This week we have been super blessed. We are working with an organization called KIM, Kids International Ministry, and staying on their campus near Manilla. It’s crazy here! Not only are there beds and running water, but there is also a pool and a gym. Oh yeah, the pool has two jumping platforms and waterslides. On our first day of ministry, we did construction on the nursery wing of the children’s home. We made a train all the way up shaky ladders and rickety boards to pass the buckets of cement up to the few that were balancing on the crisscross rebar. After we finished the nursery floor we were asked to paint the outside walls of the Children’s Home. The walls were once white, but with years of kids and dirt the white was more mud colored than anything.
As we painted I started humming the tune to amazing grace in my head. But it wasn’t until somebody else started to hum it out loud that I realized what I was singing. It was weird that we both sang the same song at the same time. But she told me that the kids were practising their recorders in music class at the school up the hill. The tune they were playing was Amazing Grace. You can imagine how twenty children playing recorders sounded, but it was such a beautiful symphony to my ears. As a short-term missionary, I struggle with feeling that I’m not really doing anything helpful long term, but as I painted those children’s home I realized that I was making a difference no matter how small.
Another day I volunteered in the kitchen to help cook the school meals and also the meals for the feedings. KIM works with local churches and people of peace to feed the hungry in the nearby towns. The first feeding I helped with was in an old trash dump. They had formed what I’ll call a town but was more of a group of shacks with electricity. We scoped out all the porridge we had in the first few minutes, but there were still more who weren’t fed. The looks on the mothers’ faces broke my heart. I don’t know when their next meal would be and by the looks on their faces neither did they. We walked around the dusty community and asked if we could pray for people. Women doing laundry, men playing pool. But everybody’s answers seemed to be the same. “Can we pray for anything for you?” most of their answers consisted of “good health” and “help my children in school.”
A woman that we prayed for answered differently than anybody else. She knew what she needed and she was willing to reach out in faith and ask for it. She looked at me and said “I’m here.” I didn’t know what she meant until she said this next, “I’m here and I don’t want to be here anymore. My family is all gone, and I cannot work. But I don’t want to be here.” She wanted to leave, she wanted a better life. We prayed for her to have opportunities show up in her life and that she would have faith to take them when they came. I’ll never know if she actually left that dusty little town, but I have faith that God knew she was there and sent us there for a reason. We’ve only been here for a week, but the amount of hands-on ministry we’ve done has made it feel like we’ve been here for so much longer.
I cannot thank all of my supporters enough. I wouldn’t be here without you. I have yet another deadline to meet, my third fundraising goal, and I’m not worried that I’m going to get the next $2,000. God has been faithful before and he’ll be faithful again. Every time I toy with the thought of having to go home early I catch myself remembering all the times in the past that God made it happen. Even when I was $1,400 away from my launch date, God came through the night before I left for the World Race. Granted I had to do all my packing for a yearlong journey in less than 5 hours because he came through so last minute. I don’t have wifi, or cell service, or even Facebook while I’m here. This blog is actually being posted by my Blog Boss (the nice lady who makes me post blogs for everybody). I really don’t have a way to fundraise. I am just waiting for God to show up again like he always does. Right now I’m sitting four stories above Our pool. On one side of the fence is our beautiful complex, and a makeshift houses made out of rusty scrap metal on the other side. In the midst of such poverty, God is still able to work wonders. So this is Elizabeth Hahn signing off from a really good view of Manilla…
