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Wonder and Surprise

by Ricardo Walters

Ricardo Walters has worked for The Salvation Army’s Africa Regional Facilitation Team in Africa – and other areas – for several years. Over this time he has seen some of the world’s poorest people helped by The Salvation Army. Poverty and suffering have been commonplace but, in words and pictures, Ricardo tells All the World of the hope he has seen in what may seem to be hopeless situations.

Lord, my world so tiny seems,
Small, self-centred are my dreams;
Clear my vision, make me see
What a world my world might be.
Grander far is your design
Than those puny plans of mine;
Wider is your will, and wise,
Full of wonder –
Full of wonder and surprise.

John Gowans
Sing for Joy No 127

YEARS after my days as a boy soprano in a Salvation Army singing company, the wisdom of this simple prayer (left), wrapped around an uncomplicated melody, continues to resonate. We live in an extraordinarily beautiful world but that the heights of beauty can be attained by the so-called ‘ordinary’ things of the world can too easily be missed.

Childlike wonder can give way to cynical dispassion. Our bright, wide-eyed lens on the world darkens all too quickly – our once-shiny idealism tarnished, suspended now from too-thin strands of fragile hope.

It’s difficult not to feel bruised by a world characterised by desperate struggle. There is darkness and yet, incredibly, joy still comes with the dawn. Those who mourn also still dance.

‘Life is a highway,’ declares singer-songwriter Tom Cochrane and, like him, I love a road-trip. I love the anticipation of arrival. The promise of adventure. The potential for surprise and discovery.

The journey itself captures the imagination. The vivid, near-cinematic cast of characters encountered. The shifting landscape rushing by. The stops en route to rest and stretch and swap places. The range of emotions: who might we meet along the way? What incredible story, what arresting beauty might compel us to stay the course, to go the distance?

This is the stuff of beauty – resilience, faith, joy, vision, perseverance, hope – all lived out by ordinary people whose paths criss-cross our own. And occasionally, if we have the eyes to see, we may yet be surprised on our journey. Grace ever offers inspiration for a tired soul.

Bangu, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Nielson and companion on a street corner in Rio de Janeiro – ‘friends of the heart’

THEIR eyes are virtually incandescent, the perfect mix of innocence and mischief that is the sole preserve of children. No older than seven or eight, they are playing with a small group of others when our team comes upon them in a dusty alley. But there is something about these two that sets them apart: a closeness, a special bond, an intimacy.

‘And you guys,’ we say as introductions are exchanged, ‘you must be brothers.’ We – me and members of the local Salvation Army team – are crouched alongside their group, protected from the rising heat of the day by the morning-shade of the favela.

Their brows furrow in tandem. ‘Not brothers,’ Nielson replies, almost indignant. ‘We are amigos do coração.’

‘Friends of the heart’. Somehow, here, that seems more meaningful than brotherhood by blood alone.

As the morning crawls lazily towards afternoon, others will claim this same space and mark it as their territory. Teenage drug-dealers equipped with attitude and two-way radios appear on the flat roofs of apartment blocks. Armed with handguns and automatic rifles and self-effacing disregard for life, they find their place in this world.

Hours later, armoured police vehicles barrel through the crowded streets, haphazardly firing into the air – even into the crowd, indiscriminately dispensing justice that reeks of carnage and chaos. Life is brittle here. And transient.

But the beautifully rendered relationship of two small boys, so matter-of-factly delivered, shows that virtue still exists to counter vice. That care exists to counter corruption. The amigos do coração are a flickering ember of hope. A future may yet be secured.

Kwazulu Natal, South Africa

Seventy-year-old Mavis in her home in Kwazulu Natal

SHE is a picture of resilience. Time-tested. Weathered. And we are in awe of her.

Mavis is a 70-year-old professional nurse who retired to a rural village in northern Kwazulu Natal. Her homestead, a small collective of huts, is the only structure visible for kilometres in a vast expanse of open land, rolling hills and big sky. Her thin frame is bent, wracked with arthritis, her feet and hands knobbed. She walks slowly, carefully, almost painfully. Yet this infirmity barely manages to mask what once was a long-limbed elegance, gracious and poised.

I am sitting on the floor of a clay hut, next to my wife and son, when Mavis walks in. Outside, a small herd of oxen drift by the doorway where a chicken made a hasty escape to make room for us. The spartan single-room dwelling is compact and simple. A single bench. A table. Some mats on the floor for sitting. And a Salvation Army bass drum, covered in hide.

This ‘otherness’ is difficult for five-year-old Zachary. I watch him make the awkward efforts to adjust but he is visibly unsettled, uncomfortable even. This is so unlike his normal life, so plain and empty and devoid of ‘stuff’. So free? I pray in that moment that this is an important life-lesson for him.

This may be one of the simplest Salvation Army meetings I’ve ever attended. About 10 children wander in and it’s all under way, complete with songbooks and tambourines and testimony. Mavis’s testimony is one of a yearning for revival and a deep burden of concern for these children who will have to make it through life when she is gone. Many are orphans, some heading households.

As our group prepares to leave, her invitation is full of resolve and conviction: ‘It has meant so much to have you here with us. It has encouraged us. Please come back. We must do something with the children.’ It is a familiar, always humbling, farewell. These people have, in fact, meant revival for us.

Mavis carries the evidence of a life not easily lived. Her home requires labour and toil. There is no water, no power, no vehicles – no luxury. But suffering and hardship have completed their work. The fruits of perseverance and long-suffering have been character and integrity. She endures.

And there is a glimmer of something else. Hope. And hope does not disappoint.

Kwazulu Natal, South Africa

A young girl watches and waits until she is strong enough to join the dancing

Patients at The Salvation Army’s Mountain View Hospital dance in the sunshine

THE Salvation Army operates Mountain View Hospital in a picturesque valley in rural Kwazulu Natal, the South African province possibly most severely impacted by HIV/Aids. Mountain View specialises in care and treatment of tuberculosis and the likelihood is that as many as 50 per cent of patients with TB are HIV-positive.

The first time I went to Mountain View I was – with hindsight – ridiculously inexperienced and awkwardly new to the Salvation Army approach to HIV/Aids. Feeling deeply unsettled, uncomfortable and invasive, I moved through the facility with the resident team on ward rounds, concerned we were intruding on the private suffering of patients who would prefer to be left alone, favouring lonely isolation over the unsolicited company of strangers. How wrong I was – a jarring realisation as faces erupted with smiles and enthusiastic greetings. People crave connection and support, I discovered; they long for affirmation and relationship, even in suffering – perhaps especially in suffering.

As we moved slowly out of the building into the courtyard, several patients – all clad in their hospital gowns – came outside to enjoy the mid-morning sunshine. They talked and laughed among themselves, and sang and danced. And while they danced, a small girl watched through a nearby window, half-concealed in shadow. Not yet well enough to come outside herself, but looking outwards. Not focused on her frailty. Looking outwards.

What could have been the face of sickness was transformed into a face of hope and anticipation, stretching towards the day when she too could break into the light and join in the celebration.

A work of healing was under way.

Naguru slum Kampala, Uganda

Salvation Army team member Dorcus, from Uganda

DORCUS is a young Ugandan, a team-mate whose radiant joy, deep devotion and uncompromising conviction are an inspiration each time we meet. And this week, as we walk through the slums of Kampala or trek across the incredible displacement camps for people who have been made refugees in their own country, has been no different.

Her story is heart-wrenching, but this is not a woman who indulges in self-pity, nor expects it, though she should readily be extended that courtesy. Abandoned as a baby, discarded in a rubbish dump, her testimony is literally that of being lifted up out of the pit. And from those dark beginnings she lives her life in the light of the knowledge of purpose. She knows that it was not for nothing she survived.

Now she spends her life in the service of God and others. She is not a Salvationist but the shining spirit of ‘heart to God, hand to man’ runs through her. In slums and villages across the country her story and her presence encourage people to hope. There is love to lift them too. She serves out of love and lives by faith, valuing the capacity of people and respecting their right to dignity. Unmarried, she single-handedly raises 15 foster-children who were orphaned by Aids or abandoned on the streets of Kampala.

Dorcus is the living embodiment of altruism, the ‘unselfish concern for the welfare and well-being of others’.

She is an ‘ordinary woman’ – no credentials, no special titles, nothing to distinguish her. She is certainly fallible, but she is beautiful beyond measure.

I say she is a heroine – a champion whose story deserves to be told with much better words than these.

Lord ...
Clear my vision, make me see
What a world my world might be ...
Wider is your will, and wise,
Full of wonder and surprise.

IMAGES from Ricardo Walters’s journeys

Download a PDF file of the double-page spread from All the World showing photos of some of the people Ricardo has met:

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