This month my team and I are serving “Sarah’s Covenant Homes” in Hyderabad, India. The homes rescue children with special needs and provide all the necessary treatments to give the kids the highest possible quality of life. The organization works together with the government orphanages to receive kids with expensive needs that the government is not able to adequately cover. This is awesome and unheard of, but the woman in charge on the government side is a Christian! Often SCH receives kids who are in critical condition. In other words, they would die without (or in spite of) immediate care.
Sarah is an American, married to an Indian man, and the mom of four kids of her own. God compelled her to start an orphanage in Ongole six-teen years ago. God is clearly the one who worked this ministry out: using people with other plans, abundantly providing in every way, rescuing the helpless and hopeless, providing homes of loving and healing caregivers, transforming the way others view these precious children of God. I wish you could come see the love He has for these kids.
This Hyderabad home just started months ago to house the children who need treatment at the local hospital. It’s an enormous granite building, open and spacious, in Jubilee Hills, which is a nicer section of Hyderabad. A Bollywood star lives on the same street.
The place is filled up! There are younger kids and babies under the foster mother Anna on the third floor. Many of these kids have physical issues like cleft palate, legs attached facing behind them, growths, the remains of faces eaten by maggots, etc., that are not life-threatening, but they have often been abandoned and arrive excessively mal-nourished. On the roof Nikki and Tori foster 8 older kids who each have one or several of: blindness, deafness, Cerebral Palsy, Autism etc.. All three of the foster mothers are young women from America or Canada and freak’n awesome to watch. They continually overflow with God’s love, pouring themselves out to reveal beautiful hearts. It’s clearly God’s love they run on, as they are refreshed by the very work I find wonderfully fulfilling, but draining. Ayahs help with the kids: changing, feeding, bathing, transporting, watching. They are native Indian women who are either widowed, or from abusive relationships, or married to unemployed men. So the ministry serves both orphans and widows at the same time! Cool, hu? There are additionally women who clean and women who cook (the kitchen is in the basement where we sleep), day and night watchmen (who sit on the porch all day) and a driver. And people who work on the ground floor level office during the day, including Beulah, Sudahakar and Sarah herself. We’ve only been here two weeks and four other individuals/groups have come and/or gone. We currently share the basement with a missionary couple from America who live in the building but serve elsewhere. Like I said, it’s pretty full.
Ella arrived the day we did (two weeks ago) in great need of nourishment. She has a special condition and wasn’t expected to live her first month. At five weeks she weighed 1.4 kg (which looks like a very premi baby) and is continually improving. They are doing everything that can be done for her. Yet Anna was charged with Ella’s keeping with the understanding that she was essentially caring for the only days the child would live. That the child could die any day. I suppose others thought, ‘what’s the point?,’ when they saw most of these kids. But Anna proves that no kid is unworthy of love and attention. She hasn’t reserved an ounce of affection, though she knows Ella may not grow up to appreciate it. Every child deserves the medical treatments necessary to make their lives better. No matter if they can see or not, if they will live long or not, if they will become scholars or not. Just because God made them and gave them breath, they are precious.
I agree with all that. I love the kids who live here. But it is still crazy to see the love poured out on these little ones. I want to become more like these foster moms. I want to fill all the way up with Christ’s love. I want to slosh over, rush out, and drench my surroundings in Christ’s love.
Love,
Mere
And they brought young children to Him, that He should touch them: and [His] disciples rebuked those that brought [them]. But when Jesus saw [it], He was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein. And He took them up in His arms, put [His] hands upon them, and blessed them.
Mark 10:13-16
