulled a broken IV stand out of the scrap pile and constructed a pole on which we could set up the antenna. A trip to the nuts and bolts market later, we had a link set up. I couldn’t have done it without his willingness to help.
And that is what struck me about HEAL Africa as a whole. Not only was everyone so willing to help, but HEAL Africa is an environment where people feel encouraged to start projects helping others, and to pitch in and help other people realize their own visions. It is a place of hope and restoration, where people that have hope can see real ways in which they can make a concrete contribution. I was so encouraged to see how HEAL Africa mobilized in a way such that even for such a short trip, our team was able to really serve with our gifts, teaching, preaching, painting, and using technology. I was so encouraged to see all the programs HEAL Africa has running, and to meet the many Congolese people that were so engaged in running the programs. I was so encouraged by the hope and the joy in the hearts of the patients of HEAL Africa, some of whom had been there for years, and all of whom were suffering greatly. Their hope was rooted in faith and a hope for restoration.
Given the weight of what we saw, and some not-so-great experiences in Ghana prior to my arrival, a couple of my thoughtful friends have asked if I was discouraged about trying to get work done in Africa. My response is always that my time in Congo was very restorative and grounding – and reminded me who I’m doing my PhD for, and why my heart is so broken for the people of sub-saharan Africa. I learned the value and the hope entailed in an environment supportive of innovation and progress. And I was restored because I felt genuinely loved by my teammates and the people at HEAL Africa.
