Africa visit transforms Christian entertainer
VICTORIA, BC—Maria Manna's week-long stay onboard the Africa Mercy, a hospital ship docked in Conakry, Guinea, got off to a rough start when her luggage failed to arrive with her.
"I was so mad at God," she says. "I said, 'You know how much I need my stuff.' And in my heart, I heard, 'Maria, you've got everything you need. Everything's going to be okay.' And I said, 'You'd better be right!'"
Manna is the events coordinator with Mercy Ships Canada, based in Victoria. She went to Africa this spring to get a first-hand look at how the global ministry seeks to meet the medical needs of the forgotten poor.
But Manna is also a professional jazz, blues and gospel singer—and had packed an evening gown, jewelry, high heels, music charts, and the other things she felt she needed for the show she was planning to give while onboard.
Yet it all worked out. Before leaving home, Manna had e-mailed the charts to the crew members who were going to perform with her. And instead of a gown, she wore scrubs.
Manna calls the experience "a lesson I was supposed to learn."
"If I'd been distracted by the niceties I had in my suitcase," she says, "I probably wouldn't have been able to fully see what this part of the world is lacking, and come back home and say, 'We really do have enough.' It makes me want to help even more."
Mercy Ships Canada is part of Mercy Ships International, which owns the Africa Mercy. For 10 months at a time, at the invitation of the host government, it comes and offers surgeries and other medical procedures that are unavailable locally.
"What we practice is, in my language, transformational medicine," says national director Tim Maloney. "We're doing facial reconstruction and orthopedics and repairing fistulas, the childbirth injury—just giving people back lives that may have been taken from them because of some affliction they had no ability to deal with."
Off the ship, Maloney took Manna and the others travelling with him, to visit a dental clinic, an eye clinic, housing for pre- and post-operative patients, an orphanage, a school for the deaf, and a preschool.
"We saw what a lack of clean water and medical attention does to the body. They suffer from things like flesh-eating disease and tumors," Manna says. "And yet I saw a beauty and a happiness in poverty—and it lives in Africa."
Maloney recalls having had a similar reaction. "When I made my first trip to Africa, I was astounded by a level of poverty that I really wasn't quite prepared for," he says.
Manna says the journey "really moved my soul. We transform lives, and this transformed me." Now she chooses to sing more gospel than jazz, and is even recording a gospel CD.
On the way home, she recovered her lost suitcase from an airport lost-and-found.
"I definitely would go back to Africa," she says. "I don't know if I need to, but if it's His plan, then I'm going—but just let me have maybe one or two things from my luggage."
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