Working to improve care

They planted seeds of hope and reaped joy and tears.

Six members of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church returned several weeks ago from a life-changing trip to Zambia, where they put a roof on the new Shuswap Medical Clinic.

At the end of April, the group boarded an airplane for a 32-hour trip to Ndola, their destination city.

Under the auspices of the Abbotsford-based Seeds of Hope, the team took 10 hockey bags loaded with gloves, diapers, towels, uniform parts, clothing, tool belts, medicine, toys and school supplies.

“It was a week of surprises,” says Maye Cann, who with her husband Don, Trish Hanna and her dad John, and Ron and Judy Goodman spent two weeks at Grace Academy, a school for AIDS-infected orphans. “We never knew if you were gonna have power because the copper mines are back in business and when they were operating, they used the power and basically the city of Ndola went without.”

With $24,000 raised by St. Andrew’s, a medical clinic was the church’s gift to the compound, which has classrooms and dormitories.

Assisted by two Zambian locals, Don, Ron and the Hannas spent four days on a hot tin roof – literally.

“It was 35 to 38 degrees every day, and they worked from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.,” says Maye who, along with Judy, kept her feet on the ground painting thatched summer houses. “They had a great time with the two Zambians they worked with and the Zambian guys were so impressed that Trish was up there with them.”

Smiles were interspersed with many tears the second week as team members went on missions – handing out 50 pounds of cornmeal in one community and taking foamies, blankets and toiletries to farm families.

The hardest moments were spent in the malnutrition ward of the local children’s hospital.

“If you have someone in hospital or prison, the family has to feed them,” Maye says, noting the team handed out 50 food packages of cornmeal, beans, oil, salt and toiletries in the ward. “It was heartbreaking; Seeds of Hope found one girl of 13 in the malnutrition ward. Nobody was feeding her, she was so weak she couldn’t even stand. Six weeks later, Trish and I were teaching her to skip.”

Laden with school supplies, soccer balls and bean bags, the team’s last visit was to a bush school where 1,140 students are taught by 14 teachers.

Every member of the team was struck by the poverty, the lack of food and how much most Canadians take for granted.

“But they have joy,” she says, noting the Zambians' belief in the saying that ‘joy is not the absence of sorrow, it’s the presence of God.’ “It was very powerful to all of us, it spoke volumes to all of us, to the food, water and power, we all take for granted.”

On a happier note, the group enjoyed taking some of the orphans on outings that sound simple here, but were rare treats to the orphans of Buseko – swimming at one of the hotels in Ndola, visiting a game farm where they went canoeing and had a picnic lunch and tasting ice cream.

With their heads dancing with ideas for future projects, all members of the team hope to return to Zambia in a couple of years.