Reflections. Lufubu. Day Twenty-two.

I have to apologize for nearly two weeks without a post.

I am seated at my desk in the Salesian Residence in Lufubu. Upstairs, the Provincial Council of the ZMB Vice-Province of Salesians is meeting at a chipped and torn table Br. Philip dragged over here from the school in a wheelbarrow and covered with a white tablecloth. They are seated on green, plastic chairs I brought from the garage and wiped with a wet bath-towel until their thick layers of black dust and dirt were removed. Across the room from their meeting, showers of dried bat droppings stream from an unclosed hole in the ceiling. I had cleaned the pile they formed on the floor yesterday, but more came today. We decided there was nothing to be done.

The same bats chitter above us as we have Mass in the mornings. Lizards crawl along the walls of my room. Spiders the size of teacup saucers sit silent watch in the corners and dark places.

Why the Provincial Council decided to drive 14 hours out to Lufubu to have their meeting, I have no idea. They arrived last night. Their loud laughter echoed along the concrete walls of the Residence until the small hours of the morning.

I have been busy in many ways. I have not had the time to pray as much as I used to—or write, or relax. I teach four classes a week in programming. These lectures I have to prepare as I go along, in the night hours or during the day before class. In the afternoons, I play with the kids at the Oratory.

Two Mondays ago, we buried Amfrey. For the funeral Mass, the Church was filled to the bursting with every man, woman, and child in Lufubu. The congregation spilled out of the doors and outside. Amfrey’s body was carried by the young men of the village. The women sang, while his friends served the Mass.

It was an environment strangely devoid of grief. In Lufubu, a funeral is a public event—and the hundreds of mourners that attended the service were nowhere to be seen at the Friday children’s Mass, the night-time All Saints Mass, or the two Sunday morning Masses that followed. These drew paltry crowds—though the nearest Catholic Church aside from ours is over 12 km away.

After the Mass, we followed the crowd to the graveyard. Br. Philip wore his black Salesian habit along with a large safari hat. Burials in Lufubu, and across rural Zambia in general, seem to be typically done in a forest. There are no grave markers, really. There are only mounds of dirt, stretching far away into the wooded distance. The woods containing Lufubu’s graveyard form a natural border with the village football pitch. We buried Amfrey only a stone’s throw away from the goalposts.

After some prayers from the presbyter, the altar boys—still in purple cassocks and white surplices—each threw a handful of dirt on the casket, which had been lowered into shallow ground. Young men from the village got to work with shovels and mattocks filling the rest of the hole. A kind of solemn queue formed—when it looked like one man had had enough, another would tap his shoulder to relieve him. I watched Br. Philip go in for one of the first reliefs, straining at the heavy dirt in his black, dust-covered cassock. I took my share of the load as well. Eventually, the mound over Amfrey’s grave stood about five feet high and—one might even say—just a bit taller than the rest of them.

We followed the singers in a procession that led to the house of Amfrey’s mother—the same place where we had the wake the night before. As we arrived, the singers began to enter and fill the small, thatch-covered house. To my surprise, I was asked to join as well. We stooped under the low mantle to enter the main room—thatch eaves about six feet high at the lowest, walls maybe wide enough for a taller man to lay down. We sang some songs, prayed, and after a while—filed back out.

The singers milled around for a bit and then left. Br. Philip and the presbyter entered back inside with a few others. I stood outside, unsure of what to do, before deciding to go inside as well.

Br. Philip and the others sat with legs straight on the straw mat that covered the floor—along the walls, facing towards the center of the room. A man was speaking. I made my way to take a place in the dust next to an older woman, but another fellow insisted I come and sit on the mat. I obliged.

After a few moments, I gathered that those assembled—maybe three parishioners from the Church, aside from the presbyter and Br. Philip—were going in turns to give a short word of encouragement to Amfrey’s mother. Up to this point, I still hadn’t figured out which of the women I had seen over the last two days was actually Amfrey’s mother. After scanning the room, I decided that it must be the woman across from me, listening intently to the presbyter’s speech. She was older, gray haired, tired, with a worn face—and hands rough from hard work.

I had no idea what was being said by those who went before me. As my turn to speak came around, I decided that I would simply say, in English, whatever my heart felt.

Br. Philip gave me a small cue: “It is a tradition to give a word of encouragement to the mother. Say whatever you wish to say.”

I did. I tried to make a point about the immortality of the human soul—that to live is to love God, and to be loved by God is to live—but it got confused with another point I wanted to make—that life in God makes us truly one entity, that if one person suffers somewhere, all the others suffer everywhere. Br. Philip translated for me, but I don’t think the message got through.

From the corner of the room, almost behind Br. Philip, I heard a small voice: “Natotela”—thank you. I noticed a woman I hadn’t seen before—younger, eyes dark from grief. “This is Amfrey’s mother.” Br. Philip said. “Oh,” I responded.

As we left, I went over to hold her hand. “God bless you,” I said. I couldn’t imagine what she was feeling.

After a funeral in Lufubu—once the burial is done and the words of encouragement have been given—it is customary to eat a ritual meal. To refuse is considered insulting. We were brought into a kind of place of honor in another house. Water in a large bowl was given to us to wash our fingers—stained red from the clay of Amfrey’s grave. We shared nshima, greens, and a kind of small fish native to the lagoons of Luapula.

After we left, Br. Philip said to me: “I was trying to give you an opportunity to leave before the meal. You must be careful. You are not used to the food here. You could get sick.”

He was right. I had thought the same thing as we had gone inside. The water, the fish, the greens—all of these were taken directly from the land around us, prepared by cooks who lacked running water, basic sanitation, and cooked over charcoal fires. In the end, I had decided that I was happy to suffer if it meant something to these people. God would provide, I figured. And He did. I went home and felt fine.

That same morning, before the funeral, I had taught my first class in Programming. I intended for it to be a kind of fast-moving motivation of the ideas behind a programming language: transistors, logic gates, digital circuits, computer architecture, assembly language, compilers, etc. All of these things they had (nominally) already learned in their Computer Architecture class.

I quickly realized that I was moving way too fast. The students didn’t gather a single thing.

The second day, I changed tack. For lecture 2, I focused on concepts and ideas that I thought were broken down into more easily digestible pieces—variables, data types, and operators. I thought that things were going well until I realized that, again, they simply had not gotten it.

All at once, I became aware that I had committed the cardinal sin of the enthusiastic professor—I had assumed that the students knew everything that I knew. They didn’t understand the way I taught variables because they had never seen a variable before—they weren’t even aware of the concept. To them, it made no sense. How could a silly little word—something absurd like “number_of_footballs”, have math done on it?

I finally went up to the board and drew a diagram. “You have a box,” I said. “And you have just put a label on it. The label says ‘number_of_footballs’. Pretend that is the ‘name’ of your box.”

They nodded, following.

“Say I have three footballs. I put them in the box. What is the box’s name?”

“Number_of_footballs,” they replied.

“So if I say, ‘there are three footballs in my box named “number_of_footballs”, does it make sense that I could also say, ‘there are three footballs in “number_of_footballs”?”

They nodded.

“So finally, does it make sense that I could say, ‘number_of_footballs’ is three?”

“Ahhh!” they said. “Now it makes sense.”

Almost two weeks later, we have made it to functions. Slowly but surely, they are getting it. They are enthusiastic, but I fear that their educational background has made it hard for them to grasp concepts in as open-ended a field as programming. From what I have seen, most teaching here is done as something like rote memorization. Getting the students to realize the creative freedom they have with code is difficult.

With all due respect, I don’t think any of my professors from Notre Dame would be in their element out here. For one, there is the idea of “African Time”. Students (and instructors) will regularly show up 15-20 minutes late for class. Sometimes, without warning, scheduling conflicts mean that you have to pack up and move to another classroom—which you only realize 10 minutes after class has “officially” started, when maybe 25% of the students have showed up. Students regularly miss 2-3 lectures per week (there are four).

There are also a frightening lack of resources. The school is still without dependable internet (more on this…) and everything they do have is old, battered, worn-down and held together by tape and string. Anything new must be bought in towns that are hours away.

As final items, students will also miss probably 20% of every thing that comes out of your mouth just because of language barrier, and the culture of a lack of academic self-confidence means that they never ask questions or feel confident enough in their answers to share them. The homework I assigned, they did not do.

But as I said, they are motivated. They are clever in a way that American students are not. They are used to making due with next to nothing—squeezing water out of stones. They work well with their hands and are creative problem solvers. If they can just get the basics down, I have full confidence that they will be able to build incredible things—as are built all over Zambia, making do with whatever is on hand.

Life at the school moves along. Every morning, the Salesians and I wake up early for half an hour of meditation, morning prayer, and Mass. There is school assembly at 7:40. Students sing the national anthem and then recite prayers. Usually, a member of staff gives a short talk.

These short talks I have learned are very common in Salesian culture. The most ubiquitous of these is the Salesian “Good Night”—a nightly talk given by a rotating member of the community that is half story-telling, half prayerful reflection. Salesians, and the students they serve, become very good at off-the-cuff public speaking, and a true Salesian product can give a “Good Night” with minimal (or no) preparation.

Thursdays, we have Mass in the morning on campus. Thursday last, as the closing prayers were being said, a whole mass of squealing hogs suddenly became visible through the school chapel windows—running roughshod over the student gardens that stretched into the distance. Less than an instant later, running after them could be seen several members of the DBATC community that, to my knowledge, had been standing next to me only moments prior. Through the open chapel door I spied a student I knew—Tuambo—chasing after a particularly quick pig, ineffectually throwing a shoe at it to slow its flight.

Every afternoon at 15:30, kids show up at the Oratory to play and pray. There is a rudimentary football pitch, a basketball court, a swing set, a pool table, checkerboards, a garden, and a large pavilion under which the kids dance and play. Fridays, there is evening Mass for the children. For these, along with Sundays and feast days, the boys of the Oratory serve at the altar, while the girls are “stella girls”—kind of half-singers half-liturgical dancers. Dance in liturgy is a big part of African Catholicism. The choir sways and steps side to side in rhythm—even the congregation is expected to step along.

There are many challenges here. In fact, there are challenges in just about every facet of life. There are tensions within the village, tensions within the school, tensions within the parish, and even—tensions within the Salesian community. For all of its lush, wild beauty—a kind of darkness is present in Lufubu. A corrupting darkness—the meanness of poverty, of superstition, of doubt.

Villagers struggle to come to Mass—many have apparently lost their faith. In their houses at night, the men brew illegal alcohol in secret stills. They are drunk during the day, leaving their children to fend for themselves. The children are fed at school and again at the Oratory, yet many bear the signs of malnutrition. Distended stomachs, stunted growth, mental slowness. These are common. Oratory staff will catch children saving and sneaking food to their parents.

There are other evils here as well. Witch doctors still hold an inordinate amount of influence—even over the Catholics. At Amfrey’s mother’s house, after the funeral, I remembered the presbyter of the parish giving a long speech to her during our encouragements. I later learned what he said.

“Do you want to know what he told her?” Br. Phillip had asked me, when we were walking home.

“Sure.”

“He said:

‘When a child dies in Lufubu, many will come to you and try to say—someone killed him. Maybe the grandmother, a relative. They cannot accept it as God’s will. They will tell you to go to the witch doctor to find out who it was. These men will lie. They will accuse an innocent person, and they will be put under the ban—and maybe, killed themselves. Do not do this, and do not listen to those who tell you to do this.’

The people, they cannot understand. In Lufubu, it is the young who die—and not the old.”

This environment takes its toll. People here, even children, have grown accustomed to helplessness. They do not know how to provide for themselves—they only know how to beg. After the independence celebration two Saturdays ago, when we had taken the children to the river, Br. Phillip gave me a bag of small biscuits to distribute. The happy, laughing children I had spent time with all day changed immediately. They snatched the treats out of my hands, roughly, clamoring all around—begging, pushing, pleading desperately—panic and fear in their eyes, like wild things.

“You must be careful,” Fr. Hamwete, the Oratorian tells me. “The people, if they become used to receiving things in charity, cease to be able to provide things for themselves. In the past, Salesians have stepped in to take care of some of these poorer parents’ children. But then—the assistance became expected, and the parents made no provision to take care of them themselves. You must be very careful…”

“The people, sometimes if we are not careful, they don’t love us—they love what they can get from us. If they think that we have money, they start to see us as only a pocket…” Fr. Cao says, eyes distant behind his glasses.

At the school there is the same problem. Students are given money from the government for education, for food, for seeds and fertilizer for their gardens. They spend it on beer, and then go hungry.

“To help these people, we must be holy. We must show them the correct way. Missionaries have always come and changed things for the better—changed culture for the better. Given people the desire to change. We must do this,” Fr. Hamwete says. He is Tonga, from the south part of Zambia. Among the Bemba, sometimes even he feels like an outsider.

There is a darkness here, certainly. Last week, Fr. Cao gave me free reign to try and fix the internet situation here as I saw fit. What followed was a week-and-a-half long debacle in which I enraged the entire students and staff of the school by removing the paltry and unstable network they had been relying on for their personal use—Facebook and Whatsapp and movie streaming and everything else—and attempted to replace it with a more secure network connected to the Starlink I had brought them. The way in which I went about this was not to their liking.

Fr. Cao and Br. Phillip encouraged me—the students need to learn. You cannot give into their demands just because they complain. If you know what is best, then you have to commit to it.

Over the next few days, I ran around like an insane person trying to fix the problem.

“I’ll build a Yagi-Uda antenna with scrap parts to boost the signal in their direction!”

This fell through because I couldn’t find a single SMA cable in the entire school.

“I’ll set up DNS filtering on my Business plan Starlink to block websites that take a lot of data and then they can use that!”

This fell through because Starlink doesn’t support this.

“I’ll put the Starlink in bypass mode and attach it to a different router that we have available here and do filtering that way!’

This fell through because the routers that were lying in scrap heaps here were too old and didn’t have these functions.

“I’ll set up a Raspberry Pi as a DNS server and point one of the routers at it!”

This actually somewhat succeeded, but unfortunately, even with Facebook and football streaming blocked, some members of the staff and the students managed to use up to 15 times as much data daily as I used on my own personal machine. The data plan was being zapped through now not in hours, but in days. Too soon for a plan meant to last a month.

Eventually, even the staff soured. No one was happy with me.

Throughout this, the Salesians supported me. Some of the students even came around.

“We see that you are working very hard. I think that it is very unfair how some of the students are treating you. You are just trying to help.”

“People need to stop their complaining. You have been nothing but generous to us.”

There were some bright parts. My programming students were interested in my plan to build an antenna and asked how it might be made. They also wanted to know the details of the DNS filtering I was doing with the Raspberry Pi. I promised that I would give presentations on these things, if they were interested.

Eventually, the students stopped being angry. They again were kind and greeted me in the hallways and stopped me to ask how I was doing. Some were very kind—following up with me when it seemed I had been anxious or upset.

The problem, for now, is out of my hands. With regards to the network they already had here, I have left them to follow their own designs. There is much to be done for the network I have brought. My site partner Nate (bless him) is bringing some equipment I ordered to his house in America—routers, access points, cables, electrical components. With these things, I hope to be able to gain more control over the network and spread its signal across the campus.

These past two weeks have been a trying time—no, they have been incredibly difficult. Almost impossible. I have found myself wondering why I am in the bowels of Africa spending my youth and life and energy on what sometimes feels like a futile venture. Helping people that do not want help, or are ungrateful for it. Or—take advantage of it.

And yet—through all of this, I remain hopeful. I did not come to help these people because they were perfect, or because I desired their gratitude. I came because they needed help.

It is not about succeeding. It is about doing the futile task out of diligence—out of love. Recognizing that we ourselves were once futile tasks. Our salvation a hopeless venture. Believing in the power of God to do the impossible.

In life, all of the little things that we do, regardless of their effectiveness—are redemptive if they are done in the Lord’s service. This is the wisdom of Therese’s “little way”. All of human action is, in fact, little before the greatness of the Almighty God. Yet God’s greatness is precisely why our little actions mean so much to him. From the one who loves Him dearly, God accepts the smallest acts and sacrifices as gifts surpassing in value even the most lavish offerings:

“Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury.”

In the active life, and indeed, in all lives—it is the dutiful obedience to our daily tasks, done in a spirit of love, that is the greatest offering we can make to God. The greatness of the offering is not in proportion to the gift, but to the love with which it is given. A mother will cherish a handwritten note from her young son much more than if he gave her thousands of dollars.

This is the supreme kindness of God, and the principle of the greatest and the least: God’s love transforms even the pathetic, petty, and humdrum course of human events into a narrative with cosmic significance. Our daily struggles are projected on the plane of the ultimate battle between Good and Evil, between Light and Dark.

Non coerceri a maximo, sed contineri a minimo, divinum est.

“Not to be constrained by the greatest thing, but to be contained in the smallest thing—that is divine.”

We must continue on this path with diligence—even if we cannot see it, even if we doubt, even if all of the world seems to be conspiring against us.

If we truly believe (with much prayer) that we are doing what God wills us to do, it is almost as if God’s will retroactively comes to meet us, even though we are the ones being bent towards it.

Incline my heart according to Your will, O God…

We are being pulled from before ourselves, from in front of ourselves, from outside of ourselves. Causality looks very strange when the causal agent is outside of time. It is almost as if events in the future exert causal effect on events in the past.

We must follow God’s will by pursuing it a little at a time. God does not reveal the whole path, except in flashes, but he does reveal to us the next step. To take the step we are taking, and to take it well—this is to do God’s will.

Sometimes God allows the path to be obscured. We must take the next step in faith, though we cannot see whether our feet will land on solid ground or will plunge into the abyss. The repeated playing of this kind of game of existential Russian Roulette with the hopeful belief—no, a foreknowledge using the technology of love—that you will always be led on the correct path is the life of faith.

God repeatedly allows you to experience doubt and pain and suffering to increase your perseverance and strength and trust. God trains you as the best kind of trainer, like the best kind of spotting partner— taking you to the very edge of your strength, even far outside the zone of your comfort, but always stepping in at the very last moment possible to prevent you from harm. This is the training that leads to maximum hypertrophy and the greatest amount of growth. This kind of training may hurt, and you may resent your trainer for pushing you so intensely, but life is a training for the greatest competition, and your partner pushing you any less would be a great disservice, even a wrong. God trains us so as to win.

Do you not know that the runners in the stadium all run in the race, but only one wins the prize? Run so as to win.

Every athlete exercises discipline in every way. They do it to win a perishable crown, but we an imperishable one.

Thus I do not run aimlessly; I do not fight as if I were shadowboxing.

No, I drive my body and train it, for fear that, after having preached to others, I myself should be disqualified.

Faith is a sort of combination of these things— hope, belief, trust— held together in the unique foreknowledge that comes from love, events approaching you from ahead.

We must trust. Run forward blindly. What holds us back is a lack of faith. We must make the resolution to run forward as if it were true whether it is true or not. Done out of love, this is the highest kind of faith.

Faith stretches forward as a kind of foreknowledge given by love—out of love. It is a kind of filler of the gaps, a bridge-building entity, a wayfinder—as water flowing down pushes forwards, around, and underneath until it finds a way; as fish threw themselves on the shore and died for millions of years before they evolved legs; as the men at Normandy threw themselves into the butchery of the German guns until they built a way across the trenches with their own bodies. A love that fills and strains at the gaps, ever forwards—that gasps and grapples wildly towards the object to which it is pulled— retrocausally, from in front of itself, outside itself.

It is a gamble of the entire universe, a risk of everything we know and that is possible, the final throw of the dice wagering even more than we cannot afford to lose— wagering, in fact, everything that exists. We throw with the kind of foreknowledge that we will win— though we cannot explain it, cannot understand it, cannot even guarantee it. But love is its own guarantee, and when your back is against the wall, you must play whether you like it or not.

It is all of existence, or it is nothing. That is the life of faith. God makes us all gambling men.

What then can we say that Abraham found, our ancestor according to the flesh?

Indeed, if Abraham was justified on the basis of his works, he has reason to boast; but this was not so in the sight of God.

For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”

Rom. 4 1-3, 18-25

“He [Abraham] reasoned that God was able to raise even from the dead…”

Heb. 11:19