Zambia

One of the most life-changing events of my life was the month I spent in Zambia at an orphanage in a rural area about an hour and a half outside of Lusaka. I went with a friend I made at Panera, a man who would become a mentor and father-figure and a woman I had never met. We stayed at an orphanage without running water and three hours of electricity a day from a generator. There was one toilet that was shared with about 40 people. After several days of sweet little hands being all over my “yellow hair”, I asked the little girls to cornrow it. I photographed many of the children and when I showed them the picture on the back of the camera, I had to tell them it was them, as many of them didn’t know what they looked like. There are not words for what I saw there, so much simple joy, so much pain. As a representative of the group I was with, I was asked to speak to a group of prostitutes in the capital city of Lusaka through a Bemba interpreter and simply tell them they were valuable. It would change the course of my life, my relationship with Christ, what I want to do with art and music. 60% of those women were HIV positive.

We bungee jumped off of Victoria Falls, one of the seven wonders of the world, on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe. We went on a safari and came close enough to touch elephants, giraffes and rhinos. There are not words for a trip like this, and what it does to you, and the words of a white American feel so woefully cliché and inadequate. But it was one of the most important, most impactful months of my life.