Just Uploading Some Thoughts

Words can’t express how I’m feeling right now. Maybe instead of trying to describe it I’ll just explain the instances that have made me feel all of these things.

Beatrice and I talked to a teacher of a small Christian preschool today. Her school is just down the street from our home.

She was telling us about the kids there and shared some stories of other kids she’d seen or heard of. She told us a story of a three year old boy who got locked in a freezer. Whether he was dead already or not she was unsure. Her friend found him and fainted.
She told us this story of a house maid who injected one of the kids she cared for with her HIV positive blood. The boy was three. He’s seven now, fighting to stay alive but still lagging considerably behind the other kids. He attends this teacher’s school.
She told us this story of coming across the body of a new born baby girl who had been done away with and thrown out in a paper bag. Dogs had come and eaten away at the body, and that’s how this teacher found her.
Beatrice said last week before I came she had found a new born baby in a garbage ditch in the Kibera slums. It was the first one she’d seen since starting the ministry, but she said that as she was walking away in shock someone came up to talk to her about it. They told her they were surprised it was the first one she’d seen, normally they see 3 or 4 dead babies a week.

It’s normal for a young girl to pay 5,000kshillings to be taken somewhere and get an abortion done, fast and easy.

There have been children in this King’s Kids Academy in the Kibera Slums who have just disappeared. Tom and Beatrice try to trace them but they normally can’t. Sometimes they find out the child’s fate, and it’s usually that the child is sent back to the village to possibly starve to death or worse. Sometimes they’re married off (the oldest child in the school is 13).
Sometimes they’re disposed of…

I just want to hold those babies, to save them. Everything in me wants to scream it’s not fair and to do something about it.
But the truth is there is no way that I can fix it. There is no way that I can stop the injustice. I can’t stop the killing of babies and the abortions.

I can’t stop the children disappearing.

I don’t have an answer for those who don’t have enough money, enough love, enough food. I don’t.

I didn’t have an answer for Alisha, a thirteen year old girl from the slums of Kibera who was rejected by her abusive aunt and kicked out a few days ago (short story: starved and neglected she wished to go home to her mother in the village. But her mother was too poor to help her in the first place and so sent her to the slums…she’s been unwanted everywhere she’s gone).

What is the answer for her? Who wants her? I don’t have the money to support her. I don’t have a place she can go. I can’t guarantee her safety in the future. I don’t know.

And neither did anybody else. Nobody knew how to help her. Even if she found a tolerable place in the slums it’d be doubtful that anybody would show her the love and attention she needs. She needs healing it’s doubtful she’ll ever get.

I kept asking, “God what is your future for such a girl?”

That seems to be the only thing I’ve found myself praying these days…God, what is your future for such a baby? Such a boy? Such people? God, nobody can help this child. I see no way that she can be helped. Lord, it’s all yours. Please help her. Please. I beg you, do something…do anything...please, help. Please…

So with Alisha…I did the only thing I could do in the short time God gave me with her: I held her. I held her and prayed and cried along with the teachers of the school.

Whatever happens to her is out of my control, but in the time given to me to be with her I know what I will do. I know the best thing I can do…I can love her. I can pray with her. I can hold her and listen to her, show her as best as I can that she’s wanted.

These kids…I don’t have answers for them. I can’t save them. I don’t even know if I can help them. A lot of them I can’t. I can’t…

But in the short time God has given me to be with them…some of them I only get to see for a moment, others maybe longer…I know what I can do. I can give them a hug. I can make them smile, laugh. I can sing songs with them. Play games with them.

And in that short time, through those small actions I can show them a greater truth. The truth that they are loved, cherished and adored. The truth that they have a place in this world just as I do. I can show them that the place they belong isn’t in their homes or their countries, but in their hearts. And that place is with Jesus. He accepts them. He loves them, cherishes them and adores them.
He is all about the forgotten, abandoned, rejected and lost. He is all about what we are not.

“For God chose what is low and despised in the world, the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are.” –Paul (1 Corinthians 1:28)