On the Road to Zion

For some reason I've been thinking about Africa a lot lately. Maybe it's the resurgent naturalist in me or the African history class I've been taking. It's probably that my mom's leaving for Mozambique today (note gun and hoe on coat of arms).

It all started about a month back while watching a show on Animal Planet about this dude who owned a chimp sanctuary in Sierra Leone, rescuing them from the jungles as the country plunged into civil war in the 90s. As they drove through Freetown, there were people with missing limbs all over the place - these poor wretches had the choice of loosing an arm or leg to rebels terrorizing the countryside. Surviving the ordeal almost seemed worse as it doomed them to a life of vagrancy, not even able to perform basic unskilled physical labour anymore. The owner of the sactuary was spared only because he dealt with animals, not people.

It all seems so pervasive - the janjaweed militia ethnically cleansing Darfur, kids sleeping in guarded camps Uganda so they're not kidnapped and forced to be child soldiers, people living like feral animals in the quintessential failed African state, Somalia.

Then there's the HIV/AIDS crisis.

The average life expectancy of Mozambicans is just 39. Not that bad compared to 32 in neighbouring Swaziland, where people can expect to live the shortest lives on earth.

So my mom is going to a missionary school way out in the boondocks to do her part to try and do what she can to help. Takes five days just to get there from Canada, no running water, only a generator for power. Gets to swim in the Indian Ocean every morning instead of a shower, a daily ration of rice with beans and for the odd treat, a bit of goat.

To those who have never met my mother, she's an amazingly spiritual person and the strongest woman I know, but if you're not at her ridiculously high level of Christianity, she can come off as a tad crazy.

First, she tells me that "there's a whole other world I have no idea about" in some of these religious revival communities in Africa. I accept that, I really don't have a clue. I read in The Economist a while back that evangelical Christianity is spreading like wildfire down Africa's East coast.

Then she tells me that she's going on week-long missions into mainly-Muslim communities to offer salvation and refuge at the missionary compound should any of them want it. A little scary (don't need any jihads against the Currie family) but yeah, that's what missions are for, I guess, conversions and saving.

Then there's the healing. Now, she already has a degree in 'spiritual healing' from a religious college in BC, so she's no stranger to laying hands on the sick, claiming to be able to channel the Holy Spirit to help physical ailments. This might sound farfetched to some, but in evangelical circles, it's commonly accepted and 'healings' take place quite frequently. I'm not really sold on the idea, but it seems to work, at least on a psychosomatic level, for some.

But apparently in Africa, the healing is on some next-level shit. Not only do they perform the run-of-the-mill arthritis expulsion or cancer reversal, but given time and a spiritual fervour only Africa can foster, HIV/AIDS can be completely cured. We're starting to go off the deep end here...

Now there's raising people from the dead, two, three and even four days after they 'die'. I asked my mom what to do if she does die over there, her last wishes and whatnot, and she maintained that in the event of death, she would simply be "raised up." That's what I call life insurance!

Lastly, if you're still with me, are what I call the 'magic pots'. Most Christians know about the story where Jesus, arriving to a dinner where there wasn't enough bread and wine to go around, performed a miracle by multiplying the food and drink so there was just enough to fill everyone. At the compound where my mom will be staying, there exists a modern-day version of this feat whereby when they're feeding the locals that come in for a free meal, the pots never have to be refilled, and when the last person is fed, the pots are found to be empty.

Africa does have that mystique that if any of this stuff can happen somewhere, it would be there. Maybe it's my Anglo-Saxon view of the continent as a vast, untamed wilderness that, for the most part, scares the shit out of me. I don't want to think of my mom as naive zealot, but my scientific-rational side can't accept dead-raising and food-creating. But it would seem oddly appropriate that in the midst of so much human suffering would come God's greatest works.