A Babushka from Paris

Christiana Milian is in the desert in her pants. She appears to be feeling very passionate about something but I don’t know what, being too distracted by how she is managing so many wardrobe changes when she is surrounded by nothing but sand for miles around....admittedly, it is a small wardrobe, featuring only lingerie and swimming outfits (poor thing, when they said ‘sand’ she must have thought ‘beach’).

I am at the mines and I am watching television.

Now someone called Tamia is getting out of bed very slowly, singing about raindrops and trying on a few outfits before going to the shops in her hotpants...oh now I think she’s inviting me to have sex with her in a booth of some sort.

Hmmm...now someone called Something Knowles is singing about Tony and sitting on a toilet. Tony is sitting on some steps and looks a bit put out by the fact that he just got Beyonce’s sister pregnant.

Ne-Yo is looking for someone to chill with, although it looks like you have to be wearing a bikini to qualify...wow he’s even found a hot girl underground...that never happened when I went to the Marble Arch Caves.

David Beckham and Robbie Williams have just popped up to tell me that AIDS is a bad thing. They’re famous so now I know it’s true.

Jamie Fox is dazzling me with the fact that he has Jake Gyllenhal (Oh if you’re so clever why don’t you spell it without using imdb) and Forrest Whitaker in his video...although it’s just the usual, tedious guy-in-a-night-club deal, although this isn’t like anywhere the likes of us have ever been. Oh hold on, who is that old balding guy? Is that...yes it is...Happy Days...it’s Ron Howard! (That’s awesome...how many of the kids watchin this video are gonna recognise Ron Howard? I mean they’ll have seen his films but his face?) And it’s almost redundant to mention the fact that Samuel L. Jackson is here too since he is in everything.

Okay enough of MTV Bass...as my father always used to say when we were kids and something scantily clad appeared on screen, ‘There must be something better on...’ Well Dad you’d think that given the number of channels we’re talking about here, but I couldn’t find anything so I went to bed...

I have never seen Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip cus America cancelled it before it had had much of a chance to stretch its legs. But I did see the first scene of the first episode and in it an SNL-esque comedian goes on an on-air rant about how the television, and his programme in particular, is failing in its obligation to speak the truth and fight the power at the same time as sparking laughter and offering escape. Something along those lines anyway. Except the lines were written by Aaron Sorkin so they were somewhat better put together. There are perhaps few television formats that exemplify this failure more spectacularly than that epitomised by Big Brother/X-Factor/America’s Next Top Model. These are incredibly popular shows and I have to admit to being entertained by each of them on a number of cold Coventry type occasions. But this is empty calorie television and the shows mentioned must be blamed for spawning even worse variations on their get-significant-quick theme. What drove me to MTV Base was the worst I had seen yet...and so unsurprisingly involved Ms. Hilton...

Coincidentally I had just been reading C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves and had been feeling inspired and excited by his vision of friendship as two people in an embrace who, rather than staring in to each other’s eyes like lovers, have turned their gaze to a common interest or goal or belief. Then I watched TV and Paris Hilton turned up in a televised competition between young American girls vying to be her New BFF (That’s New Best Friend Forever for those of you privileged enough not to know). It was hard to know what to be most depressed about. By how the beauty of a thing like friendship was being demeaned? By how badly the contestants seemed to desire Paris’s friendship? By the fact that the idea for this show came because of the breakdown (so we are told) of an actual (so we are told) friendship between the Hilton girl and the Richie girl? [By the fact that I know that?] Or by the fact that people all over the world were watching a spoiled rich girl sit in a pink throne and tell a similar looking girl with a tear soaked face that she didn’t want to be pretend friends?

As time starts to force me to think about going home this kind of nonsense is something I am loathing. Strange as it might seem for a young man to suggest that he doesn’t want to see Christiana in her undies, I am just tired by the ridiculousness of it all. I often get struck by this feeling when I head out for the night with friends at home. Few nights go by when there isn’t at least one moment when I will look around the night club dance floor or up the bar and be utterly depressed by the game so many present seem to be playing. A friend, after a particularly, let’s use the word rampant and leave it at that, night on the town sighed and said, ‘It’s all mechanical boys’. It’s a shiny, mechanical, and thus by definition heartless, shell of a thing.

We are all desperate for affirmation, for attention, for significance, for love. So everyone dresses and dances and struts with an eye on everyone else. Like when my little brother wouldn’t climb to the top of the climbing frame unless he was sure that at least one of his parents was watching him. Creed have a song with the lyric, ‘Sex sells and the whole world is buying.’ We have bought in to the lie of the music video. We have bought in to the lie of Paris Hilton. We just went along with the fluffy flow but found ourselves downstream convinced that it matters whether or not you are a size 8 or a size 18. We are convinced that it really MATTERS whether or not other people tell us that we matter by dancing with us in the club or watching us as we sidle down the street, by laughing at our wit or agreeing with our argument. We have convinced one another that our social betters are our betters, that the beautiful people are the superior people, that the rich and famous are the happy, the loved, the SIGNIFICANT.

We don’t recognise, or know what to do with, this longing for significance and love which is leaving us empty. With no idea how to fill ourselves up we instead resort to covering ourselves up , layer after layer like Russian Dolls. We hope no-one lifts the lid we have hand painted to look like a head and tried to convince ourselves does not exist. We hide behind wooden shells of talent and beauty and intelligence and attraction and strength and success and power and virtue and the list goes on and on as we uncover doll after doll until finally we reach the smallest and the last. The ‘you’ you have hardly allowed yourself to know. This is what we find Solomon (so tradition has it anyway) telling us in Ecclesiastes. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. It’s all meaningless. It’s all empty. It’s all mechanical. Unless you fill that God-shaped hole your beauty will wither, your wisdom will turn to senility, your fame will be forgotton and your significance will cease to be because it never really was. Because you never really were. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. What matters? What you see when you lift the lid of the last doll, the ‘you’ you really are, the work of quite a different artist.

“Is it real because I feel fake?”

---

According to Wikipedia, Babushka is the wrong name for Russian nested dolls...they are accurately called Matryoshka dolls. Just so I don't misled you in to a shameful mistake on your next juncket to Moscow...

Samuel

Here is another article I wrote for COTN. It is about a teenage boy called Samuel who I will always appreciate because he was the one who told me what I should and shouldn't uproot when I worked on my friend Andy's African father's farm in Senahum. He was the one who carried my bag for me as we ran home from the farm in the rain. And it was him who found himself playing translator when we ran in to Ngolala and discovered a dying Mary Lahai. I will never forget the scared look on his face as, wet and cold, he immesaurably helped us by being our Mende mouths and ears. It was the first time I had even met him! I also really appreciate him because he's hilarious!

It was not until I interviewed him that I fully understood his story and the gravity of what he has already faced in his young life.



---

Dressed in a “Life’s a Beach” T-shirt from a holiday he never took to Hawaii, Samuel Howard punches the air with excitement as the DJ skips to the next track. This is "The M68," a youth club run by COTN in Sierra Leone, and the teens are tearing up the dance floor. Samuel does a ridiculous dance around an M68 leader, singing loudly, with his bum sticking in the air.

A real slapstick comedian, Samuel loves to enjoy himself and make others laugh, although this young man who dreams of being an accountant is keen to assure that he also knows how to work hard. “Sometimes when I go to school there are some boys who like to talk. I don’t like talking when I am in class. At lunch or after school I can play with my friends but in class I am serious."

But it is this time after school, when clowning around with his friends, playing soccer, singing, dancing and also spending time with God that Samuel finds freedom. “I feel happy,” he says. “That will help me not to remember long what has happened to me.”

Samuel was born in Gbangbatok, a village about thirty miles from COTN’s ministry site at Ngolala. When the war broke out, his father fought with the Civil Defense Forces known as Kamajors. These fighters sought to protect themselves through traditional spiritual means, for example by drinking a "medicine" which would make them invincible. There were certain conditions however that if not adhered to could see this protection fail. That is how Samuel’s mother explained his father’s death in the fighting.

Samuel was alone with his mother during the war, although his younger sister Jenneh was born later. He remembers travelling from place to place a lot and one particular incident when rebels unexpectedly entered the village of Mokanji where he was staying. “But it is God”, he says. “They never saw us and we escaped.”

After the war, with his father dead and his mother struggling to take care of two children, Samuel’s uncle stepped in. He explains, “My uncle came and took me from my mother’s hand. He took me to Freetown.” Though he did not know it at the time, that would be last time Samuel would see his mother.

Samuel would live in Freetown until he was twelve, at which point his uncle decided to send him back to Gbangbatok. “He said that he was tired, because he did not have enough money to take care of his children and me.” It was when he arrived back in his home village that an aunt would break the news that his mother had died some time before. This relative was caring for Jenneh and it was she that told Samuel about COTN and the school they had at Ngolala.

On being enrolled in the Village Partnership Program Samuel would be able to attend school and successfully pass from primary to secondary level education, although with no-one to look after him he had to strike out on his own.

Today, Samuel works hard and is a good cook and these attributes have seen him secure board and lodging with a couple of different COTN staff members. When Rev. Michael Sonsiama took over as Head Teacher of COTN’s Ngolala Primary School he needed help around the house and so asked Samuel to stay with him.

The impact the church has had on Samuel has been profound. His father’s traditional beliefs saw Samuel sworn in to the dark spirituality of his village’s secret society as a child. “When I came to COTN they prayed for me," says Samuel. "I changed my life and became a Christian. That is a big change that COTN has made in my life.”

And though he has had to struggle so much, Samuel has never forgotten his little sister. He says, “If they give me anything here I go there and help her too. Like those books they give us [supplied every term to children enrolled in the Village Partnership Program], I go there and help her too because she is my smaller sister.”

---

This article can also be found at www.cotni.org and there you will see this little note at the end of the article - Samuel is enrolled in our Village Partnership Program but does not yet have a sponsor. If you are interested in sponsoring Samuel ($32/month), please contact Tami Johnson, our Sierra Leone Sponsorship Coordinator, at 360-698-7227 or tamijohnson@COTNI.org.

Katumu

This is an article I wrote for the COTN website. I love this girl a lot and found it hard on more than one occasion when interviewing her not to jump over the table and give her a big hug. You will see in one of the pictures taken by my friend and one of last year’s intern leaders, Scott Cook, that I am holding Rebecca. This is something that is somewhat tragically a thing of the past for now as she is going through a terrified-of-the-freakishly-skinned-monster-man phase. It sucks :(

Note for my mother (sorry for disillusioning anyone who thought I was trying to be all professional on this thing)...please print a copy of this for Aunty Christine – Rebecca was looking particularly beautiful at church on Sunday in her little red dress :)

Article also to be found at http://www.cotni.org/!

---

Katumu Williams was born on a Sunday. 7am on Sunday, April 4, 1992 to be exact. Sixteen years later at 9am on January 27, 2008, also a Sunday, Katumu gave birth to a baby girl of her own, later named Rebecca by "Mama Angie," COTN-Sierra Leone Country Director.

Before the pregnancy Katumu had lived with her father, her two brothers and one sister in Kenema. She remembers her mother did not have much of an interest in education. As Katumu says, “She doesn’t even know the way to school.” However, her father had different ideas and sent all his children, including Katumu, to school.

Church was also a part of their lives because of Katumu’s Aunty Adama. “My father was a Muslim,” Katumu explains, “But now I can say 'Thanks be to God' because he has changed. He is now a pastor.”

But everything changed when Katumu got pregnant. Her father pulled her out of school and sent her away to his home village, Ngolala, to the same Aunty Adama that had carried the young Katumu to church every Sunday. It would be at the COTN clinic in Ngolala that Katumu gave birth, her aunty at her side. “The thing was very painful!" recalls Katumu. "But we went about it successfully.”

Then in June 2008 when Rebecca was five months old and Katumu thought that her school going days might have come to an end, everything changed yet again. Katumu met Laura Brost of Orlando Florida, a leader of that summer’s US intern program, and the relationship which developed resulted in Laura offering to sponsor Katumu.

This second chance at education is something that Katumu craved. She believes that, “Nowadays, in our time, without education you are nothing in this world.” Indeed the importance of education is something she believes the other people in her village did not understand before COTN came to Banta and she comments on the particular impact that has been made by the fact that two of the teachers in COTN’s secondary school are female.

COTN has also helped nurture Katumu’s spiritual development. She regularly attends morning prayers, Sunday services and midweek Bible studies. Commenting on church she says, “You will not just go and be a listener, but a doer. Also, pray for your enemy so they will not be your enemy tomorrow.”

And what of tomorrow? After completing the education she values so highly Katumu intends to go in to business and take good care of her family. She really appreciates how hard her Aunty has worked to take care of her, saying, “I have so many plans for her.” And Rebecca? Katumu laughs, “Ah. Rebecca will be the top. She will be the top. Because for Rebecca I am straining to have my education.” When Katumu says, “If COTN was not there, there would be no education and a lack of medical facilities,” she speaks as someone who has lived the difference COTN has made.

COTN was there when Katumu’s world was turned upside down. It offered her a safe place to give birth to her beautiful daughter. It offered her a second chance at school. And every Sunday it offers her a place to learn about and worship the Father who will never leave nor forsake, who offers life in all its abundance.