Africa

On Jumping

June 27, 2022 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

Every so often here I just tell a story, something I’ve lived through that I think is entertaining. I’ve written on the almost-plane-crash, and on the time when my Dad threw bullets in a wood stove. There are other stories to tell, and today I’d like to talk about jumping off a bridge.

In God’s kind providence, I’ve had the opportunity to take ten different teams of university students to Africa. The experiences have been instructive, exciting, and joyous; I have fond memories of each team and each team member.

We went to several different countries: initially Kenya and South Africa, then Zambia, and eventually several teams went to Ghana and Tanzania. Ministering in countries in three different regions—East Africa, West Africa, and Southern Africa—taught us a lot about the cultural diversity of the continent, dispelling several myths common among Americans—but that’s for another post.

On one of the trips (the second, in 2010), we went to Zambia, working in several churches, an orphanage, and a Christian school in the Copperbelt, the northern part of the country. It was a delightful experience with a really talented and focused team.

I’m sensitive about tourism on these trips; we don’t go to be tourists, and I try to weed out those students early in the planning process. But on most trips there’s been time and opportunity to do a little touristy thing. We visited Amboseli in Kenya, Serengeti in Tanzania, Mole in Ghana, and even an amusement park in Johannesburg (in winter!), where we had the place pretty much to ourselves and rode the roller coasters until we could hardly see.

Zambia has one of the Seven Wonders of the natural world, Victoria Falls, and the missionaries we were working with thought it would be worthwhile to take 3 days to drive to Livingstone and back, with a day at the Falls. I was inclined to trust their judgment. : – )

The Falls are spectacular. They’re as wide as three Niagara / Horseshoe Falls, and you can hike right up to the very edge of the precipice on the Zambia side; I bent down and put my finger in the first inch of the cataract. You can hike around to the front of the falls, and I very much recommend the raincoat rentals.

There are associated activities, among which we gave the team members options. Several opted for the whitewater rafting, while others chose the bridge package. Just downriver from the Falls there’s a bridge between Zambia and Zimbabwe, from which you can bungee jump or ride a giant swing, and nearby there’s a zipline. At the time, you could do all three for $100.

When I showed up with ten customers, the guy comped me.

All three, for free. Cool.

The bridge is about 150 meters above the Zambezi River, with class 6 rapids in the gorge, and crocodiles just downstream.

Any number of ways to die.

I had posted on the team blog, which is typically read by parents and other interested parties, that we were going to have this opportunity, so that parents could interact with their progeny if they had concerns. When we got there, I watched the staff very closely, and they were professional, methodical, careful, with frequent checks and doublechecks.

OK then.

You could jump solo or in tandem. I opted to go alone.

You stand on the edge of the platform, raise your arms to the side, look at the horizon, and the crew member says, “1, 2, 3, bungee!” and gives you a slight nudge in the back.

Down you go.

It’s sensory overload—the peripheral landmarks speed by, the wind is rushing in your face, the water is roaring louder as you approach, and you’re upside down for the additional joy of utter disorientation.

It’s a 110-meter freefall before you max out the cord (essentially a 6-inch-thick rubber band), and then oscillate to equilibrium. There’s no discomfort to the maximum extension—it’s a rubber band, not a rope—but I found the extended time upside down, with blood rushing to my head, mildly uncomfortable.

When you’ve stopped boinging, a crew member comes down on a cable and ties into you, and they haul you back up.

At the time, this was the second highest bungee jump in the world. (The highest was in South Africa.) A few months after we jumped, an Australian woman had the cord break and dump her into the Zambezi—and she survived.

Knowing that, I don’t know if I’d do it again.

But it sure was fun.

Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash

Thoughts on Returning from Africa for the 9th Time

July 9, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

On June 24^th I came home from Africa, again. I went for the first time in 2000, when I went to teach in a small Bible college in Cape Town. I was privileged to take my family on that trip. I thought I fell in love with Africa then, but I realized later that experience with Cape Town is a pretty narrow introduction to the continent.

I began taking student teams to Africa several years later. I’ve taken teams to Kenya and South Africa (2007), Zambia and Kenya (2010), Ghana and Tanzania (2013, 2015, 2016) and just Tanzania (2014). And this summer, for a change, I took a team to Ghana for 3 weeks, brought it home, and turned right around—24 hours later!—and took a different team to Tanzania. That cut the cost in half for each of the participating students, and it also did wonders for my frequent-flyer miles, but it also just about killed me. More on that in a minute.

Like every other time I’ve returned, I have thoughts. Unlike those other times, though, this time I’m going to share them.

1. Africa is unique.

Yeah, the animals are unique, of course. Elephants (the variety with huge ears) and lions and giraffes and wildebeests, and on and on it goes. (But, to the surprise of many, no tigers. Except in zoos.) But Africa is unique in other ways. It’s a remarkable mixture of traditional and modern, of tribal and national. Villages of thatched-roof huts with 5 bars of cell service. Cultures that are at once similar and noticeably distinct.

I suppose Africa is stereotyped, and inaccurately so, more than any other continent. First, there’s hardly any jungle—that’s in the DCR, mostly—and second, the continent has a wide diversity of culture and stages of development. There’s a mall in Cape Town that’ll knock your socks off. I could go on forever.

2. Diversity is strength.

I’ve taken teams ranging in size from 17 to 6. Each has had its own personality. But more importantly, each has had diversity among its members. Men and women, extroverted and introverted, athletic and, well, not. And in each case, the team has sorted itself out, figured out who can do what, and distributed its strengths to accomplish the tasks at hand. In each case, the differences have led not to divisions, but to increased flexibility in complex ministry opportunities. You need Marys, and you need Marthas. By the grace of God, everybody’s good at something, and everybody enjoys succeeding at that.

3. Aging is a thing.

This summer’s outing was more challenging physically than previous ones, most obviously in the need to take 2 different teams, back to back. One week’s schedule:

Sunday: 12-hour overnight bus ride from Wa to Accra, Ghana
Monday: hiking around Accra, sleeping in a real bed in a guest house
Tuesday: overnight flight to Amsterdam
Wednesday: all-day flight to Atlanta; drive 3 hours to Greenville; sleep in my own bed
Thursday: meet new team; drive to Atlanta; 15-hour overnight flight to Doha, Qatar
Friday: flight to Nairobi; sleep in chairs at the airport
Saturday: flight to Mwanza, Tanzania, via Kilimanjaro; stay awake until local bedtime so jetlag doesn’t kill you

For 7 nights, sleeping in a different place every night, and only 3 of the 7 are beds.

Seemed like a good idea at the time.

I realized pretty quickly that I was not physically prepared for the trip, and that came as a surprise to me. In previous years, I’ve just gone, and the bod did what it needed to do. Now, apparently, the bod has less natural strength than it did, and it’ll need to be prepared. Years of good health you pretty much take for granted. Time to start workin’ out.

4. Pretty much anybody can go.

Jesus left us a command to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. Most Christians assume that they’re supporters of the goers rather than goers themselves. You know, “pray, give, go”—we do the praying and the giving, and we hire other people to do the going, which would be really, um, inconvenient for us.

Nonsense. Anybody can go. Pretty much. That 1 lady in the iron lung, I suppose she can’t go. And of course there are others with disabling health conditions. But for most of us, there are only 2 obstacles:

Time. We have jobs, children to take care of. But you can learn a lot, and even do a lot, in just a week or two, provided you have wise counsel on where to go and how to help. You have vacation time; donate one of those weeks, and see how your priorities change.
Money. Yeah, that. My 2 trips this summer cost several thousand dollars, and I’m not wealthy—though I hasten to add that God has given me everything I need, and a lot of things I don’t. So where does the money come from? Well, here’s the thing. There are people in the church—a lot of them—whose hearts God has touched, who have set aside a hundred bucks, or a thousand bucks, or even several thousand, and they’re asking God to show them where to put it. They’re actively watching for opportunities to invest those funds in ways that will make an eternal difference. I don’t like to ask for money, but after I realized that these people are out there, I found that if you’ll make the opportunity known, the funds will show up. Money isn’t an obstacle. Over the years I’ve had team members whose essential poverty would astonish you. And they went to Africa, for 3 weeks, or 5 weeks, or 8 weeks, because God, through his people, provided.

Be a pray-er. Be a giver. Sure. But be a goer. Don’t sell yourself—and your God—short.

Cry, the Beloved Country

March 8, 2018 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

I visited South Africa for the first time in the year 2000. I tell my friends, and my students, that you cannot visit Africa without leaving a piece of your heart there. I love many countries and people in Africa, but South Africa is as close to my heart as any. It has a stark beauty in its land, in its people, in its many languages, even in its accents.

My favorite place in the world, oddly enough, is not in my homeland; it is in South Africa—Dias Beach, at the Cape of Good Hope. It’s like no other beach—or place—in the world.

And so it’s hard to put into words how deeply my heart was broken by the news that the South African Parliament, which meets in Cape Town, has voted to expropriate farms owned by whites without any payment, to establish justice for apartheid.

It’s not certain yet; the proposed constitutional amendment needs to be approved by the Constitutional Review Committee, which will render a decision by August, and then be approved by 2/3 of Parliament. I’m not well enough informed on South African politics to guess on the odds of that happening. But I do enough theology to comment on the underlying causes.

For decades the South African government viewed black Africans as inferior and instituted a system of segregation and discrimination against blacks that it called apartheid, Afrikaans for “apartness.” It was similar in many ways to conditions in the Jim Crow South, though there were some differences in the particulars.

One law was that blacks were not allowed to own land. The predictable result was that virtually all private land was owned by whites. Under increasing world pressure, the white government abolished apartheid in the early 1990s, and former prisoner Nelson Mandela rode a wave of popular support to the presidency in 1994.

It was a precarious time. There were cries for retribution in the name of justice, and whites, whether landowners or not, were afraid. To pretty much everyone’s relief, Mandela rose to the occasion, declaring that there would be justice for all, but not revenge. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to hear testimonies of injustice and abuse under apartheid. The truth was both told and heard, and the explosive situation was handled deftly. Every white South African I’ve spoken to in the years since has told me that Mandela was a good man. They mourned his death alongside his black countrymen, who called him by the tribal honorific “Madiba.”

Mandela was a flawed man, like any other. He did foolish and sinful things in his younger days. But I have respected his conscious decision to rise above revenge to act for the good of his country. We all could benefit from more such men.

So South Africa prospered, unlike its near neighbor Zimbabwe, which raced headlong into revenge mode. Under the dictator Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe confiscated white-owned farms in the name of retribution and justice. The country swiftly descended into economic chaos, and societal chaos quickly followed. When I visited Zimbabwe in 2010 you could buy a 1 billion dollar note as a souvenir for a couple of US dollars; the Zimbabwean retailers wouldn’t even take Zimbabwean money, but our US dollars were welcome.

I don’t know what will happen in South Africa. The new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, claims the confiscations will be done in a way not to cause economic harm. I don’t see any way he can keep that promise. I’m afraid that South Africa is about to learn that killing the goose doesn’t yield any more golden eggs. And a great country will face a long period of economic and social hardship.

This is what sin does.

God created men and women—all of them—in his image. World history is an unbroken story of peoples in power abusing those out of power, denying their imageship. And that sin, like all sin, has consequences, and long-lasting ones at that—consequences that outlast generations. Apartheid set the stage for suspicion, hatred, revenge; and this generation and future generations will reap a bitter harvest.

My prayer is for grace, mercy, and peace for all the dear people of South Africa. May the gracious hearts of my many South African friends—black, white, and coloured, in places like Guguletu, Kuilsrivier, and Beverly Park—prevail to bring peace and mutual respect to their beautiful land.

Photo by John-Paul Joseph Henry on Unsplash