Tomorrow is a BIG day

Tomorrow is a big day for us.  We expect to have over 60 moms, children and staff present to celebrate the opening of the Day Care Project.   It has been an amazing few days as we have been out in the community; visiting moms and their children and assessing needs.   Today I found myself totally undone as a little girl (probably 2 years old) who finds herself in a desperate situation ran to me minutes after having met and wrapped her arms around my neck and squeezed like there was no tomorrow.  In that I caught a glimpse of what this little girl has that I don’t.  I recognized that while this little girl will benefit from the project and become healthier along the way, there is much that she is going to teach me about true joy to help me become healthier.   Her mom and her brother and her have absolutely nothing.    Her little brother has health issues and as a result Dad abandoned the whole family shortly after birth.   She has no support, no job, a squatter room…and we had to shoo the swarm of flies away from her brother to take the picture.   YET, in all of it, this woman and her children have hope.   When we think of this mom we think of the persistent widow, because she had to come to our gate 3 or 4 times before we ever were able to adequately help her.  Yet, now there is hope in her eyes.

one of the women & her daughter

Another story is the young mom and her two children whom we first met along our street as they sat there begging.  As time has gone on I have learned more of her story – she and her husband were in a car accident when her youngest daughter was only a few months old – her husband was tragically killed, leaving her a widow and her children orphans in a split second…without any defender nor provider nor sustainer in the flesh.  As a result she now considers herself an atheist.  Now  they live wherever they can crash for the night and beg for enough to have some food.   One day on my way by the brother yelled at me “Ammamot, Ammamot” which means “she’s sick.”   I stopped and found out that his little 2 year old sister, Nahomi, was running a high fever.  She was so lethargic that it was a bit unsettling to me.  Someone had given them a bit of medicine which I encouraged mom to give her and then I prayed for little Nahomi and was on my way.  Two days later I stopped and Nahomi was feeling a lot better.  A day or so later we invited the family into the project.   And today, as I passed them, here was a family of 3 smiling from ear to ear…with hope in their eyes.

And, still yet another mom found us today.   She has a young child whom she supports by buying rotting bananas that are discarded as “unsellable” at vegetable shops across town and then brings them to Kore to sell them to locals for almost nothing.   She has done whatever it has taken to provide something for her baby to eat.   As we talked with her we learned that while she has nothing,  she does know how to sew indigenous clothing and showed us a little shirt that she was working on.   We saw an opportunity to outfit the kids of the project with these shirts and we think we can help her start a business which will more than provide for her and her baby’s needs.   As we told her to come back tomorrow to celebrate with us, there was hope in her eyes.

All of this before the project even gets off the ground.  And to think that God literally brought many of these women to us.   He truly is the defender of the widow and the fatherless.  I believe that He led them to us long before we ever found them.

Tomorrow is a day of celebration.  We look forward to celebrating with these women and their children…sharing with them The hope that goes far beyond stuff or education or food…the lasting true hope, Our Lord and Master Jesus, Who is the reason for why we do what we do in the first place!