I was not prepared for this. This week I am with my squad and I am broken. I am overwhelmed with everything from the past month. I don’t know where to begin or even how to express to you what my month was like. I was not prepared for this week in sharing with my squad-mates and in doing so I have realized just how broken I am. This was a difficult month – my hardest month yet. When thinking about this past month and trying to share with my squad-mates, tears start flowing. Even sitting here trying to type this is difficult. This is not me…. I did not prepare for this.
I hate crying period and now I am doing it in front of others. I have a tendency to put up walls and not allow myself to break… let alone have others see it. I am learning to have grace for myself and allow myself to be broken. I don’t have to be strong any more. I had to be strong when I was with the children so I did not allow myself to cry and kept myself together. Now I am having to let down my walls because if I shut myself off, I am doing an injustice to those I worked with this past month. People need to know. YOU need to know the truth.
You have not heard from me this past month because we have been in a closed country and unable to use the internet. Now that we are no longer there, we are allowed to share our experiences. Going into the closed country, my team was told that we would be working with disabled children. We partnered with an organization that takes in disabled kids that have been abandoned and take care of them for life unless they are adopted. They give them hope and opportunities for their life.
This past week, I came to some realizations. I have hidden my heart behind the wall that I had built over the years. I put that wall up to protect myself but in doing so, I sit behind it feeling isolated and alone. It is much like this country. They have hidden their problems so that no one knows they exist. People have lived here for years and didn’t know that disabled people existed here much less that the welfare center exists until we told them that we were volunteering there. The children are isolated and alone. As their walls are breaking, so is the wall around my heart. I want to share with you what has been going on behind the wall.
Most of my team worked with our partner organization and the children that they have been able to take out of the welfare center. They have the rare privilege of being able to go into the welfare center and work with the kids in there. The staff would love to take all the kids but they do not have space. They still want to be able to help the children over in the welfare center. A few of us had the privilege of going along to help with their snack program and to spend time with the children over there. I was one of the ones that volunteered to go to the welfare center everyday. Being a social worker, I had worked with disabled children before and figured I could handle it. But, I was not prepared for this….
Walking into the center is an assault on most of our senses – sight, smell, sound, and feel…. You are faced with terrible sounds and smells before you even enter the room that our children stayed in. I was told we were working with kids with disabilities. Doesn’t sound so bad, right? Typically, it wouldn’t be. It wasn’t just kids with disabilities though… it is that compounded with injustice and the ramifications of that.
Here kids with disabilities are unwanted and abandoned. These kids are taken to a place that is supposed to care for them but there is a mortality rate of 85%. The bare minimum is done for these children. The center is overcrowded and they don’t have all they need to provide for these children. It is survival of the fittest at its finest. These kids are provided with very little food. There are about 3 bowls of food to feed 12 kids… 2x/day. Food time is a very stressful time for these kids. They will push and grab to get any food they can even if it means grabbing food out of the other kids’ hands or mouths. They are quick too!
The caregivers work 24 hours a day and only have 2-3 days off per MONTH. They are burnt out and with the mortality rate, they have to deal with a lot of death. There were 8 deaths the month before we were there. With all of this, they are shut off and unable to connect with the children. These kids are left to themselves most of the day. The babies stay in bed all day and rarely get touched. These kids are unloved.
Back home, if I were to walk into a room full of children they would be running around playing, laughing, and interacting with each other. It may be loud and chaotic but they are full of life. They are given opportunities to have the fullest life possible even with a disability. Walking in to the center can be very depressing. You look at these children and it is NOT normal…. The room is fairly quiet and the children sit or lay there doing nothing. There are spontaneous yells, moans, and cries. The smell of the room is that of dirty children covered in urine and other things. My heart breaks for these kids. They live in a corner room with white walls. It isn’t very inviting and it is cold. It is like a waiting room for death.
It is easy to feel sorry for them and have compassion for them but it is something else to love them and be able to show it to them. I say I love kids, but kids are typically cute, fun, and easy to love. These kids are not cute. Some of them are starving to death. They are skin and bones. They are dirty and they smell. Their pants may be wet or they may be covered in vomit. The first couple days, I learned that it isn’t so easy to love kids like this. It is disturbing to pick up a kid that has bones sticking out or disgusting to hold a kid that you know you will leave you dirty from different body fluids and who knows what.
Over the last few months I have been learning about LOVE. This has come up for me in different ways throughout the race. At the end of our time in the Philippines, God had me read Hosea. I felt he was calling me to love others even when it hurts. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that; but this month, that has been put to the test.
I was unable to do this on my own. I had to get over myself and daily ask God to fill me with his love and joy so that I could have strength to love these kids the way they needed to be loved. To love unconditionally… even when it hurts….
Each of these children have found different ways to deal with their living conditions. Some have taken to staying in the corner and hiding their face, others sit in their chair and shake their head all day, others run around scavenging for food or anything they can find (even if it is a bag full of raw eggs or left over baby bottles), and still others have given up… they lay around and are too weak to fight.
When we went to the welfare center, we took snacks with us. We tried to establish some kind of order in doing so but it was always a challenge to make sure that everyone got to eat. We would pass out the food and have to defend the weaker ones from the more healthy ones to ensure that their food wasn’t stolen. We would also try to assist with meal time to make sure everyone was eating. The organization we were working with brought toys that we would get out for the kids to have play time. When the weather was nice, which was very rare, we would take a few of the kids outside. We brought life and hope to these children.
This month was intense. I have never felt so powerless. In the States, we fight for social justice and as a social worker there are steps that I could take to bring change. It was overwhelming and I couldn’t be there for all of them. I was not enough. This month, I had to learn that God loves these children more than I ever could and he is ENOUGH. I had the privilege to be his hands and feet for the time being and tangibly show them His love. That is all I could do – love them and pray for them. It was hard, but it was good. Some days I didn’t know how to pray… what to pray…. We learned to celebrate the little things.
I wish I could fully express to you what my month was like but I can’t. I am not a descriptive person to begin with and I even struggle to put into words things to be able to share with my teammates about the month… and they were there. I do want to try to share one story with you… a story of a 12 year old boy that my heart broke the most for this month.
This boy is about 12 years old and he is starving to death… literally. Picture the commercials you see on television about the starving kids in Africa and that is a close description of what he looks like. His bones stick out and his face is sunken in. He weighs very little – little enough to be carried like a baby. He is one of the ones that had seemed to have given up. He laid on the mattress-less hardwood bed sucking on his hand to comfort himself. He was too weak to to stand up and walk on his own, too weak to fight for his own food, and he was even too weak to fight the other kids off when they sat on top of him.
Going in there, we would sit him up and make sure that he got fed. I would sit with him and rub his back. He would put his head in my lap and we would sit there. There were times he would look at me like he was searching for something…. The way he looked at me and the sounds of his cries/ moans were heart-wrenching! I don’t think that is something I will ever forget. I was unable to talk with him and felt like I had nothing to offer him. I couldn’t do anything to change his circumstances. All I could do was look back at him with a look of understanding and knowing that he is suffering and in emotional and physical pain.
Over the course of the three weeks that we were there, we began to walk. He was unsteady at first but he has gotten stronger and we began to walk more. I would walk into the room and he would hold out his hand for me to help him up… then we would walk hand in hand. The second week, one of my teammates tried to get this boy to walk. He stood there hunched over and refused to move. I came over and held out my hand. The boy looked at me, grabbed my hand as he straightened up, and we began to walk down the hall. I celebrated that moment. I realized that we had something… we had established a relationship and he trusted me.
I’m not sure how to respond to the last week. He was up walking with me more and more. He began to search for food as he paced around the rooms and the hall. He has the desire to live and we have given him the desire to fight. This last week with him was really hard for me. We paced and he had moments that he would cry out and lower himself to the ground. He would lay there and I was left not knowing what to do. I had these questions running through my head. He has gained strength but have we just prolonged the inevitable? Is the food we are giving him actually helping him or is it just making him feel more hungry? What hope does he really have? What kind of life will he have? He is too old to be adopted and his chances of going over to our partner organization are very unlikely. How do I pray for him? Do I want him to get strong so that he can continue to suffer at the welfare center or do I pray for God to make things quick? I don’t have answers to these questions and I don’t know that I ever will….
All I know is that love hurts. We prayed prayers we never thought we would pray. We had a child die and others are still fighting for their lives. We had frustrations and physical pain of being bitten or getting your hair pulled or pee thrown at you. But God is good and he was and still is there in each one of those children. My heart has been broken for them. I don’t know what God is going to have me do with this, but these are his children. All I can do for now is to cry for them, pray for them, and share their stories….
This isn’t the end. There are happy endings and God can do miracles. There is hope and we have been able to see that side as well. One of the babies was near death but we were able to take her to our partner organization. She is a fighter and she is doing better! She is beginning to gain weight and looks healthier. She still has a road ahead of her but she has a future. The staff we worked with is still there to continue loving on these children. They do an amazing job of that and they are a great organization. Join with me in praying for the children and the staff working with them.
