Introducing this blog

It’s July 2013 and I’m sitting in my hotel room in Addis Ababa at 7.15am on a Sunday morning (1.15 Ethiopian time!) having just spent an hour supporting a football match between the CRED team and the locals. The actual match time was only 30 minutes, but by the time the locals had reached an agreement on where to place the piles of dirt that were the goal posts, and with all the stoppage time for cars, taxis and buses to drive through the pitch, it took an hour to play. Yes, the match was on a road – there is no other space for playing football around here – and it was quite something to see how unbothered the locals are by the traffic; sometimes they would stop the game, sometimes they would just let the traffic weave round them – a bit nerve-wracking for the spectators!

The match was just one more little element of what has been a fascinating week in Ethiopia. We have been working with one of CRED’s partner organisations, Women At Risk, which works with women trying to escape the prostitution industry, and the stories we have heard, the people we have met, and the sights we have seen have left me with much I am still trying to process, and will continue to be processing for a while yet.

Last week I was in Rwanda co-leading a different CRED team who were working with another of CRED’s partners, Good News of Peace and Development for Rwanda (GNPDR). The work focused around a catch-up education centre for street kids and ex-street kids, so plenty more challenging stories there. But the aspect that made that trip extra hard is the recent and very horrific history of the genocide that almost destroyed Rwanda 19 years ago. Whilst there we heard testimonies of Tutsi people who had lived through the genocide, and we visited two genocide memorials and saw the bullet holes in the walls, and the machete wounds in the skulls; plenty more to process and try to get my head round.

And with me on these trips are amazing young people from  the UK who have spent months fundraising to come and work in very poor conditions, having their perspectives on life totally altered, getting down in the dirt alongside street kids, children of prostitutes, and many other marginalised groups to serve them in inspiring ways, returning to the UK transformed. These trips are not just about serving the poor overseas, these trips are about raising up the next generation of young leaders in our country, and that combination is so exciting.

As I was chatting with one of the other Ethiopia team members about some of the past 2 weeks, she asked me if I ever blog; ‘you have so many fascinating stories to tell, people need to hear about them; you ought to do a blog to get the stories out there’.

And so this blog-site is being created. I have heard stories that need to be told, and met people who need to be honoured. I have dipped into issues that mustn’t be shut away, mustn’t be tidily placed in a drawer marked ‘contentious, do not open’. These people are as precious as anyone, and they deserve a better crack at life, and if my thoughts and words can help in some tiny way to achieve that, then I will write on.

Be assured this isn’t being done as a therapy session. It is an attempt to be a voice for some of the voiceless people I have met. Yes it is coming off the back of the Ethiopia and Rwanda trips, so those stories will feature prominently to start with, but it will go wider. As I travel to other countries and projects with other CRED teams, there will be more stories to tell. And there will also be stories to tell of the lives of the young people who come on the trip, and how they have been transformed. And amidst those I’m sure there will be other posts prompted by news we hear from our CRED partners, or related news stories etc.

I've named the blog 'Soft Heart, Hard Feet' as that is what I pray I have, and will continue to have as I travel  - a heart soft enough to be touched and sometimes even broken by what I witness, soft enough to feel love and compassion for all, and soft enough to be moved to want to tell their stories. And feet hard enough to keep on with the journeys as long as I am needed - to keep on taking young people on these life-transforming trips, to keep on developing our next generation, and to keep on finding the people whose stories need to be told.

I’m not ashamed to say that my faith will feature in my postings, as that is such a key part of my life and my thinking, and I can’t separate it out. But I won’t be using this as a platform for trying to convert people, so don’t worry about that – I hope that what I write will be accessible to all who have a heart for the wider world and the people that live in it. From the homeless person on the street in UK to the 13-year old girl forced into prostitution in Ethiopia, from the teenager excluded from school in the UK to the AIDS orphan desperate to go to school in Kenya – this blog is dedicated to them and the organisations working tirelessly to bring hope to a hurting world.

So, that’s the introduction done; now to get on with telling those stories!