(Written February 21, 2014)
If I had to characterize my ministry this month in one word it would be: LICE.
Even though all our teams in A-Squad our living together this month, we are doing three separate ministries. My team, Adelphoi, are all by ourselves helping out our contacts, Ron and Annette, at the orphanage they inherited from their parents near Talanga, Honduras. Originally, they pastored around 60 churches in Peru, but took over for Annette’s parents a few years ago.
The children are all wonderful and craving love and attention. Many have siblings with them and come from homes with abuse, neglect, or homes that could no longer provide for them. Their moms can visit once a month and they go to school there at the orphanage where they are being taught English. Many of the older ones can speak English quite well while the younger ones can understand it. It makes it easy for my team as none of us are fluent in Spanish, we only know enough to get by.
There are construction projects that we are getting done, but this month Anna, Amy, and I have been battling the lice living on the girl’s head. There are over 20 girls living there and three of us picking it out. Every once in a while we have another person helping us but three or four against 20 heads? It is very hard. All of last week and half of this week we have been picking at the lice and nits and only a few girls were finally declared cleaned. I finally learned what it means to nitpick. We have shampooed their hair and then this Tuesday we put Mayonnaise in their hair to suffocate the nits. I don’t know if it worked but it made it easier to comb out the lice. On one girl’s head Anna found 20 live lice after we mayonnaised. While we didn’t win the war for we leave next week without enough time to do every ones’ hair, we did make great head way. The girls were so proud and happy to have lice free hair. Many of the girls would rush over to us just so their hair could be clean because they were tired of having it in their hair and constantly itching it. I’m glad we could love on them through this.
Every night we had to boil the combs to make sure if any nits or lice on it died so we wouldn’t put them back in their hair (the last day we boiled the plastic combs we accidently melted them). To prevent us from getting lice, we have been putting Tea Tree Oil in our hair and wearing head coverings, the girls love to climb all over us. Also, every night we check each other’s hair for lice. We figured it was better to catch it the day we get it and prevent it from spreading than hoping we’re clean and infecting the whole squad. That would not be fun at all.
It has been crazy and a new experience for me. I did get to learn all of the girls’ names, I learned how to be patient with them, I got to play and build relationships, and I picked up the skill of combing and picking lice. It has been a great month and God has been teaching me so much.
