12 Days in Africa: A Mother's Journey by Lisa Sanders

12 Days in Africa: A Mother's Journey Reviews

• 
  Heather Fineisen

  This is a quick yet inspiring read about the author's 12 day trip to Uganda with her son and Church group and how it impacted her life. This isn't flowery prose but heartfelt narration and stories from various participants. Lisa is a board member for the organization that she represented and she lets yo know that throughout. But set that marketing aside and you have a call that any one person can give a little and make a big difference to someone who seemingly has nothing to give in return but a smile and love. Seeing the gratitude, smiles, and love changed the lives of her group and she encourages readers to find their call.
  
  I found her story friendly and easy to read as well as inspiring. I especially liked the idea of taking a trip like this with your school age son like she did or daughter like another participant What small thing are you doing to make a difference? Sponsoring a child, donating canned goods, volunteering at church, offering a prayer or a simple thank you... I know I can up my game, what about you?
  
  Provided by Book Look Bloggers
• 
  Lorraine Montgomery

  I received a free ecopy of this book from Book Look Bloggers in exchange for an honest review.
  
  Anticipating the "empty nest syndrome" with son, Trent, away at university and son, Blake, heading off the following year, Lisa Sanders begins praying about what she might do by way of serving God and making a difference. One might say that venturing to Alaska with her husband, Greg, and staying for 26 years had been quite an adventure in itself, but that has nothing to compare with the exciting and unusual experiences God had in store for her as he led her to join Hope4Kids International on a 12-day mission to Uganda, taking her teenaged son, Blake, with her. This book is a compilation of her "recollections and reflections" and those of some of her travel mates, of what happened after she walked through God's open door and entered Africa.
  
  With both excitement and trepidation, Blake and Lisa make all their preparations — shots, below the knee skirts for Lisa, travel arrangements, insurance, tons of hand sanitizer and antibacterial wipes, beef jerky, granola bars — and found themselves meeting up with other mission trip travelers in Amsterdam (46 members in all, most of whom were volunteers like Lisa and Blake, some of them nurses and nursing students) after a 9-hour flight from Anchorage, then another 9-hour flight to Entebbe, Uganda. While the team was based in a hotel in Tororo (about 5 hours east of Entebbe), they forayed out daily on trips to villages to tend sick children, distribute clothing, dedicate new wells donated by churches and individuals who organized Walk-4-Water fundraisers, attend church services with villagers, attend graduation ceremonies for students leaving school and women who've completed the related empowerment program Hope4Women, and to find children to love and sponsor.
  
  Walk-4-Water events consist of participants walking 4 miles — "the average distance African women and children walked to their water source". Providing wells for villages is quite possibly one of the most important advantages Hope4Kids International can do for the people living there. Lisa and Blake learned very quickly what the most serious problems are for Ugandan families in the outlying villages. "When close to half of the children die before age five, a loss of hope and overwhelming despair rules your life." One of the field workers with Hope4Kids Int. told this story:
  
  

  The children beginning around age five are woken at daylight, handed five gallon water containers and told to walk many miles to get their family's daily water. Then they turn around and go back to the water source and fill up another container for school — six or more miles of walking before reaching school — all without breakfast and likely no dinner the night before. . .
  During their walk to the water source, it is a common occurrence for the children to be accosted, beaten and raped by men who have no other purpose in their lives but to lie in wait and hurt the innocent. At their school, the children are required to bring a container full of water. If they don't, they are caned. An eight-year-old from this village was raped on the way to get her water for school. The men stole her water container as well. She still managed to make it to school, but without her water. The teacher showed her no mercy; instead she was caned for showing up without her water.

  
  
  Providing a well brings more than just accessible water — it brings safe drinking water and a safer environment for the children — it brings hope!
  
  Lisa quickly learned she had "no frame of reference for poverty and starvation that are all encompassing". She realized one had to be non-judgemental and, to some extent, to leave her own standards behind when she climbed into the van each morning. So many of the men, unable to support their families, lose their self-esteem and hope, turn to home-brewed alcohol, and abuse their wives and children. Because dowries are so high, many just begin living together and having children. People who haven't the wherewithal to feed their children, also haven't the wherewithal for contraception, and HIV/AIDS becomes an overwhelming problem for families with multiple wives. When one wife dies, another must look after her children as well as her own, and is probably suffering from HIV as well. The medicine brought by Hope4Kids gives life and success to many, but of course, not to all; the problem must seem insurmountable to the workers. If children have parents, then medicine, operations, and overnight care cannot be given without their consent.
  
  Another related group that Lisa got to work with is Smile Africa. Visiting an orphanage run by this group, Lisa spent the afternoon with an emaciated little boy about 5 years old lying in the shade on a concrete slab covered by a tin roof. He was feverish and barely conscious, and she comforted him as best she could, gently rubbing his back and whispering to him. She left him for a short while to watch Blake who was "orchestrating a running game" where everyone won. She enjoyed the kibitzing he was initiating with the rather large group of children. When she turned back to the concrete slab, the little boy was gone. She was shocked to find that in those few minutes, he had died of malaria. The medication was on hand, but the boy's family could not be found to approve the overnight stay required to administer the IV. How disheartening.
  
  Circumstances like these make the success stories all the more precious. And there were success stories; some delivered at ceremonies by "graduates" who had been to university and returned to the villages to work, often employed by Hope4Kids. Women who graduated from Hope4Women were so excited about everything they had learned and put to use from their year of starting up their own businesses. They had a plan and knew where they were going; a plan that would enable them to support their own families, and train their daughters to be able to do the same. Lisa quotes an African saying: Teach a man and you have taught one man, teach a woman and you have taught a family. Hope4Women is proving this daily.
  
  Lisa includes some reflections from other members of the team, including her son, as well as testimonies from "graduates" from the programs provided by these organizations. Lisa has since joined the board of directors of Hope4Kids and her son Trent was planning to take a semester off and work with Youth with a Mission (YWAM) Discipleship Training School (DTS). I've seen other reviews lamenting the proof-reading and the non-chronological telling of the stories but I found the former very incidental and the later of no consequence. It really doesn't matter which day of the trip Lisa is describing because it's the stories themselves that tear at your heart and make you realize how well off we are and how little we are doing toward achieving a balance. This is an incredibly moving story about how a small group filled with dedicated individuals are changing the world one village at a time. An amazing story.
  
  All profits from this book will be donated to build lifesaving wells in villages desperate for clean water.
• 
  Nathan Albright

  [Note: This book was provided free of charge by BookLook/WestBow Press in exchange for an honest review.]
  
  Although this book is a short one, it manages to combine a lot of elements that make it a warm and compelling and deeply personal read. If you want to get a proper set of expectations for this book, going into it, picture part humorous travelogue [1], part infomercial for the author's organization, Hope4Kids, which helps struggling children in Uganda [2], and part exploration of the gratitude that comes from knowing how people live in poorer countries. Throughout it all the author demonstrates herself to be a good-humored and deeply sympathetic Westerner, the kind who would adopt waifish street children fairly readily. On a larger level, this book provides a defense of the mini-missionary trips that are popular among many people, not only as a way for mother-son bonding as is talked about here, but as a way that people who cannot commit years of their lives to foreign mission work can serve in smaller chunks of time in a sort of socially conscious religious tourism that lasted, for the case of the author of this book, for 12 days in Africa.
  
  In reading this book I expected a chronological order of material, like a travel diary, but the result was more complicated. The author divided her book into roughly twelve chapters, including such areas as the surprises she found, as well as her experiences in traveling, her own health problems with migraines, the duties she and her son did while they were in Africa involving digging wells and teaching children. The author not only includes her own discussions, and gives a lot of praise to her son and the other people working with her, but also gives space for some of the people in Uganda on a more permanent basis, including some of the Ugandan children themselves, to discuss their experiences and also gives her son a chance to talk about how harrowing it was to try to pass out prescriptions to the many sick people who came looking for help. One gets the sense from reading the book that the author took her brief time in Africa very seriously, setting a good example for those who would wish to do likewise in spending a few weeks in a country like Uganda seeking to go a great deal of good in a little time in the midst of a busy life.
  
  It should be noted that although this is an inspirational book that it includes material that is deeply unpleasant and unsettling. The author does not sugarcoat the informality of many marital and family relationships, the pervasive influence of witchcraft in many areas, the problems with spousal abuse and alcohol addiction, and perhaps most harrowing, the experience many children and young women have with frequent rape as a result of doing such simple tasks as fetching the water from local wells in the face of harassment and abuse from local men [3]. The author gives the grim statistics on the high rate of infant and child mortality and the rampant spread of AIDS in the face of promiscuity and a total absence of moral and social infrastructure. This book is not for the faint of heart, and appears to have been written by someone who was genuinely shocked at the conditions she saw, not having been fully aware of just how difficult life was in Sub-Saharan African. The book is a mother's journey, and certainly aims at the heartstrings, but readers should be aware that this is an account that is pretty grim at times and certainly real enough to discuss going to the bathroom alongside the road, and its ultimate optimistic tone is not one that ignores the difficulties of life in a fallen world.
  
  [1] See, for example:
  
  
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  [2] See, for example:
  
  
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  [3] See, for example:
  
  
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• 
  Mindy

  I enjoyed this book for the details of her trip and her experiences there. Some of them similar to my trip to
  Ethiopia, but some of them different as she was out in the country and we were near the city. I did find the book a little disjointed, though. The author states that this book grew out of a pamphlet she created for people who asked about her trip and to give out at her presentations. I can see this, as the beginning of the book is more like a bullet point format. For the first several chapters she lists people's names and city names and then describes them. The later chapters of the book where she includes her stories and stories from others that went with her were much more enjoying. I found myself reading the first several chapters as if they were a dictionary to help understand the rest of the book, and then the "meat" of the book felt too short. There were also times where she would relate a story from an event and then a couple chapters later re-visit the event with more detail. I would have preferred to have both of those stories together and given greater detail. Overall, this book is a good, quick read allowing you to see some of the amazing things that happen when you allow God to use your heart to mother those who aren't your own.
  
  BookSneeze® provided me with a complimentary copy of this book for review purposes. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
  
• 
  Amy

  Very inspiring.
  
  Heart wrenching but hopeful. I can do something, and will! We can help lives change and give young people choices.