Can You Hear Me Now?

Jungle. It was exactly what you expected in Africa. We had our Land Cruiser traveling where ordinary vehicles dreamed of going. It was one of those places way out in the middle of nowhere in Uganda. The people looked native. The huts were tiny and made of mud. The language was strange to me. But the people were welcoming. And why wouldn’t they be? It was church.

Their building of praise was really only four logs standing upright with a grass cover for a roof. But the building didn’t hinder their worship or enthusiasm for God. It was a time of celebration like I had never experienced. Some of the women led the way with a tribal dance of worship led by yells, shrills, and eventually loud singing. Wow, I had never experienced exuberant song anything close to this before. This was church. I was in awe of their extreme joy in the midst of such huge poverty. But their lack of food, clothing and good shelter hadn’t prevented them from having the joy of the Lord.

Now it was my turn. It was preaching time. It didn’t take long into my sermon before the most annoying thing started happening. Over and over again, their cell phones started ringing. And in remote Africa, there is no proper etiquette for incoming calls. Yes, they answered and talked just as loudly as I was in my sermon.

Doesn’t this seem strange? How did all of these poor people in one of the most remote places on earth get cell phones? And how do they afford them? When you have very little food, doesn’t this seem like a bad choice for your resources?

And how about the technological changes going on here? Think about it. Just a few years ago, this very tribe was communicating to each other by beating on drums. Yes, that’s how they sent their signals. Now they have cell phones. Communication advancement that took centuries for most of us had happened to them in a few years. How do you process and understand change when a culture moves that quickly?

Zimbabwe is now the poorest country in the world. With massive unemployment, most Zimbabweans survive on the equivalent of about $1 a day. Yet a family needs about $467 a month to even reach poverty level and have enough for the basic necessities of life. Here’s the kicker–I was reading about a new problem in Zimbabwe—there are so many mobile phones that the nation’s three networks are now clogged. Two-thirds of the population of the poorest country on earth owns mobile phones. We are talking about 7 million phones—even beggars and street children have them.

What does this say? In places where people are dying from a lack of food, there are plenty of cell phones. Are these the wrong priorities? They are for me. But I’m not making these choices. Why are people choosing a phone over food is the question I need to figure out? I’m not sure. But cell phones raise the esteem level of poor people and make them not feel lonely. They also show that communication is sometimes more important than food to people. I think we need to wrestle with these inner longings that produce what seems to be odd choices if we are going to better help much less understand areas of poverty.