Moses and I

Since February 1st, I've felt like Moses.

5 weeks ago I was sitting at home when I got an email asking me if I wanted to go to Mozambique and to join our disaster response team which was scaling up after severe floods displaced over 200,000 people. I jumped at the chance to get out of the cold Philly air, return to my beloved Africa and serve.

But like Moses, I didn't feel at all qualified to do the work God sent me to do. I was brought on to set up a food program and get emergency food relief to thousands of people who headed for the highland and returned home to find nothing. The thing is, I actually had no idea how to start up a food program. Sure, I've worked on WFP projects before. I've seen plenty of food distributions from my Uganda days. I've even seen our warehouses but actually run a distribution program, nope. Like Moses, I was given a task that was way over my head. Moses couldn't talk to Pharaoh so he asked for help. He needed an Aaron. I didn't know how to run a food program but I didn't gripe about it like Moses, but God knew I needed help and he sent me an Aaron who's actual name is Manhique.

Manhique used to run a food program with us. He's a local who knows the place inside and out. He knows everyone at WFP, and he knew government contacts. We quickly brought him on and assembled our team. He was invaluable and as I write now, he's still doing the work. We made a pretty good duo.

The second time I felt like Moses was after a coordination meeting with WFP. This time when he was facing the Red Sea. The Egyptian army was in hot pursuit and the Israelites were wondering if they made the right call. Moses reached a dead end and needed a miracle. After my meeting, I had been given our planned tonnage, beneficiary numbers and locations. My Red Sea: hire a team of 16, set up 2 warehouses, receive and store 230 metric tons of food (8 fully loaded tractor trailers) then feed 35,000 people covering 2 large districts, all in 3 weeks. In a perfect world, I would have had a month to get the program started with hiring and training the staff, plus setting up the warehouses. In this world, I had less than a month to do all of this and feed 35,000. Christ fed 5,000 plus in one day with a few fish and loaves, how hard could it be? My Egyptian Army: remote villages, broken roads and bridges, a warehouse caked in 3 inches of mud, a tough local government and delayed paperwork that authorized spending.

As Exodus shows time and time gain, God is faithful and when needed, he parts the sea to get you to the other side. It's up to you to walk through it but in the end you reach where you need to be. The past few weeks were a complete blur but the sea was parted and the Egyptian army was defeated. The team worked nonstop. Phones were constantly ringing, meals were skipped and cash went out as soon as it came in. We found creative ways to get food where it needed to go (tractors). Paperwork got sorted it and government was appeased.

Technically, we missed our distribution deadline by a few days, but I still call it a miracle. I knew when I created the distribution schedule that it was very, very tight. Borderline unrealistic but we did what we needed to do and when I left the field a few days ago, my warehouses were empty and waiting for the next 600 metric tons to arrive.

For Moses, the Red Sea was just one event of many as part of his journey. The same is true for the people in Gaza and Zambezia in Mozambique. They got pounded by the floods and they have a very long journey ahead of them but as I saw firsthand over the past month, God is faithful.