Joy

I led a team of volunteers to Malawi for two weeks to work with Lifeline Malawi, a primary medical NGO. This was my second trip to Sub-Sahara Africa, and the impact was as great as my first trip seven years ago. Seven years ago, I was part of a team that ran day camps for orphans. Kids would walk for miles to come to our “rinky-dink” day camps, and they loved it. My most recent trip was a building project. The team raised $35K to build a nursing staff house (duplex) as part of Lifeline’s maternity clinic. Malawi has one of the highest maternal death rates in the world, so having the nurses on site will decrease the risk to mom’s and child. The needs are great, as one may imagine, and Lifeline does its best to serve those needs by seeing 200,000 patients annually. Even though the need is great, joy is present in these people’s lives. In many ways, seeing this joy was a culture shock for me. In the West, we strive for comfort and are overcome by desire. This is to our own detriment of course, because we have lost sight of what really matters-people and relationships. I will always remember what it was like to be witness to pure joy in the midst of having very little….what a lesson!