I think that for the most part, for right now, I am doing okay with the way things turned out/happened in Zambia. God had His purpose for our time there and He did, still is, and will continue to work out HIS purpose for us in that whole situation. Do I agree with how it happened? Nope, not really, don’t much like it at all. But, GOD IS GOD, and not me-AMEN! So while I don’t like the way God did it, or through whom, I am mostly okay with it (for now).
What is so frustrating to us is what we view as continued misinformation/misguiding and half truths (I am not talking about us here). Maybe that too is a cultural thing? Different regions of the country think putting out the same information in different ways is okay; that’s culture, I can get that. Maybe it is the culture of the non-profit/fundraising world that we had/have trouble with. Where all you are suppose to talk about is the good, where you talk like something IS one way when it is still years away from happening, where you do things in a backward way because it is easier to raise money that way (despite the extra costs involved in doing it that way), where you accentuate the suffering (of your cause) in order to make others feel guilty for what they have so you can raise more money.
It’s kind of like sunshine being blown into a certain place. Sure, it feels real good for a couple days, a couple weeks even. Everyone can handle a little bit for a short period of time. But at the couple month point it starts to get a little irritating, starts to burn, get itchy. Continue on in that sun and you start to see it for what it really is.
When you rely on others for the funding of your project, there is this sense that you can’t be real, you can’t let people know what is going on; you have to make THEM feel good or you are afraid they won’t send their support. In a way, there is a small part of me that gets it, because in general, we in the United States just don’t understand the way most of the rest of the world is. We think everything runs the way we say it should, and if it doesn’t, we need to “fix” it so it does. We saw that first hand some. And no matter how many times you would try to explain it, most people from the West just can’t picture it, so they think it just can’t be true. Plenty of people say they want to know the truth, but then when presented with it, they just can’t believe it and they don’t take the time to really examine the evidence.
Yes, I still frustrate myself rehashing and preaching to the choir about certain things. But I am still relived to know that my faith in GOD is still alive, beating, surviving, lifting my head.