Africa, why Africa?

My first experience with Africa came as a little girl on Saturday mornings.  In the middle of my favorite cartoons a commercial would come on.  It was always a commercial that would last longer then the others and by the end my eyes were full of tears and my heart was full of the desire to save my few pennies a day. The screen was full of pictures of other little kids on the other side of the world who looked very different from me. 

 I remember going to my mother and asking her if we could sponsor a child.  In her sweet way, she sat me down and told me that she loved me for wanting to do it, but even at pennies a day, our family couldn't afford it.  I made up my mind then and there that one day I would make enough money to sponsor a child from Africa.

And then I grew up and got married.  At 22 years old, I had been married for a year when my little sister Alena turned 21 and got her call to serve as a missionary for our church in the Zimbabwe, Harare Mission.  I was so excited for her.  She was the first white sister to serve in that mission.  She was the perfect girl for the job!  Pretty soon these started arriving.

 I worked as an admin and in my downtime I wrote her letters, every week, for 18 months.  By the end of her mission, I had a stack of letters.  Inside were pages and pages, sometimes six or seven detailing her life there in Africa. She had so much to tell me that her letters spilled over to the back and sometimes the insides of her envelopes.

My birthday cards started to look like this:

 She told of waking up to the sound of the women "sweeping" the dirt in front of their yards, how much better bananas tasted over there, the sadza that was eaten with every meal.  The bugs could be as big as her hand, she washed by standing in a big pan and poured water over her head, she made s'mores for the locals with their strawberry flavored marshmallows.  She went to game preserves, played soccer with the locals and the elders and shared stories of the members and a part of her testimony in each letter.  She helped me fall in love with Africa.  I told her one day, I'd get there.

That day starts tomorrow night.  Darren is staying here and working from home while I head out with three other people to the other side of the world.  We fly from here to London on the red eye, have a four hour layover and then hop back on a plane for another 17 hours to Johannesburg.  I'll be there for 9 days - not long enough but we have researched and planned to do so many amazing things.  You can bet I'll be taking a ton of pictures and blogging about it when I get back.  Stay tuned.