As I was reviewing my plan for helping
the Street Kids, I thought of the conversation with Liz as we watched
Lauren and Katie buying them loaves of bread.
“What
are you thinking, Joe?” she said to me, sensing my pensiveness.
“I
don’t know… I don’t really feel like talking about it right now.
What are you thinking?”
“Lots
of things. But I’m wondering if we’re actually helping, you know?”
“Yeah,
I know.”
Her thoughts
mirrored my own. Because if you give a poor boy a loaf of bread,
tomorrow they’ll be hungry again. If you take his bottle of glue,
later that night he’ll buy another.
How could we help?
How could we give these kids the stability they need to grow up into
self-sustaining adults? We’re here for a month and gone, never to
see them again. What good could we do?!
It seemed like the
only reason to help was to feel good about ourselves; we did
something, at least. At least we gave them a loaf of bread. But what
was that except putting a bandaid on a gaping wound, patting yourself
on the back and saying, “What a nice guy I am.”
What the Street
Kids needed were families, moms and dads who could support them and
raise them in a stable environment. I knew that because they didn’t
have that, then their chances went down rapidly. They were much more
likely to do drugs, become violent, and even go to prison.
Why expend all
that effort to risk it on kids that probably wouldn’t make anything
of themselves anyway?
Still though, I
felt this guilt on me, this pity for them and their lives speaking to
me and telling me to find out what I could do to help.
God said, “I
looked for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand
before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to
destroy it, but I found none” (Ezekiel 22:30).
for the Street Kids of Eldoret. God was asking me to step into it.
