I smack my head on the edge of the desk. I'm tired but I really feel I need to share with the world how our weekend went.
Yet, I'm so exhausted from the beautiful time we experienced that it's becoming a hazard to my health. Or maybe just a hazard to my head...Either way, I'll make it brief. Our YWAM guests taught a 2-day Bible overview to our community in Namale. While it seems like 2 days wouldn't be enough, they did an excellent job of giving everyone the main ideas and really explaining what the Bible is all about: REDEMPTION.
We heard story after story of how people in the village used to worship idols like trees, statues or animals. They explained how coming to know Christ and learning about God has changed everything.
They elaborated and told us how God continues to bless them and heal their friends & family. Their animals continue to grow and their crops are healthy. When things are hard, they pray and have hope.We also experienced some sad cultural ways of dealing with 4 children who were abandoned. The church paraded them around and tried to convince us to take them home. The 3 boys were dressed in rags, and probably hadn't bathed in 3-4 days. The little girl was in dirty, torn clothes and hadn't washed her hands in face in at least a week.
We've seen these kids before and they didn't look like this. We believe the community was trying to manipulate the situation and pull at our heart strings to the the kids. The saddest part is the kids have an aunt, an uncle and a grandmother who are able to care for them, but none want to assume the responsibility.
The kids were made to feel rejected over and over again, as we aren't able to takes kids who have ABLE family to care for them, and it also goes against our mission to keep kids in their communities whenever possible. My heart still aches for them and it's prompted us to have some serious conversations & training with the church leaders about how to handle these situations.
The root of the issue seems to be that the children's mother ran off and abandoned the kids, so if anyone tries to care for them, the mother may come back and become angry. I think there is a cultural piece at play here that maybe we don't understand, but this seemed like the general consensus as to why the family members wouldn't care for the child.Either way, we can't publicly reject kids while everyone watches. It's a disgusting form of abuse and it won't ever happen again. We'll contact the social action office to find out what we ARE allowed to do to help, especially if the children aren't actually being care for
We experience other highs and lows of the weekend - hearing about Estonio and how his mom wouldn't allow him to come see us. Or how we pray for several people who were sick and were later much better by the end of the day.We also had a major first: We were driving along and saw a small herd of cows walking and eating. All of a sudden, out of the corner of my right eye, a huge cow came charging out of the right field at the car! He was on a serious mission so Phil drove as fast as he could and we narrowly avoided being impaled by an irate cow.
As awesome as the weekend was, we had to come home to the other kiddos. I always feel like crying when we leave the communities in the village because my heart truly wishes to be closer to them. I would love to spend a few months in one village and live with the people we have come to know & value. I'm praying we can do this as Jojo gets older and we find reliable staff members to be with our kids.Well, this wasn't short or sweet, but I hope it helped give you an idea of how we're doing here in Moz. We'd love your prayers as our YWAM team has 2 more weeks of teaching here and many hours of fellowship with pastors, leaders and youth in the churches around us. We'll get some extremely useful and effective training as well, and we couldn't be more grateful to this team for coming all the way here!
If you like what you hear, feel free to support us tomorrow on Giving Tuesday. It's a global day of giving that encourages everyone around the world to give their time & money to worthy organizations like ours. You can head to our website to make a donation today: www.heartfortheneedy.org.
We're thankful for you and your support. We'd love to hear from you!
Happy Monday,
Laura & Phil
No comments:
Post a Comment