Dear Grandma,
Remember how I used to watch TV with you and the cat while attempting to help you crochette baby blankets to sell at the Farmers Market? It was the biggest challenge for me and I honestly lacked the patience, concentration and skill to actually complete one. But I loved to sit beside you and I enjoyed the challenge, at least for a little while.
I also loved when you and Mom pulled out all the material and other craft stuff and just let me be creative with it all. For years the end of October meant a trip to the craft room in your basement where I would go to work creating treasures to enter into the annual Fall Fair at school. Dreams of blue ribbons danced in my head as I glued macaroni to tin cans or twisted pipe cleaners into crazy shapes.
As I grew older money became my main reason for raiding your basement treasure cove as I tried to mass produce and sell beaded lizards, necklaces, cookies and greeting cards. Eventually I just stopped creating and selling crafts and my interest in it simply faded away.
For months now I have been travelling around the world. I have gone to places most people only ever dream about and I have seen things most people only ever hear statistics about. I’ve sat in bars across from prostitutes in Thailand as they fight back tears and tell me about how they can’t find work any other way and I’ve talked with a woman in Kathmandu who was sold to a brothel in India by her older brother and never went to school. I sat next to a woman in the jungles of Cambodia while she wove palm fronds to fix her roof and heard her tell me about how much her son loved attending the English school I taught at. She explained that she was a girl when the Khmer Rouge was in power and had never learned to read or write. I have played English games with Burmese kids living in Malaysia as refugees to escape the genocide taking place in Myanmar right now. My life has been forever changed by the lives and stories of the people I have met.
I am so far from home and I am so heartbroken over the suffering that I see around the world. It feels overwhelming. Amid so much wrong how can I even begin to make things right? How can I ever hope to change anything for the better? The problems are too big, too overwhelming. How can a girl from a small town in Canada change any of that?It has been my joy to find out that God is very active and very present in places of great darkness. And, in simple ways, I have been given the chance to make a world of difference to people in need.
More times than I am able to count this past year I have found myself wishing that I was able to go and raid your basement for craft supplies. All of the fabric, paper, buttons, thread, glue, scissors, beads, macaroni and tin cans seem like rare and beautiful treasures in places where people struggle to make ends meet. In several different countries I have partnered with ministries whose main objective is to teach people how to do crafts in order to have their own business.
I have been focused on teaching and creating crafts all month here in Mozambique. Again and again I find myself remembering something that you taught me that would be valuable in helping the people here get ahead. I have been crochetting a blanket all month in order to teach our contact so that she can teach it to others. I have also been working like crazy to create little fabric flower headbands that are easy to make and easy to sell. I have created fabric butterflies, sewed fabric onto cards and helped to brainstorm ideas on how to recycle everyday materials so that they can be sold.
They are simple things but each of those simple things is a very big deal here. I wish you were here to teach the boys how to can vegetables. They’ve been working hard at growing a garden so that they can sell the produce but no one here knows how to can vegetables so at the seasons end they lose profit. Knowledge that you have could bless an entire nation.
Imagine that… We are more powerful and more able than we know. We really can change the world for the better. I guess when it comes right down to it God doesn’t really need a couple hundred more talking heads, he just needs us to go where he calls us to go and do what we are able to do. I wish you could be here to see how everything I learned from you is changing the world. There are 7 boys here in Mozambique who will be directly blessed because of all the time you took sitting next to me on the couch, teaching me how to crochett.
I’m hoping to finish the blanket today, I’ll post a picture for you. God is using you to change Africa Grandma, isn’t that cool? I bet you didn’t know you were a world changer.
I love you and I miss you. See you in 3 months.
Beacon of Hope – Maputo, Mozambique
