An African Memory: Waiting in the Dark

I remember Carol Concerts in Bulawayo’s Central Park. I remember the wonderful descant to “O Come all Ye Faithful” on “Glory to God, all glory in the highest” – sung in the small city hall at a combined choirs carol concert. I remember candles and music that shaped my heart as a child.

Advent is a different time than Christmas, even though it is the time was always had our Christmas concerts. Advent is for waiting, and my African memory is of a time I don’t remember, although I was there. An African memory of waiting in the dark for someone to be born.

[The pictures are from Google images -- of the Central Park, but not of the amphitheatre where we had carols by candlelight, and of the City Hall where we also had carol concerts.

My older sister tells me the story. Our mother was waiting for a child, expecting her third baby. The life of her second was short – eight months long, before Dorothy died of malaria and was buried at our home in Sikalongo. [The picture below was taken in 2003, as Lois and I and our sons visited Sikalongo and reconnected with the memory of my sister, Dorothy.]

Perhaps as a result, mother went to the nearest hospital well before the birth of her next child. Livingstone was the nearest city with a hospital, so she and my sister Donna and another missionary, Verna Ginder, went down to Livingstone in a 1948 Ford Pickup.

I have wondered what they talked about. Verna had lost her husband to a tropical fever a few years before. Mother had lost her daughter to malaria. They may have identified closely with each other. They stayed in some government rondavels (a nice hut with a thatched roof) beside the Zambezi River, just above Victoria Falls. After several days by the river, mother announced that her labour begun.

[Pictures taken from Google images: the rondavel was probably not quite this nice, and this hospital -- in Livingstone, Zambia -- may be newer. But you get the idea.]

They drove to the nearby hospital in the 1948 Ford and hurried inside. I don’t know anything about the labour (although I am told I was the cause), but I gather that during labour the mother delivering the baby does not think about anything else. So Donna remained in the Pickup, momentarily forgotten.

I don’t remember what time I was born, but finally the time came, with the night well spent. Donna spent that same night in the dark of the African night, wondering where her mother and Aunt Verna were as she sat in the 1948 Ford Pickup. After I was born, someone thought of Donna. Maybe mother asked, “Where is Donna?” And maybe Verna Ginder rushed out horrified to make sure Donna was safe. Maybe Donna had fallen asleep; maybe she was just glad to see someone she knew.

In any case, they hurried back into the hospital so that Donna could find out what had kept mother so occupied. As a five-year old child, she was maybe less than impressed with the discovery of her baby brother. “That was why you left me alone in the dark?”

She has been a good sister, for which I am grateful, and mother was a good mother, for which I am doubly grateful. Her experience of waiting in the dark is a paradigm or model of the way we all are waiting for the night to end, trusting that God brings us this Christmas the joy of new birth and new life. Maranatha!