treasure island

This time last week I was on Ibo (small article to come). Soaking in all the beauty of this primitive little island. Now I am back in my reality of life in Pemba. Ibo was quaint and quiet. Her 4,500 inhabitants so friendly and welcoming. Pemba is a little more threatening. I am always shocked by the varying levels of poverty all around me. I don't know how you measure it. Ibo was poor. Pemba is poor too. But it's a poor city instead of a poor island if that makes any sense. 

I was deeply impacted by this innocent little vacation more than I knew I would be. I went just to have some quiet time, but I stumbled into dreams of my past. I had a dream several years ago where I was in a large African farmhouse. It was spacious and lived-in. It was beyond quaint. It was rustic and functional. There were twin iron beds on a wrap around porch. I was wearing an apron. There was a screened-door. I could have been baking an apple pie. Two little girls were playing on a tire swing, both in braids. One girl was white, the other black. I knew there were other children there too. Children to inhabit all those beds. 

I stopped in to visit other missionaries living on Ibo. I stepped into a painted blue door underneath a large trumpet vine. Their daughter was playing in a bamboo playhouse with a little black girl in braids, a tattered brown dress and bare feet. The screen door was opened for me and there was a twin bed on the porch. We sat around the table covered with a needlepoint runner. They offered me coffee in a French press with rusks. Lovely South Africans. In an instant my dream collided with this moment and I wondered whose life I was living in. Was I back in that dream or was this reality? The father sat with a bowl on his lap making butter. The mother offered me homemade Feta cheese. The daughter eventually warmed up to me and now I have a friend for life. The next day they take me to see the Iris property. The ministry I work with owns ocean front property on this island. They've struggled with the Ibo government to get very far in building or creating anything just yet but apparently are hopeful. I've heard rumors they would like to build a lodge or place for hospitality. I can see the vision. It would be a perfect training center. It could take years. It would be so much fun.

I walked back in silence wondering just what my role is in any of this. I recalled past dreams and long conversations about working in the area of development and finding solutions to poverty. This little village looks no different than those all over this continent. There has to be a solution. Major strides are being made every day. Social businesses and schools and healthcare are growing and changing nations. I just wonder what my role is in the midst of it all. 

Meanwhile I am in the middle of this life in Pemba. We will soon begin another semester of English classes. Hartwellian Fran Colquitt will be sitting here beside me in 9 days, sewing away. She will be doing a three week sewing school with some of my students.  I will be taking over computer classes and teaching English. 

It doesn't look like an African farmhouse and I'm in jeans and not an apron. They aren't little girls but moody teenagers, but I am living a dream. I used to think daily about all the things from home that I will miss. But over the past few months I have been thinking about all the things from here that I never want to leave. Driving home on the scooter, on the sandy road in the dark last night from the nearby village under bright stars, I felt it. I will miss this. I don't know that I am even leaving or where I will go next. But I am following Him in the journey. And I don't have to know what it will look like, because I already know. It will look like something beyond my wildest imagination.