Off to Africa

Off to Africa

I’m going to Africa. It’s true even though I can scarcely believe it myself. I’ll be at the New Hope Orphanage in Bethany, Swaziland, where I’ll be teaching writing to kids. I hear, via email, that the kids are excited. One little boy really gets it—my reason for going. He said, “This is for me. I’m going to learn to write a book and tell my life’s story.”

It’s a challenge for me. I don’t know these kids, I don’t know their culture, and I know only a little of the awful trauma these precious children have been through in their young lives. They’ve seen most or all of their families die of AIDS. They’ve tried to live on their own and almost starved to death. In an effort to get a little food many of them have been abused—abused beyond what most of us can conceive in our worst nightmare. I also know that most African cultures are full of occult practices and witch doctors and a lot of other concepts from the dark side. The workers at the home have asked us to avoid anything that speaks of the occult. And that brings me to the reason I’m writing this blog today.

One of the best ways to learn to write good stories is to hear good stories read to you. So I set about trying to find wonderful, engaging stories that had no reference to the occult or witches to read to the kids at the orphanage, and I found it was a huge challenge. It seems that inevitably hidden somewhere in most stories is a reference to a spell or a witch or something evil. Then I became alarmed to think of the steady, subtle diet of this kind of information our own kids are getting in many—perhaps most—of the things they read. Of course, the literary phenomenon of the century is the Harry Potter series that reeks of witches and warlocks and the supernatural. I’m concerned because kids don’t have the ability to sort reality from fantasy and to make the application of an allegory to their own lives until they are about eleven or twelve. So if your children are under eleven years of age monitor carefully what they are reading and viewing.

I finally found several books that were not based on the occult and that I believe are culturally acceptable to African children. One is The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford. If you’ve never read the book, it is the story of three animals: an old English bull terrior, a golden Labrador, and a Siamese cat who trek across the Canadian wilderness to find their master in a truly incredible journey. The story shows how none of the animals would have survived the trip if they had not stuck together and helped one another. I won’t give away the splendid, tear-jerking ending.

The second book is an old one. It is the original Boxcar Children book and is the story of four children who are orphaned and set out to find a way to survive. They find an old boxcar and move into it. Once again the story is based on sticking together, helping each other, and being inventive in finding solutions to the many daily problems they encounter.
My challenge to parents is to be involved in both what their kids are reading (and we hope they are all reading) and especially what they are watching on television. Protect their minds from any inroad of evil that might come to them through their eyes. Remember the Bible’s admonition to think about what is true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, excellent, lovely, and pure. (1 Peter 2:12) There will be plenty of time in your children’s lives to deal with the ugly and the frightening. And perhaps today you can give thanks that your kids, unlike the orphans I’ll be with in Africa, haven’t seen the ugly side of life yet. Make a plan to build wonderful, positive, lovely, courageous concepts into your children by making sure that what they are reading and viewing is good for them.