LITA

ABOUT

ABOUT MY FIRST JOURNEY TO AFRICA

Years ago through dreams and visions I became aware ... one day, I'd be traveling to Africa in response to the collective needs of children there. When I learned in 2007 due to HIV/AIDS there were an estimated 12 million orphaned children living in Sub-Saharan Africa with a projected increase to 20 million by 2010, I realized the time had arrived for me to make my first journey to the continent.

In September 2007, with equity from the sale of my home, I sponsored myself and set off solo on my first journey to Africa, inspired to live among and begin learning first hand how to best bring LOVE and LIGHT to orphaned children and this current situation on our planet. 

First stop ... Uganda (see PROJECTS page for a little info about Uganda) where, according to the UN publication titled "The State Of The World's Children- 2007", it is estimated that due to HIV/AIDS and other causes there are 2.3 million children without parents.

During my 8 month stay in Uganda, I was very privileged to work closely alongside CHILD HEADED FAMILIES as well as community based initiatives such as 'AIDS CONCERN INTEGRATED ORGANIZATION' (ACIO) a local group working to create and implement holistic solutions to care for the over 400 orphaned and vulnerable children in their district of Sironko. 

To become familiar with some of my experiences as well as projects and efforts I participated in on my first journey to Africa please visit the archived PROJECTS pages from Nov '07, Mar '08 and June '08.

ABOUT MY PRESENT AND FUTURE INTENTIONS IN AFRICA

Living very simply and terrifically uncluttered as I do these days, me and my constant companion backpack are always ready to return to Uganda when circumstances deem it's time. Once there I will continue caring for orphaned children by supporting additional small, locally inspired initiatives like ACIO as well as Child Headed Families. You can find information about projects I am currently working on discussed on the PROJECTS page. 

In good time, it will be great to purchase land and establish a 'LOVE IS THE ANSWER' compound in Uganda that will serve as a simple home base for myself as well as for families, groups and individuals who wish to join me to share their Love and support personally with orphaned children. 

It will also be wonderful to one day have available a 'LOVE IS THE ANSWER' van in Uganda ( ... I think it may be green... that comes from another dream I've had!!! ) to facilitate travel and delivery of goods when visiting child headed families as well as provide accommodation for me when staying with the children at their compounds.

Since returning from my first journey, I've been exploring ways to financially support my continued involvement with the children. On the 'HOW YOU CAN HELP - LOVE IS THE ANSWER ~ PRODUCTS' page there are a couple 'green' products I've developed for purchase. You'll be helping me to carry on by purchasing these products or by making a "General Contribution" donation here.

One thing I learned about myself in Africa is that I very much enjoyed taking photographs and writing about my experiences with the children, and I have received some very encouraging and positive feedback about what I've shared so far. Presently I'm on the lookout for a connection with someone in the 'publishing field' etc to help me take this to the next level, perhaps connect me with sponsorship for equipment for my next journey as well as help me to organize a photo essay project I have in mind for the orphaned children to share their stories with the world. If you can recommend... thanks so much!

It remains an honor for me to connect with orphaned children on your behalf and it's always my intention that 100% of donations for the children go directly to supplies, services and projects that benefit them. You can become aware of empowerment initiatives I am currently involved with on the PROJECTS page. Clicking on the 'HOW YOU CAN HELP - DONATE' page you will find 2 donate buttons, one exclusively for the children. If you are interested in seeing how and where donor funds have been spent so far, click herewhere you will also be able to see how many children have benefitted from every donation made in their name ... to date over 500 orphaned children in total!   

Thanks so very much for your interest! As everything, it's ALL about relationships ... and I am so grateful there is the perfect part for us each to play in uplifting and empowering the children!

In Love and Service,  
Catherine

ABOUT SOME OF MY PERSONAL HISTORY

After graduation from high school in Vancouver in the mid 70's, I went to work at a popular clothing store and ended up spending the next 7 years there helping the chain grow from 8 to 84 stores! Being a case of 'right place, right time, right fit' I held positions of assistant and store manager, trouble shooter and area supervisor on to district supervisor of 18 stores and assistant buyer for the entire chain, all before I was 25 ... it turned out I was a natural in service and management and even better ... I Loved every minute of it!

From there I went on to sell residential real estate on the west side of Vancouver for about 10 years. Work in the field greatly appealed to my appreciation and Love of hearth and home. In 1991, as co-owners/operators, a friend and I founded a recycling business specializing in new home construction waste recycling. As registered members of the 'BC Recycling Hotline' of the day and awarded the 'BC Hydro Fridge Buy Back Program' for the Gulf Islands, we literally recycled and re-directed tonnes of stuff from going in the land fill.

Motivated by a soul connection with Native Medicine, I decided in 1996 to study natural medicine and herbalism and took a job at a health food store to compliment my studies. Before long I was happily managing the store as I continued to expand my knowledge in the field.

Following the passings of my Beloved Mom and Dad 10 months apart in 2000, and after spending several months sorting through their home of 30 years and shared belongings of 47 years, I climbed into my old VW van with a friend and headed out on what may turn out to be the road trip of my life! Returning 11 months later, I had driven 26,000 miles ( my way of "circumnavigating earth"..! ) from Canada to Panama and back, flown from Panama to Peru return where I visited the very beautiful and mystical Machu Picchu and enjoyed the privilege of climbing Huayna Picchu, and, traveled through every Central American country having spent time at hundreds of Sacred Sites throughout, as well as in Mexico and the US! Beyond an amazing journey, really, a whole book could probably be written about that drive! ( ... Lately, I consider how incredible the journey from Cairo to Cape Town might be one day..! :)

In more recent years I have studied and received certification in various natural, alternative and Spiritual disciplines including Paq'o (Shaman) training in Incan/Andean Medicine, Usui Shiki Ryocho REIKI Level 1 and 2, Laying of Hands and Laying of Crystals training as well as Angel Healing Medicine. I've supported myself by managing and supervising large (60, 120, 200 person ) remote camps in the wilderness providing catering and accommodation for bush workers in northern BC and Alberta.

While it's true to say, there have been times when I've felt somewhat perplexed about being here on planet earth :) throughout this life some very simple basics have remained constant for me. Before she passed in 2000, my Mom, June, made sure I would remember a story from my early years, to help me understand and always recognize these basics that inform my life.

She said I was 5. It was my first day of school. We were walking down the hallway on our way to the classroom, me and her, hand in hand. I was excited and happy! With 2 older brothers already in school it was finally my time to get on with putting all my well learned and very practiced letters and numbers to good use!

Mom and I saw a little girl crying, standing with her mother outside the classroom door. She was scared. Mom said, without hesitation I let go of her hand and walked directly over to the little girl. I took her hands in mine and looked in her eyes. I comforted her, 'You don't have to cry, we're going to have lots of fun!' And with that, hands joined, my new friend and I turned and walked into the classroom together. Mom said the other mother, somewhat stunned, looked at her questioningly ... to which Mom replied 'That's Catherine'.

I didn't remember the experience when Mom told me, but the feeling in it is one I have felt over and over through the years. I call it following my heart, I call it Love!

And so it is, right from the start to today, life continually inspires me to choose Love with an open heart; and, takes me on the most wonder filled, informing and ultimately empowering adventures, that always seem to have something to do with Loving children by taking hold of their hands, when I do! Although I've been told many times how I could've been at the top of some 'big business concern' for years now, I made a very conscious choice many years ago... To Love, To Serve, To Uplift, first and foremost - to embrace my career as a care-er - it's simple, it's natural, and apparently, it's why I'm here :)

Enter millions of orphaned children in Africa. I will do all I can to Love as many of you as possible.  ( ... one of my little Beloveds in Uganda, named 'Morning', made this Angel out of bark from a banana tree for me)

ABOUT AFRICA

Doing a little research about Africa, so far I've come across no less than 7 "guesstimates" about the origin of the continents name! Be it from the Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Asians, a Yemenite chief or perhaps the grandson of Abraham or companion of Hercules, however it received its name, present day scholars and scientists refer to Africa, particularly East Africa, as the "birthplace of humanity" which can only underscore her enormously vast and yet undisclosed antiquity. Fossils, human bones, tools, pottery, rock art, cave paintings, even the worlds earliest recorded mathematical notations... "discoveries" about Africa continue to systematically and irrefutably ENLIGHTEN the "dark continent" of "savages" labels and misinformed assumptions of the past.

Shining her own light on Africa, in her very entertaining and inspiring book titled "Looking For Lovedu: Days And Nights In Africa" Ann Jones details her remarkable road trip from Morocco to Cape Town in search of Modjadji V, Queen of the Lovedu people. With her kind permission I reprint here a small portion of Ann's informed and concise history of human beings in Africa...

"It was in Africa that what we call human life - Homo sapiens sapiens - first appeared not less than 150,000 years ago. It was out of Africa that "wise wise man" hiked into Eurasia and later - between 30,000 and 15,000 years ago - over the Bering land bridge into the Americas. Which means that African cultures are the oldest on earth and therefore more advanced, more "developed" than any other - at least in chronological terms. Nowadays, of course, "development" is a measure of industrialization, not the mere accretion of elapsed time, and it is commonly believed in the West to be the correct path, the only acceptable path, to the future. Other nations of both West and East have hurried along that trail, leaving the nations of the African cradle in the dust. But in prehistoric times, the inhabitants of Africa actually were further along the path of "development" than Native North Americans. The first stone tools - found at various sites in Africa - were made about two million years ago.

Historians say that African history properly begins with the spread of farming across the continent after about 6,000 B.C. Some date the Iron Age as early as 500 B.C., when Africans of the Sudan and the upper Nile Valley learned to mine, smelt, and forge metals. By the end of the fifth century of the Christian era, nearly all of Africa was occupied by Iron Age farmers. Farming made villages possible; settlement in villages made the accumulation of goods possible and stimulated trade. During the period Europeans still know as the Dark Ages, Africa's Sudanic states carried on a vigorous trade - in gold, ivory, ostrich feathers and slaves derived from the hinterland to the south - while the prosperous East African coast developed commercial connections with Arabia and India. The old state of Benin sent ambassadors to Portugal years before Columbus sailed for the New World.

Eventually, many African cultures below the Sahara developed systems of self-government based on participatory democracy. The kings and chiefs who headed such cultures were not rulers but symbolic leaders, charged like Queen Modjadji with maintaining harmony and balance among the ancestors, the people, and the elements of the natural and spiritual worlds, and above all with doing the will of the people. A privy council and a council of elders advised the leader, and the voice of the people was heard in the village assembly, where everyone could speak until consensus was achieved. The chief was kept in hand by various institutional checks and balances, and for such grievous offenses as greediness and refusal to heed good advice, he could be removed from office, or "destooled": lifted bodily from his stool of office and deposited on his rump on the ground. So devoted were Africans to freedom, and so distrustful of executive power, that many sub-Saharan peoples had no chiefs at all. Instead, the people of these stateless societies - people such as the Igbo and Fulani of Nigeria, the Mbeere of Kenya, the Konkomba of Togoland - ruled themselves through the council of elders and the village assembly, seeking, like the Lovedu, to resolve conflicts through compromise. Powerful states like Asante (Ashanti) that conquered their neighbors typically left them considerable autonomy, so that even an African empire might resemble a confederation of self-governing democratic states.

It's not that the continent was some idyllic Eden - some carefree "merrie Africa" without despotism, warfare, slavery, or treachery - before the white man came along. It was inhabited by human beings, after all, and customs varied from place to place. But sub-Saharan Africans generally seem to have come down on the side of participatory democracy, free speech, and the rule of the law. And although wars were fought and people subjugated or forced to move, Africans on the whole must have been good at finding peaceable accommodation. How else could more than two thousand different ethnic groups speaking more than two thousand languages and dialects have survived as neighbors to the present day? Scholars say that the civilized art of living peaceably in small societies without establishing states is a distinctly African contribution to human history. Nevertheless, when Europeans arrived, it suited them to say that Africa had no history and no "civilization."

In the second half of the fifteenth century, Portuguese navigators made their way along the African coast, followed by the English, the Dutch, the French. So began centuries of trade relations that came to focus on the single product for which Europeans and later North Americans raised the greatest demand: slaves. At the end of the eighteenth century, European explorers first braved the interior of Africa, and in the nineteenth, European military men, merchants, missionaries, and settlers ventured after them to conquer, kill, trade, Christianize, colonize and exploit. But Africa is an immense continent, the second largest after Asia. It's 8,000 kilometers long and 7,400 kilometers wide - about three times the size of the United States. Covering twenty percent of the earth's land surface, it is so vast and so daunting to outsiders that until late in the nineteenth century - little more than one hundred years ago - the European presence in Africa consisted merely of a few tenuous handholds around the edges, and Western influence was slight.

Then Leopold II, king of the Belgians, claimed as his personal property an enormous chunk of Central Africa, bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined, and more than seventy-six times the size of this own kingdom. Other European heads of state, worried that Leopold had skewed the delicate balance of power among them, gathered in Berlin in 1884 to discuss the matter. There the eminent white men, seated around a table at Bismarck's house in the Wilhelmstrasse, resolved some conflicting claims to the African continent and affably began to parcel it out among themselves. What they wanted was natural resources. Leopold thought of Africa as a rich "unpeopled" treat - a "cake". Everyone wanted a piece. Less than twenty-five years later, when the European scramble for Africa ended, only two pieces of Africa remained independent: Liberia, a small impoverished West African settlement of repatriated American slaves, and the empire of Ethiopia. The rest of the African cake had been sliced into more than thirty pieces, snatched by chicanery and force, and packaged in the flags of England, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Germany and Italy were to lose their colonies to England and France in the First World War, and Spain claimed only a small portion: so it was England, France and Portugal that came to hold the continent. They clutched it tight until the middle of the twentieth century, when it began to blow up in their hands.

As things played out, perhaps this history is not so very different from that of many other parts of the world: successive waves of invasion ("exploration"), conquest and genocide ("pacification"), theft of land ("settlement"), theft of resources ("trade"), economic exploitation ("development"), and obliteration of culture ("civilization" and "Christian conversion"). What makes Africa "dark" is our own ignorance of the place. We don't know its history or much about its present condition either. We've forgotten that it is the homeland of us all." (32-35)

Jones, Ann. "Looking For Lovedu: Days and Nights in Africa" New York: Alfred A. Knoff, 2001

Thank you Ann!

I am also very thankful a great many appear to be re-membering Africa, our collective homeland, more often and ever more reverently these days.

My experience with Africa has helped me to understand she possesses and continues to offer an overwhelming treasure of wealth, her most precious resources, to us all... priceless jewels such as strength - incredible enduring strength - and humility, and authenticity, wisdom, simplicity, and forgiveness, acceptance, joy, generosity, and Love...

I think in some way we're all on our way back to Africa and her heart is wide open, waiting to embrace us when we finally and truly arrive back home in Love! See you there!

Cath :)