Kids' hearts for Africa

It has been such a joy to share with people about my time in Africa.  Last week, I had the chance to share some stories and pictures with a few kids, and they were just soaking it up.  A few of them had seen some of the photos the day before and so whenever I’d ask what they thought was happening in a certain photo, they remembered!  I was so glad to just see their excitement and know that some of the stories were sticking with them.

One of the things they kept asking about was this little boy.  He was a smiley little guy at a YFC orphanage in Burundi.  You’ll notice his shoes are mismatched.  I didn’t realize until I picked him up that he’s wearing a tennis shoe on one foot because he has a prosthetic leg.

Another thing we talked about is water and how lucky we are to have running water and faucets in our houses.

While I was sharing with the kids, my friend Robin had one of them grab a milk jug from the fridge.  The kids took turns trying to carry it on their heads, and we told them to try to imagine carrying something 10 times as heavy.  I shared with them that I had seen kids smaller than the girl in this first photo carrying water jugs.

They were soaking it up and asking so many questions, which just makes me happy!  We finished the night by praying for the little boy from Burundi and missionary Aimee and the Mozambican women she serves with.
Would love it if you would pray for them, too, but pray also for these sweet kids who are already learning about other cultures and how big Jesus' heart is for the world.  Pray that He'd keep shaping their hearts and giving us the tools to help them find ways to serve (which they've been asking about a lot!).

Jackie's Home

 


GITEGA, Burundi-- My second day in Burundi, I left Bujumbura for Gitega to meet up with the Sister Connection team. This awesome ministry, provides sponsorship and homes to Burundian widows and their children. Many of these women were widowed during the civil war between the Hutu and the Tutsi. In fact, such a large part of this generation was wiped out that, when we saw an elderly man on the street Friday, Denise (the U.S. Director of Sister Connection) stopped mid-sentence to point it out. There just aren't many men older than late 30s or early 40s there, she said.

It was great to meet up with Michelle after all our emailing back and forth about this trip. She was the one person in Burundi that I had met before.  We arrived at the hotel where they were spending time working. There is a team of about 11 engineers and architects from all over the world, here to serve with EMI and work on building plans for Mount Hope, a mountain donated to Sister Connection by the governor, who was orphaned himself in 1972.


That afternoon, the EMI team, Denise, Michelle and I went to visit three widows. The pictures below are from our visit with the first woman, Jackie. She was so grateful. She kept saying, I want to thank Jesus for the blessing of this house and thank you. Praising God. In fact, she was so grateful that she told Denise she wanted to give her a chicken. Jackie had no idea Denise wouldn’t be able to take it on the plane, but it would’ve been horrible if she hadn’t accepted it.

Denise asked her if she had children. She brought out all three. They were 11, 8 and 6 years old. The 11-year-old was about the same size as the eight-year-old, and I would’ve guessed that the six-year-old was only three or four. It was so sad to realize that they were that undernourished. The smallest boy’s stomach was bulging out, but obviously he had been underfed for long enough that his growth was greatly affected.


Then, Denise had one of the team members pray for the family. I couldn’t stop my tears, realizing that many of the children who had sung for me the day before were probably in the same situation. I had learned after visiting them, that many of them were orphans, but it was just dawning on me that the kids I would’ve guessed were three years old were probably closer to five or six. My heart just broke for them even more.


However, these women that we visited were able to see the blessings in the midst of their poverty. Instead of focusing on what they lacked, they gave praise to God for their new homes and were so happy to receive us as visitors. Jackie shared with us that before receiving her home from a donor through Sister Connection, she had a thatch roof. I thought she would say the problem was rain came through, but what she shared instead was worse. Her own family set fire to that roof in an effort to scare her away and gain whatever her husband had left behind.

I was also so surprised to hear that the women we visited didn’t have sponsors yet. Though they could certainly use the aid, no one is currently sponsoring them through Sister Connection. The reason this surprised me because they were so thankful—thankful to the point of saying their lives had been changed—and by what? $600.


Their lives were changed by God using a gift from someone with more resources. What does it take to qualify as having more resources?  Take a look here.


If you’re interested in learning more about Sister Connection or in providing a home to a widow and her family go to http://www.sisterconnection.org/.


Thanks so much for your prayers and continued support!

 

 Jackie ripped a piece of the tree off to tie the chicken's feet together before handing it to Denise.

If only I could hold them all...

(Oh my goodness! I'm so excited this loaded!!! We've had limited internet access and what we have had has been so slow that replying to your blog comments has not even but working, but I am getting them and am so encouraged! Thanks for being such a great team of supporters and friends.)

My heart is so happy and broken at the same time… Happy to have been able to be with these children, broken to be learning more about the depth of their needs each day that I’m here.

My first day in Burundi, I was picked up by four African OMS workers. Boopolo (the Village Church Planting supervisor), Pastor John, Pastor Peter and his wife, Fidelite. We drove for about an hour to visit two village church plants. It was a Thursday, so the churches had called special meetings to meet us.

The picture above was at the first church plant, which is only six weeks old. There were 48 children there, and they sang to us! It was so great! The pastor had special places for us to sit up front facing the congregation of kids. I just wanted to be sitting right in the middle of them, but I knew that the chairs they had set out for us were a gift of honor and that it was important to accept that. It took everything in me to stay put while listening to a few of them cry, only to be comforted or scolded by other small children. Besides the pastors, there were only three women with these kids.

Two of these women had testimonies of healing. The first had intense leg pain that forced her to go to the hospital every six months and kept her from walking more than 1 kilometer at a time. Since Pastor John prayed over her during his visit two weeks ago, she has been healed. Now, she doesn't have pain and can walk more than two kilometers. I found myself processing later that night just how much it must have impacted her life to not be able to walk a mile. Most people here have to walk more than 30 minutes to get water-- and that water isn't even clean. This was a major thing for her, and yet how many people in the U.S. can't walk 2 kilometers just because of their choice not to try?

We visited a second church plant, where about 15 adults had gathered to meet with us. The highlight of that visit for me was to be able to pray for them before we left, because honestly, I found myself asking what do I have to offer? At both churches, I was unexpectedly asked to give greetings and a brief word... I felt like, I know it's true that God is good, but what right do I have to even say that to these people who have experienced so much more suffering than I have? I felt completely challenged to be looking for the "holes in my gospel" and to ask God where I am selling Him short.

At each of these churches, I copied down testimonies and interviewed who I could, but the OMS workers who had brought me kept rushing us to move along. I learned at dinner that their plan had been: see now, talk later... more on that dinner meeting later.

So much to process, so much to be thankful for, so much to learn... I'm glad to have the chance to be here and at least get started!

How's that for lunch on Super Bowl Sunday?

Did you know that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger daily?  And perhaps even more staggering—a child dies every 7 seconds because of hunger-related causes?

I walked into my apartment building Sunday afternoon and it smelled awesome—Amanda must have been cooking something good!  She and her husband have told me I always have an invitation to join them, but I shut the garage door and told myself, you have plenty of food upstairs for lunch.  It was then that I had to remind myself I’d already had lunch.

A bowl of corn/soy powder mixed with water. This was our lunch on Sunday.

A few weeks ago, Kate and Storly (who are leading our Sunday school class on "The Hole in our Gospel") told us we'd be having a lunch after class one day when our pastor could come, so that the class could ask him questions about how our church is responding to poverty and missions.

What they didn't tell us until the moment before we went into the next room is that this lunch would be the same corn/soy blend powder that World Vision sends to people groups suffering from hunger.

I’m so glad we had the opportunity to do this.  It’s hard to think that this is the relief we are sending, and obviously, we all had a much easier experience eating it than those who normally receive it.

For example, even just the fact that it was made with clean water, that we didn’t have to go fetch that water and that we had dishes to put it in, are all things that aren’t a given in the countries that receive this food aid.  Not to mention the fact that we all knew when our next meal was coming, and probably many of us even spent the evening eating more Super Bowl snacks than anyone needs.

Kate, who used to work for World Vision, got a hold of some of the powder and mixed it with water earlier that day.  It made for a grainy consistency, almost similar to that of grits, but this certainly tasted less substantial.  There were a few chunks in it.  Not chunks of food, just chunks of powder that had not been dissolved all the way.

If this doesn't sound very appetizing to you, consider this...at least there wasn't mud mixed in with ours.  In "The Hole in our Gospel," Stearns quotes an article from The New York Times:

     "In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the destitute. 'It's salty and it has butter and you don't know you're eating dirt,' said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. 'It makes you're stomach quiet down.'"

Can you believe that?  Storly, who is Haitian, reassured us that this is true.  Kate, who has also lived in Haiti, said that this corn/soy powder mixture is made into cakes with mud and then sold in Port au Prince.

Speaking of Haiti, click here to read an amazing story!  The story is about Junior, one of the seminar students I spent time with in Port au Prince, and it is an awesome example of God's power.