I went with Jon's group which was mixed with middle and high school students. Monday we visited a community of people living in shacks near a large drainage ditch. So far, the worst living conditions that I've seen in the 3 years we've lived here. What's even worse is that every time it rains heavily (it's the rainy season..this happens often) the drainage ditch fills so quickly that their homes become flash flooded. Many of the older people that live there are blind. Their nutrition is poor. The water that they use comes from that ditch. We met a pregnant lady and the kids decided they would use some of their money to buy her vitamins to help carry a healthy baby. We met families who pilfer through this ditch to find plastic or metal that they can sell to support their family. I think 1 kilo of plastic brings in about 20 cents. One family that we visited cried when they saw the kids. They were reminded of their daughter who would be about the same age as these. She was stolen off the street as her family sent her out to beg. They haven't seen her for 2 years. So, the kids spent Monday visiting the community and then headed back to school to discuss what they'd seen and to come up with a plan on how to best serve them. I was so proud of the kids because all the ideas came from them and not the adults. And listening to them pray for the people....wow. They came up with a plan to buy food, prepare it the next day, and then bring it back to the people there on Wednesday.
Tuesday, I shadowed the group as they shopped at a local market for ingredients to make a traditional chicken curry and rice dish. They bargained and everything all by themselves! Jonathan wasn't feeling that great that morning and he just barely made it out of that marketplace without getting sick. Poor guy! Was it the dried fish smell that permeated the indoor market or the meat laying out to be butchered?? Here are some pics:
Wednesday, we brought the yummy food that the kids themselves cooked and set up a soup kitchen in one of the homes. One team served food, while the other teams shared a meal and talked with the people. Met some cute kids :) We met a crippled man who was a single dad of 2. He touched my heart because when it was time for us to leave this man walked on his hands across a VERY busy street to make sure that we made it across safe. Here he was on the ground...how could the cars even see him? Plans are in the works to visit them again soon!
A good friend of ours let us borrow a book called The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns. He said it was a must read and that I must pass it along to my friends here to read. It IS a must read! He is the president of World Vision and talks about the call he had to leave the corporate world as CEO of Lenox and how inadequate he felt to accept his current position. It's a challenging, eye-opening book that will break your heart for the poor in this world and talks about practical ways that lives are being changed among them. Read it! It's changed the way I look at the people we live among.
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