Caranavi is a place where the toilet paper is pink and the rice pudding is purple. There are carnivorous bugs that you can’t feel biting you who leave their trace of little dots of blood all over your legs and huge ants that sting so badly they can cause a fever.
But it’s also a place of beautiful mountainous landscapes and bright red dirt. It’s a small town that doesn’t readily have access to WiFi, which meant more time to invest in its people and more time for genuine rest. Our ministry was an orphanage called Casa de Esperanza located about 20 minutes up a mountain.
Casa de Esperanza is a Dutch-based organization originating out of Holland. There are six houses of kids, with House 3 being the babies’ house and House 6 being the boy’s house.
The children all have different stories of how they ended up here, some more traumatic than others. Some children were dropped off as infants only a few days old while others were found in a field with ants eating them or in a cage they’d lived in for 3 years.
The horrendous stories are hard to believe, but now that they’re in a safe place their spirits are so joyous. Some people might get distracted by their crusty noses, dirty diapers, or that they don’t wash their hands very often, but when you look past all that, it’s really hard not to fall in love with them.
It’s really similar to something God revealed to me in another blog I wrote: once you look past the things you like or don’t like about a person, you can see who they actually are. The same is true with kids. When you look past all the things that people think are “bad” or “gross”, you can truly love someone.
Within each of the houses, there are 2 tias (house moms). We split up into five of the houses to assist the tias where needed. This allowed us to build relationships with them and with the children who lived there. Towards the end of the month, we decided to have a Tia Day, where we pampered the tias while some of us kept the kids busy to give the tias a break. We gave back massages, manicures, and a few pedicures, complete with homemade sugar scrub.
We also held a movie night with the older girls who lived at Casa de Esperanza. We made cinnamon-sugar-vanilla popcorn, as well as regular salted popcorn. Some of the girls made “milkshakes”, which were similar to very sweet fruit smoothies.
One Wednesday night, we went to youth group, where my teammate Simone gave her testimony. Afterwards we played games with the kids.
One weekend (Thursday/Friday), the kids didn’t have school because their teachers were having a soccer tournament (right?!). So, we all loaded up in the bus with the kids at 6am to go to the soccer fields and then the river. When we arrived at the (very, very nice) soccer field, we were informed that the teachers’ game was starting at 7am, so we went to another field that was in the middle of a dump. It was an experience, to say the least. It was super muddy, but I was glad we were going to the river afterwards. The river ended up being freezing super fun!
Spiritually, month five started out as a little disconnected for me. I wasn’t passionate about this organization. Maybe it was the fact that this was just another orphanage (and my third “Casa Esperanza” in a row), or maybe it was something deeper.
I started praying about it, and asking God to give me the heart to look past the “grossness” of the kids and to actually love them. In return, I realized that I can’t just pick and choose whom I love. I can’t love the kids who are super clean and wear real diapers and always have their hands washed.
Jesus knelt down in the muck of my life and picked me up out of my filth. He dusted off my clothes, grabbed my hand, and led me out of the pit I dug for myself. He loved me even though I was dirty. He looked past the ugly and really saw me. He saw my heart and loved me before I even knew Him.
Jesus paved the road for how we should love others. There are a lot of physical things that can make it hard to truly see someone, but once you look past all that, you really see another person’s beauty.
For me, it was in the form of a kid. I realized that these children were snotty and dirty (and some lice-infested), but I picked them up and played with them anyway. Because when you really get down to it, what’s the worst that could happen? You get lice? You get boogers on you? You get a little muddy? That’s all temporary.
Go love on a child. Go tell someone how much you love them and wh. Find someone who needs loving and actually spend time getting to know them.
