Note: I started this blog at the beginning of the month and added to it as time went by, my apologies if some of the tenses are weird. Thanks for reading!
These are the days that I wish I had more internet, if only to be able to share with all of you at home a daily update about a girl here at El Shaddai orphanage in Swaziland (affectionately dubbed “The Kingdom”). Her name is Wendy (actually its Nozipho, but for the non-Africans she goes by Wendy), and I help her with her homework each day during tutoring from 3-5 in the afternoon. Each day I walk in, help a couple other children but know that Wendy is somewhere around, waiting on me to help her with her fifth grade homework. Wendy is fifteen years old, and has only lived here at the orphanage for about a year so she is pretty far behind in school. Each day I sit and work on math, English, science, social studies, and the occasional religious studies homework. Sometimes we are there for as much as a half hour after everyone else is gone. I’m not saying this to give myself undue credit; I’m saying this to bring glory to my King. I’m generally not the most patient person, especially in the helping with homework department (just ask my little brother) so when I learned we would be tutoring every afternoon I wasn’t ecstatic. Then God showed me Wendy, and for some reason God has just poured out so patience into me for this young girl. Even as she sits afternoon after afternoon, generally with a confused or frustrated look on her face, I can look at her and just love (occasionally some tough love happens as well) and sit alongside her, get through subtracting fractions, memorizing multiplication tables, and reading number lines (and that’s just the math) and at the end of our time know that she knows that someone else is determined to see her succeed.
Maybe it will make a difference in the grand scheme of her life, maybe it won’t, but I know she has changed my heart for all those children who are fighting to learn and just need a little compassion and a little time. By the end of the month Wendy and I had definitely learned a lot about each other, she learned that I wasn’t giving up on her, that I was also pretty bad at multiplication tables (sorry Steve), and that on occasion I we could have fun together. I learned that Wendy is a bright student and when she puts her mind to it she can do multiplication faster than I can, I learned that sometimes a couple hours a day can make more of a difference than you can imagine, and that children in Swazi can basically speak an entire language with their eyebrows (sometimes that’s the only communication I would get in a day.
Wendy was a big part of my of my favorite moments during my month in Swaziland, the first time she went for a walk with us and she held my hand almost the entire time, we talked about things other than homework and it was such a great time. Then during our last week I had walked up the hill with a couple other people to pick up some groceries and Wendy RAN up to me and gave me a big hug and told me she missed me, beautiful child. Then on our last night at El Shaddai Wendy gave me a note asking me not to forget her and thanking me for the time I spent with her…it started the tears that continued on into the next day of telling all our little ones good-bye.
On the morning we left I went to find Wendy to give her a good-bye note and tell her good-bye one last time, but she was hiding from me. Heart-breaking. My Wendy didn’t want to say good-bye, she was avoiding it at all costs, so after a couple minutes of chasing her around the yard I finally caught up to her and we had a last little chat and a nice long hug. She may not know it, but Wendy changed my heart and maybe even my life. She thanked me, but really I’m the one who should be thankful to a beautiful child of God who gave me such a gift by simply being herself.
Wendy and I! This was the best smile I could get, but when this girl smiles full on its an even more beautiful thing.
