Our South African living situation: on a farm about 25
minutes from town, in tents, no internet/t.v./ furniture, cooking for 25 people
over a camp fire, and have only 2 bathrooms for all of us. We live next to the
children we are ministering to this month and their homes are one or two rooms
with an outhouse for their bathroom and a small yard to grow most of their food.
The kids walk around bare foot most of the time, so we are really living as
close as we can to the people we are ministering to are.
Monday thru Friday we do ministry in the afternoons with the
kids living in our neighborhood. Each day we gather the kids from their houses
and walk with them about a mile away to their school, by a busy road, trying to
keep them from playing in traffic. Once we get to their school we pray,
stretch, do warm-ups, get a game of soccer going and end our time with songs,
Bible time and snacks. It is amazing how much these kids just want to be loved
and want attention. Even though we are just playing soccer with them, we are
teaching them about team work, unity, sharing, and in the midst trying to share
God’s love. Yet showing love has been one of the challenging things to do for
them.
The kids are amazing and it is not hard to love them, but it
IS hard to figure out how to love them through disciplining them but not
controlling them or being too harsh with them. (AKA I am learning a lot about
what it will look like to balance disciplining and loving my own children)
These precious kids come from families where their parents smoke weed every
day, are alcoholics, they do not show them love or parent them and only
discipline them through extreme violence. Thus most of them are raising
themselves and their younger siblings.
Because this is their family environment, we want to create
as much of a loving environment as possible. We have figured out how to do that
by laughing with them, letting them play with our hair, letting them talk to
us, and listening to them. These kids want attention and love, so we figured
how do we feel loved… through people caring enough about us to listen to us,
hugging us, and telling us that they love us. So this is how we love thee
beautiful African kids, loving them as we want to be loved. It brings a whole
new meaning to “love your neighbor as yourself”. How do you show people love
who you don’t know how to love, love them as you would want to be loved yourself.
