The truth is that I had no special relationship with missions. Like everyone else, I saw pictures of the children from Africa and felt a punch in the stomach… Three years ago the president of the Orthodox Foreign Mission, Mr. Vaios Prantzos, invited us to join him in Cameroon and I accepted immediately. So together with the cameraman Christos Kapriniotis we found ourselves in this Central African country. After an adventurous journey we all (the Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa, Theodore II, the Metropolitan of Cameroon, Gregory, the President of the Orthodox Foreign Mission and ourselves) ended up in Northern Cameroon, in Katrang, where the missionary centre of the Cameroonian Metropolis has been established. When we arrived it was night and we could hear drums and voices. Hundreds of people, young and old, had gathered outside the church and were setting up a celebration to welcome us. Our cell phones had no signal and there was no landline phone within 200 kilometers. Then I began to understand where we were… We were to stay in “bukaroo” , round huts made of dirt, and grass for a roof. There was no electricity in the area. We would only have 2-3 hours of power with a generator to charge the batteries from our cameras. The roads during the rainy season would disappear as the whole area would flood and become a vast lake. There were a few wells from where the residents got water. All the wells were donated by Greeks and were constructed by the Metropolis of Cameroon. There were people who walked several kilometres every day to get water from these wells. We drank only bottled water that we had gotten from the capital and when we threw the empty bottle in the garbage there was a big fuss about who would take it. As they explained to us, bottles in Cameroon are very valuable because it is the only way they can carry some water to their huts. In one parish, the inhabitants cooked a big pot of rice to thank us. At the sight of the food, dozens of children gathered around. Just as they were carrying it to the dining room, some rice fell out of the full pot onto the ground, all ten grains of it. Then they realized the situation. Within a split second more than ten children dove on the grains and started fighting. I don’t know who had time to put them in their mouths because a cloud of dust rose up and covered us all. Needless to say, nothing was going down in my stomach that day… We stayed there in Katrang for a week. I will never forget the first day in the infirmary of the missionary vacuum. A 13-14 year old boy had come alone from his village, which was 20 kilometers away, because his belly hurt. Before entering the dispensary to be examined he took off and left his slippers on the doorstep. They were melted from walking but this child kept wearing them. When I showed them to Fr. Evangelos who was a volunteer doctor, he in turn showed me some children who wore only one slipper and some who walked around barefoot.
Their clothes were torn and some young ones were walking around completely naked. Their diet – as I was told – was “mile-mile” which, with water, swells in their stomachs and gives them a feeling of satiety… There in Kathrang I felt an immense frustration. Who to help first? You’d go out to give something to one child and hundreds would fall on you. If you made the mistake of throwing candy on the street, there was a savage beating over who got to first pick it up. Every time the mission volunteers handed out food to the children we had to enlist soldiers to get them in line. One night when the generator was working we decided to show them scenes from the shooting we were doing. We hung a sheet and projected scenes of the children on it. Then we found that some children were laughing their heads off and some were looking scared. The children who were laughing were pointing to the scared children and they were looking left and right… We couldn’t understand what was happening until the mission people explained to us : The children in Katrang had never seen their idol because there are no mirrors… Unbelievable? Sometimes we “civilized” Westerners cannot understand many things. Like for example where these hungry people find so much joy. Every night they gathered under the only lamp outside the church and danced to the sound of drums. And when the generator stopped and the lamp went out they would continue to dance and laugh. And we who lack nothing, may in all our lives have never laughed so much as one day in Katrang… On the other hand, I could not understand how the mission volunteers , left their comforts in Greece and found themselves in this desert place? How did they find so much strength of soul, so much love for these children? The answer was given to me by a volunteer just before we left: “Most people believe that if you go on a mission you have to give all your energy to help this hungry people, to heal their wounds. And yet what actually happens is that in the end you realize that maybe you didn’t give anything but you got from them… You got love, joy happiness… Everyone needs to understand that. In the mission you don’t give but you receive…”
