Showing posts with label Africa Trek 1. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Africa Trek 1. Show all posts

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Bookends: Africa Trek 1


 Antelope in the Hart Mountain Refuge, Oregon

My head is spinning Africa. I've yearned to know more. Because I can? Because I should? Read Africa Trek 1 by Alexandre and Sonia Poussin. It will change everything you know and think about Africa. An amazing journey. An amazing story.

Favorite excerpts...

Everything is simpler with all hands in the soil.

We are thinking of the thirst of an entire people.

We are all walking towards the light. When you reach the summit, keep climbing.

Sorcery, jealousies, acts of sabotage: the success of an individual is forbidden. He has no right to succeed. It's everyone or no one.

To be a missionary is not to disembark with a brand new catechism in your suitcase and hit people over the head to try and hammer it in forcibly. To be a missionary is to find the work of God in every man, in every culture, and to inhabit, inculturate that spirituality with the evangelical message of the Good News.

How many of these admirable women will we come across, these heavy lifters who bear loads, households, offspring, and Africa in their arms?

You are always in the middle of a landscape you are crossing! You think you see it? All you are doing is moving the center, and the landscape never ceases to change...

They aren't a thousand young people singing together, but a single body expressing itself with a thousand hearty vocal chords. A lesson in harmony and unity. No complexes, no individualism, no self-aggrandizement or self-obsession among the Basothos. The length of the mass depends on the enthusiasm of the young people; sometimes it last three hours and we can't manage to stop them singing....Then there are long discussions about life, faith, travel, the world, Christians around the world. And what surprises me most is that these girls have a shameless faith, free, without complexes, pure and simple, natural. And it becomes obvious to me how hard people are on the believers of Europe. Systematically derided. Constantly humiliated. To what extent they hide their faith and elicit sarcastic remarks. Who has not felt queasy getting into a conversation on this taboo subject, revealing one's candid thoughts? Who has not been ashamed to say there was maybe something rather than nothing? What fine man has not been sacrificed at least once, swearing to himself he will not be caught again on the altar of ambient cynicism and skepticism and that anti-clericalism and atheism fashionable ideas. Well, the glacial wind of the kingdom of sorrow and emptiness is swept away by the shining faces of these eager girls. Let them believe! And let me doubt! Who ever said that faith was certainty? And happiness, those who are born into it, well nourished, spoiled, they find that bourgeois, so they worry about their appearance and think themselves romantic when they are brooding, wise when they are sinister, happy when they are blasé.

Read this book. You may not be able to trek Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to Mount Kilimanjaro, but you can follow the footsteps of man, learn their story. Our story. Go with them on their trek. Above a certain altitude, man cannot conceive bad thoughts.

As for me, Africa Trek ll, the journey from Kilimanjaro to the Sea of Galilee is next up on my list.