This month my team and I are enjoying our last month in Africa serving at El Shaddai Children’s Home between Pigg’s Peak and Mbabane, Swaziland. Our job is to love on orphans and do whatever chores and activities need to be done. This past week I have been part of the cleaning crew given the task of organizing years and years worth of donated items haphazardly crammed into a little storage room. It’s dusty, hard work but this room is also located in the baby house so we get to take a lot of cuddle breaks in between.
My first introduction to the baby house was a little bit shocking at first. I’m not exactly a “kid” person and small toddler sized kids with snot rings under their noses would not be my first choice. But I really do trust that God knows what he’s doing and I’m open to whatever he has for me. As the door opened for the first time 15 of the little people God has set aside for me this month came racing out arms up, sticky fingers grabbing and pulling to climb into your arms first.
The hardest thing for me has been dealing with the demand on my attention that I get as soon as I step into the baby house. 15 sets of arms shoot into the air like rockets. 15 little faces complete with 15 sets of pleading eyes. Each one of them is deserving of attention and I want to give them that one on one time but it is nearly impossible to do that. There is a definate competetive spirit among the kids to capture and keep your attention. Usually the way they do that is by sitting on you, crawling into your arms and just physically making it extremely hard to spend time with any other kid.
———————————————————–
24/09/2011
This month we have played with bubbles, coloured pictures together, snuggled while we watched movies, sang songs, spent hours on the swing set or ran about in the sunshine. I’ve grown to love the little muffins in the baby house even with all of their 3 year old drama.
The other day something funny happened to remind me exactly where I’m ministering this month. We were talking about the issue of HIV/AID’s here in Swaziland, after all the whole reason El Shaddai exists is to care for orphans who have lost their parents – usually to HIV or AID’s. The conversation wasn’t eye opening until Courtney mentioned that many of the kids themselves were born with the disease and have a very short life expectancy – maybe to age 30. She named a few of the kids in the baby house – little ones that I’ve spent a lot of time with – and said that for them that expectancy might be even less.
As we were talking about it I remembered something I had noticed in South Africa. Driving from Umtata to Maputo we passed dozens and dozens of funeral parlours. Some of them actually looked quite commical because of how make-shift they were. For example you might see ‘Flo’s Funerals’ painted sloppily across the side of a large metal shipping container. The truth is there is a lot of sickness and a lot of death here.
But there is also HOPE.
The God we serve is fully capable of healing every sickness and hurt that we can hand him. He truly loves us and he is truly for us. That’s the same back home as it is here. What Jesus completed on the cross stands.
On one of the first days in Swaziland somehand handed me a baby who obviously had a fever. I carried him around the yard, praying outloud that the fever would break. Once in a while, as I prayed, I would check his forehead to see if he felt any cooler. At first there was no change but when I checked again his temperature felt normal.
Our prayers really are powerful and effective and Swaziland is a nation in need of your prayers. On Monday morning I leave for country number 10. I will be living in Odessa, Ukraine but the faces in the baby house will stay with me.
Please continue to pray for Swaziland and the struggles faced here.
