Rob Chifokoyo, Daring 2 Serve

Rob Chifokoyo is polite, thoughtful, a little quiet. He doesn’t strike you right away as the kind of guy who could turn four text messages into a youth conference attended by more than 600 teenagers. But he is.

Rob was one of many amazing people we had the chance to meet on our trip to Zimbabwe this past January (you might have read about some of that visit somewhere around here), and when I heard he would be coming to Pennsylvania to visit us, I was thrilled. His is an incredible story, and I had the pleasure to hear him tell it several times this week.

Not that long ago, Rob had it made. (He’ll tell you that he still does, but you get my point.) It was 2007 and he was in the U.S. He’d gotten out of Zimbabwe – his dream had come true, to hear Rob tell it. He was young, in the United States, making friends, planning on college, going places. The rest of his family had gotten out, too – spread across the U.S. and Canada. Rob was ready to join them.

Until he went to a diner one day with some friends. And used the restroom.

It was there – not a church, not a prayer group, not Dr. Phil – that Rob had what he calls a “God moment.” By the time he walked out of the restroom and returned to the table, his worldview had changed. He knew he was called to return to Zimbabwe, and start a ministry there. To leave behind the new life he had just discovered and immersed himself in, and return to a country ravaged by HIV, unemployment and hopelessness. At precisely the moment where his life had fallen into line, Rob – for reasons he could barely articulate and with absolutely no plan whatsoever – was blowing it all up.

He’ll be the first to tell you this was crazy. But he did it.

Rob went home to Zimbabwe and started an organization called Dare2Serve – a grass-roots, Christian community outreach group focused on mobilizing the youth of Harare to reach out to the lost, who in that city alone number in the tens of thousands. And Rob started it with four text messages.

This was the plan, or at least as much of a plan as Rob had: He was going to gather some friends, on Valentine’s Day, and venture into Harare’s Avenues – an area of the city rife with prostitution after dark. His thinking was that women like these, whose idea of “love” had been so warped by poverty and desperation, were those truly in need of comfort, and encouragement, and prayer.

He sent those four text messages, and they morphed into about 30 young people, all willing to join him in his mission: Rob and his friends would give a red rose to every prostitute they met as a way of starting a conversation. As he said later with a grin: “I’m sure every guy who gets caught giving a prostitute a rose says, ‘You don’t understand … I’m praying with her.’ But I guess our plans weren’t that well thought out at that point.” In any case, something else Rob’s team hadn’t taken into account was that it was a Sunday night – not exactly prime time for prostitution – so they actually had a hard time finding recipients for their roses.

Until they saw all the children. Hundreds of them, Rob says, who literally and figuratively came out of nowhere. Kids living on the streets, in the dark, kids living with their grandmothers in some rough housing somewhere. Orphans of Harare. Rob and the Dare2Serve team suddenly had no shortage of recipients for their roses, and their care.

And that’s how it started. Dare2Serve now convenes at least every weekend – always getting the word out via text messages – to teach young children, to rebuild crumbling buildings, to reach out on street corners and retirement homes and orphanages and anyplace else where they can reach those whose hope is dwindling. This leap of faith built so quickly that Rob and Dare2Serve were able to put on a three-day youth conference the following year, where more than 600 youth – from every social stratum – came together to be encouraged and connected.

After meeting Rob in January, it was really a joy to see him again this week as he came to see us at Covenant Church as part of a larger trip to the U.S. – to visit again with those of us lucky enough to make the trip to Zim a few months ago, make some new friends, share with our youth groups and to join us for worship services. (Rob looked out at the crowd Sunday morning and told the congregation he was a bit nervous: “This looks like the entire white population of Zimbabwe in one room.” He also observed that Wawa appears to be “an ATM that spits out sandwiches.” I love that.)

Rob enjoyed his time with us here this week, and we loved having him – reconnecting and marveling at the ways that he and Dare2Serve are making an impact in his homeland. Rob still has a few more weeks in the States, culminating in a trip to California where next month he will reunite with – and marry – his fiancee, Lisa, who is wrapping up her degree at Azusa Pacific.

After that, Rob and Lisa – a white Zimbabwean – will return to their home, both leaving behind the lure of a more comfortable life in the U.S. Both intent on reaching the unreached and remembering the forgotten. Continuing to build Dare2Serve from a small flash mob into a formidable youth movement, one text at a time.

Who Needs Augmented Reality?

Earlier this week, Google told the world about “Project Glass,” something that at least one tech blogger categorized as “augmented-reality glasses.” They’re not really glasses, although they sort of look like glasses if you imagine glasses without the glass, but that’s not the thing that troubles me.

It’s this: Who wants “augmented reality”? I mean, just look at this woman. Does she look like she’s experiencing regular reality, much less an enhanced version? Of course not. She looks like she won MegaMillions and actually has the ticket, which we know is not reality, at least if you live in Maryland.

And on an existential level, how is “augmented reality” possible? What’s real is real, and can’t get any “realer,” right? Reality changes all the time – OR DOES IT? – but regardless, it’s always unique to an individual’s perception. My reality isn’t yours, but it’s always reality. You can’t “augment” it because reality is an absolute, right? AND MY HEAD HURTS NOW, which it shouldn’t, because it’s a beautiful Saturday morning.

Anyway, I was thinking that if the boy and girl geniuses at Google really wanted to impress me, they’re going in the wrong direction. I don’t want more reality. I want less. More reality is not going to make me smile like she’s smiling. It’s probably going to make me curl up in the fetal position and pray for a Three Stooges marathon.

So in an effort to help spur their brainstorming (I mean, it’s not like Google has ever come up with a real game-changer or anything), I humbly offer up my suggestion:

The Diminished Reality Muumuu.

Part of the brilliance of this concept is that the muumuu is, of course, one-size-fits-all, so we’re looking at enormous cost savings by producing just a single size. And even though the muumuu is … how to say this … not exactly at the bleeding edge of modern fashion, wearers won’t care, because they’ll be too entranced by the diminished reality they’re experiencing. (This applies to colors and also the fact that it’s not traditionally, you know, unisex.)

Anyway, here are just a few of the benefits that come with the Diminished Reality Muumuu:

• Excessive airline baggage fees are transformed into peanut butter cups.
• Everyone on the planet is as friendly as the checkout lady at the grocery store was to me this morning.
• It’s always sunny and 80 degrees in the bleachers on a 4th of July doubleheader at Wrigley Field.
• Westvleteren 12 is available on demand from every faucet in my house … but those faucets are outfitted with fingerprint ID technology. (Gotta keep it legal, everybody.)
• Presidential election campaigns are limited to one month. Political talk shows on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc. are abolished as needlessly repetitive, not to mention annoying and generally infuriating. Electoral tie-breaker: MOONBOUNCE THUNDERDOME.
• “Jersey Shore” just plain never happened. Snooki is a poet.
• People who don’t know how to drive … don’t have driver’s licenses.
• Time travel, of course.
• I get a thunderstorm, including several bolts of lightning, every day for at least a half hour, preferably around 3:30 pm.
• Available future-proofing such that there is no Rocky VIII, Hangover 3, or iCarly I.

There are still a few kinks to work out – it’s gotta be stain-resistant, for instance – but really, we’re through the difficult stage. Brainstorming is hard work, people. If the kids at Google can’t grasp the enormity of this opportunity, I’ll do it myself.

Going to take a break for a little while to decompress, but I should be ready to start production as soon as my magic sewing machine comes back from the shop and we reach a collective bargaining agreement with the Oompa Loompa Local 39.

Fantasy Futility

Baseball’s opening day is tomorrow (I KNOW THEY PLAYED TWO GAMES IN JAPAN LAST WEEK I’M PRETENDING THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN), and with it, I guess, the fantasy baseball season as well. I loathe fantasy baseball, or rotisserie baseball, or roto, or whatever you choose to call it. Loathe it in every way you can loathe something. I find it loathsome.

I loathe it for the same reason every other gray-haired baseball traditionalist loathes it: Because it forces fans to root for individual players rather than a team. It puts you in the position of potentially rooting for an opponent when they’re facing your team, and  the occasional no-win scenario of one of “your” hitters facing one of “your” pitchers. This premise is as dumb as my overuse of “loathe” in these first couple of paragraphs.

Maybe it’s because I grew up as a Cub fan, “rooting for the laundry,” as they say – meaning I root for the jersey, not the player. When you’re a Cub fan, especially in the desolate wasteland of the 1970s when I grew up rooting for them, you really have to love that team in order to keep coming back for another fistful of punishment.

And I did. My buddy David Brown and I used to take perverse pride in occupying seats in the very top row of the upper deck, with thousands of empty seats below us … just because. We were fans, and we loved roaming around Wrigley Field, watching George Mitterwald lumber around the bases from time to time. (Lousy fantasy pick, by the way, Mitterwald: hit .231 in four seasons with the Cubs with atotalof 26 homers during that span.)

We were just like other pathetic losers who followed star-crossed franchises like the Indians and the Red Sox (the latter of which I include with an asterisk; they hadn’t won a World Series in a million years, but they at least played in that epic ’75 Series): We rooted for the laundry. I was crestfallen when, inevitably, the Cubs were eliminated from playoff contention long before Labor Day every summer. Not because I cherry-picked the players I wanted to root for, but because I was stuck rooting for Carmen Fanzone every time he took the field whether I wanted to or not. (Not. Career .224 hitter.)

Which brings us to last week. When my 14-year-old son suddenly informed me that he wanted to try fantasy baseball this year, I didn’t even object. He can’t help it. He’s a millennial. He’s all about destroying everything good and pure in this world. (Kidding, Jack. Sorta.) So I reluctantly agreed to “help” him when it came time to draft his team.

“Help” is used here in the loosest of loose ways. I consider myself a huge baseball fan, and while I’m a traditionalist, I have no problem with the whole sabermetrics movement and development of new, detailed and ever-more-esoteric statistics. Stats will always have their place in baseball, but so will random chance, and that’s awesome.

But it doesn’t mean I know Juan Pierre’s VORP. Frankly, I wasn’t even sure he was still in the league. I have another friend who has been doing fantasy baseball for years and who told me this week that she’s under some serious stress because, among other things, her league’s draft was happening and she had lots of research to do. RESEARCH. But hey, it’s a hobby, and for the folks who are into it, the time spent researching before the draft is crucial.

For me, it’d be torture. So my research consisted of remembering what time the draft was. As the hour drew near, I think I told Jack about a hundred times that I probably wouldn’t be of any real help to him. And I was true to my word. We had a brief panic attack at the start of the draft when we couldn’t figure out how to load the right page on ESPN’s site where the draft was happening, and we weren’t sure we had the right software loaded to make it work. (We were terrified of the “auto-pilot” feature kicking in, whereby we might end up with someone that ESPN’s server didn’t realize had lost a leg or contracted leprosy during the offseason.)

Anyway, once the draft started, I realized quickly that I probably have pretty good knowledge on maybe 75 baseball players. I mean, really knowing them well enough to be able to say, within 90 seconds, whether we should go with Yadier Molina or J.P. Arencibia as our catcher. We chose the latter and almost instantly found to our horror about a thousand internet posts on why that was an utterly stupid idea.

We kept picking for awhile, but once we got to the later rounds, I had no clue who anybody was. This guy might be an outfielder … that guy might have played for the Astros, or was that his brother? … I thought this guy retired last year … I thought that guy missed the whole season with turf toe or something. It was a bouillabaisse of incompetence and uncertainty, crystallizing in 90 seconds into what was inevitably a terrible pick. Way to go, dad!

Finally, for the last couple of rounds, we succumbed to auto pilot. I don’t think Jack particularly cared at that point, and I know for a fact I didn’t. Once it was all said and done, Jack shared his roster with another friend of ours, somebody who does actually know something about fantasy baseball (a lot, actually), and overall he gave us a fairly decent grade. Time will tell.

And I suppose I’ll be keeping track, but I’ve already told Jack that I care much more about the Phils than I do his fantasy team. But I suppose for a baseball flat-earther like me, I can coexist in baseball fantasyland vicariously through my son’s squad. I’m sure he’ll keep me posted one way or the other.

And of course, when he somehow wins his league, I will take EVERY OUNCE of the credit. I believe Arencibia was my idea.