It was always Rose’s and my dream to volunteer overseas in some capacity of community development work. We shared that dream before we ever said “I do” to each other twenty-six years ago. That leads me back to how I met my wife, which was the first step in an adventure that I wouldn’t trade for the world. That adventure has landed us in the middle of the global AIDS crisis in rural South Africa, volunteering with Mukhanyo Community Development Centre (MCDC).

I think I was probably an average guy who really didn’t know what exactly to do with his life. All I knew was that I wanted to make a difference in this world. I didn’t really have an ambition to make money or to become famous or to break any records in life. I ended up with an education in Cultural Anthropology out of an interest in people but not without dropping out of school several times in the process. Not long after one of those lulls in my education I was at a Christian conference where I heard an impassioned man speak about the need to show the love of Christ to down-and-out people in the heart of San Francisco. A few months later I found myself living in this man’s garage, observing the manifestation of life’s pain in the Tenderloin of San Francisco. I spent nearly two years getting to know prostitutes, drug addicts and those who were the outcasts of society. Little did the world know that a virus was about to announce itself. It made its debut in several major American cities, one being the city of San Francisco. This virus, we now know as HIV, has sent shock waves around the globe. It was during this tumultuous time that I met my wife Rose and within five months we were married.

Rose Finkbeiner with a young friend.

It still amazes me to this day how God takes all of our seemingly unrelated, collective experiences and gathers them together in some profound way to prepare us for some future purpose. I would never have imagined that twenty-six years later I would follow the aftershocks of this virus half way around the world to South Africa.

We have faced no greater pain than to witness the devastating effects that AIDS has brought to African families. We have had a front row seat to this crisis these past four years volunteering with MCDC. My wife and I are involved in assisting families infected and affected by HIV/AIDS (one major MCDC project is the Nakekela HIV/AIDS Hospice which is funded by Word & Deed North America).

We live in a community that the government claims has an HIV prevalence rate of 34% amongst adults. I read the other day that half of all 15-year-old girls in this country won’t see their 30th birthday. That absolutely shocks me. Not because of the statistic, as raw as that is, but because Rose and I have recently been adopted by a 15-year-old girl who lost both her mother and her grandmother to AIDS. She now refers to us as “mom and dad.”

I met a girl recently who told me she had resigned herself to the fact that she would eventually die of AIDS. When I asked her why she felt this way, she simply replied, “Because someday I want to get married and have children.” A few hours ago I watched a 31-year-old man die. He was the only surviving uncle who was caring for eight orphans.

A new addition to the Nakekela Hospice.

What kind of hope can you offer in a seemingly hopeless environment like this? Rose and I struggle with that question daily. I know that our relationship with Jesus Christ is what transports us from day to day, but sometimes I feel a terrible hopelessness here. So I can’t imagine the suffering for those who do not have Christ in their lives. The only way I have come to reconcile this tension of offering hope in a hopeless place is by my view of the Kingdom of God. I see the Kingdom of God as being revolutionary in its ability to overthrow darkness. I have come to see myself as a member of that Kingdom and wherever I go the Kingdom goes. I recently have found comfort in this portion of scripture from Psalms 139: “If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hides not from thee; but the night shines as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.”

Our hope is Jesus Christ, the light of the world.

Rose and I thank God daily for the opportunity granted to us at this time in our lives to volunteer with Mukhanyo Community Development Centre (MCDC) here in South Africa. We often see darkness as light.

Randy (50) and Rose (54) Finkbeiner volunteer in South Africa for MCDC. Randy is the Family Development Coordinator and Rose is the Sponsor-a-Family Coordinator and Volunteer Coordinator.