Project: Rescue

It’s been a long time coming.  Four years to be exact, since this dream, this vision; this need was identified and planted in my heart.  Four years ago since I woke to the sound of the Muslim Call to Prayer at 5am and called out to MY God in silent prayer.  Silent because I lay a metre away from another girl on a mission.  Called out because this girl on a mission (me) was being missioned herself.  The mission that went on outside of me reflected the mission that God was trying to accomplish inside of me and that July morning in Nazaret, Ethiopia, the mission was accomplished.

The childhood pain, the adulthood shame; all culminated into a place of purpose.  Unforgiveness I held against my father, my foes, myself; at that point seemed futile.  It paled in comparison to the stories I had just heard. Here I was trying to piece together my story to share.  In trying to figure out what parts I should expose, I navigated through my dirt and my perceptions and reflected them back off the lives of these women.  Nothing that I had ever experienced seemed wasted.  I thanked God for carrying me through.  For “what you [they] meant to harm me, God meant for my good.” But not just my good, the good of others. 

For the time my father told me he would pay me $2 when I ended up on the street.

For the women who had taken away the security of my relationships.

For the friends who turned against me when I needed them the most.

I finally saw the purpose in my pain.

These women I had encountered in Nazaret, their stories broke the floodgates of my tear ducts.  Their testimonies penetrated the defense walls of my heart.  Their children tore down the ideologies I upheld in my mind of what life should look like.  My life was at the mercy of their pain.

Fast forward three years and I find myself walking to church through a hallway of brothels.  This street lined with women and children in the same situation as the women I had met in Nazaret.  Except they lived on the opposite side of the wall of hope.  Hope was not in sight for these women as it was in the Women in Nazaret who were on their way to recovery. 

But one woman found it.  Her redemption had come.  Her grace had been found or GRACE had found her.  I helped to move her off the street and into a new place and received the blessings from onlookers that I didn’t deserve.  I was just a straggler in a bajaj who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to help this woman make the best move she had ever made.  The move first began in her heart though. 

I had been a part of this ministry of Hope in Nazaret and knew that there was more that this woman needed than a conversion and relocation.  She needed rehabilitation. 

Not long after another woman died.  A woman who had cried out for help but failed to receive it before her lifestyle took this mother from her children.  From HIV to alcoholism to prostitution; the legacy she left behind was not one worthy of any accolades. 

Women on the street witnessed two events that MUST have shaken their worlds.  They saw Life and Death pass before them.  Life given and life taken as a result of choices made.  SURELY, I thought, this must have made them question their own decisions to be where they are and doing what they were doing. 

Now that I have seen, I am responsible… There goes that line again..

So I find myself again this year receiving GRACE = undeserved, unwarranted, unexplainable, outlandish UNMERITED FAVOUR.  By this grace, I overcame the temptations that faced me again.  And the Bible says that we are more than conquerors.  I heard it once said that we are MORE than CONQUERORS when WE ourselves CONQUER and then HELP OTHERS to do so!!

So in His time, and by His Grace I set out to connect with these women who God had placed on my heart. 

Last Sunday night my friend and I went out to meet these women where they are at- in their workplace. 

We walked into one house, bar, brothel- whatever you like to call it.  It’s getting dark and the kids are still playing outside.  They take us in to see their families. There’s coffee being poured and a customer is waiting on the bed in the room adjacent to the room we enter.  We sit on one bed which takes up more than half the space in the room.   I can’t help but think of the activity that has taken place on this bed.  My heart revolts.  The nerves soon dissipate into the coffee cup that is always accompanied by conversation; otherwise a spurring on of one is instigated. 

So we talk, play, break the ice with introductions and exchanging of names and glances that signify peace.  Selam new.  It is peaceful on this bed of desperation.  I ask how work is and the young pregnant one says it is good.  The other disagrees and says, No, it’s not good.  "It’s bad." 

She has just been deported back into the country because she had been found illegally working in Dubai.  She was desperate for a way out and we had come with a large signpost showing her which way to go.  So we leave them with a decision and a time and place to let us know what they decide.

Four days later, the word had spread and 18 women come to sign up for the program that was about to take place the next day.  Unsure of whether or not they would all come, we welcome them with open arms and big smiles and sign up their names on a piece of paper.

So Thursday comes and the lunch is prepared by two amazing ladies who, at the last minute had prepared for the unexpected response.  We are waiting for the call and it comes.  First one woman and her baby and then seventeen more and three more babies.  All boys.  All fatherless and yet full of smiles when given a simple toy to play with.

Trust was displayed as they shared their stories.  Short versions to break the ice and to make them reflect, as I did when asked to share my story, about whether or not they were ready to change their lives.  Tears were shed and defences were lowered as they made the first step into the journey that could possibly set them free. 

We heard stories of slavery and bravery...stories of abandonment and desperation...stories of love lost and dead ends that led them to this place they would never have chosen before. Two hours later and we had names to the faces I had walked past so many times before.  Hope made an appearance and ultimatums were given. 

Their stories were familiar yet again so heart breaking.  I have heard them before and I can understand their dilemma in a society where streams of income are not readily available to the uneducated and rejected. 

So we have job to do.  The relationships we have built with people working in the same field will hopefully make it easier for us to do so. This is them...

Yesterday on my way to church, I walked past these women again.  I am no longer a stranger to them nor they to me and they ask if we will meet again this week and I say YES!  They are all planning to come again this week.  Even without promises of money or an allowance or even a description of what our rehabilitation journey will look like.  They come in faith and in hope to receive Love; and the greatest of thing we can show them right now is Love.  Love will Rescue these women.  It’s the only Thing that can.

“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." 1 Cor 13:1-7;13

This song has been ringing in my ear this week  It’s a song that was written by an amazing girl who came here last year in January with a team from SBU in Missouri.  The lyrics go like this:

Because she wakes up every morning, walks down to the corner, turning every head as she goes; she makes a living with her body, let’s somebody own her, coz that’s the only life that she knows. She doesn’t know what Love is…

So we will sing about ...

(Song by Madi Walker)

LOVE is something worth sharing.  

Soddo

Alarm screams at me to break dead silence.  Amharic music plays signifying the beginning of our adventure.  We wake, we walk, we fill the van of sixteen and we drive to collect two more.  It’s 4am by the time we exit the city gates that is lined by Ethiopian Air force fences.  It doesn’t take long and I am back to sleep along the steady roads between here and there.  Here being DebreZeit, there; Soddo, Wolayta.  

My sis squashes behind me, fourth on a three seated row.  She laughs as the girl next to me asks me something and I reply with a request for a repeat.  No repeat, just a shocked look and a turning head.  An obvious sign that her English vocabulary is entirely limited.  And she’s in University? I think.  Does she not even understand “Did you say something?”.  No she doesn’t.  So my sister giggles to herself in lone observation.  

Four and a half hours later and we drive down into the city which sits in the valley all wet and dirty.  It’s dressed in beautiful green mountains and far away lakes: Arba Minch.  It’s soil is red and It’s roads are hilly. 

We pull into the University grounds to unload the baggage mountain that steeples high on top of the van.  Seventeen students disembark and head to the buildings that lay ahead of the cobblestoned drive way we are parked upon..  My sis leaves me with her suitcase as she combs dormitory lists to find her name and her new home for the coming nine months.  She finds, we leave.  Suitcase and bags in tow and an excitement that is the product of knowing that there is a space that exists securing her place in her third year of study.  

The study though, is not what SHE would have chosen.  The University neither.  But the government has chosen this career for her out of lack of other places in areas of study that might have brought her joy, in a city that may have brought her comfort.  Instead she endures and she suffers.  She is strong though and I admire her deeply for that. 

Smelly hallways with dirty walls usher us into her new dormitory which houses six girls on three bunk beds with little room for anything else other than one small desk and a chair.  There are six cupboards that enclose one bunk against a wall and mattresses and pillows are additional condiments in this disastrous recipe.  I ask how she can sleep on these dirty pillows and she tells me of a fungal infection she had on the back of her neck the year before.  A new pillow is a critical necessity we buy. 

Once settled we board unfamiliar bajajs.  Theirs much wider than ours.  Able to fit four rather than the three “our” bajajs can hold.  I tease about the second hand bajajs being sent to this city.  But we climb a hill and reach the top for only two birr.  She teaches me about Quanta meat and the drying and salting process that preserves the meat we now eat mixed in with injera and spicy wot.  It’s totally agreeing with my taste buds and gets washed down with my first macchiato for the day.  It is already 11:30am.  

Walking through landscaped footpaths that lead into the next tourist town, I already notice the difference from here and there.  Or rather, they notice the difference in me.  Am I a foreigner? An Ethiopian?  Mixed blood? or Chinese?  Long straightened hair confuses India in the mix to which my public denial sends teenage girls into a cackling applause.  For two days, the attention is manageable.   A lifetime of curious gestures and stares would have me begging for anonymity.

As planned we arrive at the Soddo Christian hospital around lunch time.  Led down a rocky path through beautifully landscaped gardens, we arrive at the doorway to the beautiful home that belongs to the Doctor, his wife and their two beautiful children; one blond and blue eyed, one with gorgeous dark curly hair.  Furnishings which contend with American homes and well established home school routines.  They offer us lunch in true Ethiopian style to which we decline for a retreat to our bedrooms.  Back up the path and adjacent to the entrance of the hospital lies the place we call home for the night.  The bedroom crying for our company; tired bodies desiring still to be horizontal.This relationship has to wait.  

With power outages at home, this generator backed up power supply with kitchen and shower in tow, begged for some attention.  With permission to use the facilities and ability to do so, I bake in the company of my sis.  Wifi opens up the greatest recipe book that has ever existed for mankind and I scale it’s recipes for the lemon meringue pie we will share for our desert with the Doctors family.  To start the process I make the pastry and we head out the door for additional ingredients for the baking I will do later in the night. 

On our return, I meet Dr “Ears, Nose and Throat” who sits on the board for the Pan African Association for Christian Medical Centres (or something to that affect.) He tells me of the Mission medical centres they are responsible for and one sounds familiar.  The Kenyan one our friends visited before they visited us eighteen months ago.  Frustrated yet impacted they had arrived at our airport.  We played games and shared stories.  They brought us shopping and left us with news of ongoing supporting.  One day, we know they will return.

So we talk and he admires my baking and me and sis head off to dinner with the family.  Enchiladas, Mexican rice, tortilla chips with three different dips all lay upon the hardwood table.  Aquas and reds splash through the house and hug the coffee into the cup we hold to compliment the dessert.  This beautiful and patient wife saves her husband some dinner for when he arrives from his last minute call out that left dinner in his dust as he dashed out the door on our arrival.  My curious nature calls for question asking and ever learning the stories of those who come to serve the people we have come to love- the people of Ethiopia.  A Muslim man converting to Christianity because of an arm being bitten off by a lion and him receiving surgical miracles through this ministry.  Mission organization stories and furlough trips home. 

We indulged in good conversation simultaneously while indulging in good food.  The cute child conversations always taking precedence though before they headed off to bed.  We head off too.  Thankful for good company and delicious food, a place to rest and the offer of unlimited wifi. To which I take advantage of to make necessary skype calls to my boy.  He is staying with my mum.  We talk of plans to reunite, undisclosed information is shared and love is exchanged.  He’s growing up my boy.  Freedom is calling us apart and the approach of manhood drawing him away.  What to do with our separate lives and desired connection, we decide every day.  It’s a daily journey which is made easier by instant access in our hands yet made difficult by the limited waking hours that we share.

After skype calls and facebook crawls, we pack away two dozen freshly baked muffins and head to bed.  Finally, my body screams as I suddenly become aware of it’s tiredness and the lack of stillness it had experienced over the last twenty hours.  Not as normal, my eyes close and instantaneously sleep begins.  Not even woken by Muslim man crying at the five am call to prayer.  I sleep through to 6:30 and arise to make fruit salad for breakfast.  

So we eat and we shower and I read half an hour.  My eyes drawn to this book about the Holy Spirit that sits upon the bookshelf in the dining room. Chapter one talks of the journey of a man through the desert in a seven year growth of none in his ministry with thousands waiting for his prophecy to be fulfilled.  He is prepared in the desert and I am akin to the place in which he had learnt- the desert place where humility is gained and heart motivations are changed.  He later shares an important season in the harvest of his prophecy fulfilment where family are neglected and church leaders left holding down his fort.  It shook me and opened my eyes to something I had never read before.  I let it take root deep in my heart and have locked that pearl of wisdom away for when my harvest will come.  Ready though, to apply it today. 

Wailing starts wafting through the room like a wind through trees.  The sound of a woman in heart pain fixates with my heart and we lean towards the window sill to see what lies behind her cry.  “He” is in pain.  We find out who he is during our hospital tour.  In fact, we see him in the emergency room, covered with blood stained sheets, surrounded by doctors and nurses.  They roll him past me intercepting my procedure to the new CATscan building where our three tour guides await; so I stand and wait and they try to navigate his bed around the corner on which I stand.  He is old and grey and lacking life but she doesn’t know that yet.  We walk over his blood further down the ramp and as we cross into the cafeteria we hear screams of mourning.  “Abaye!Abaye!” requiring of us tears not just from me and sis but by many onlookers who are working at or visiting the hospital.  It is the resounding cry as we walk the next few blocks through.  “Many doctors come from the States and Europe and can’t stay for more than a year because of the emotional impact they experience.” “Abaye!” means “My father” in the most affectionate way you could say it.  Not just said with words but with the beating down of her body upon her legs.  I wouldn’t be able to handle it either.  Oh, you strong woman, I think.

We meet other doctors and hear the story of how this institution began.  We hear the vision to expand and the amount they need to expand it.  Three million dollars is a lot of money in Ethiopia but it is not a lot to the God who resources what He requires.  The paediatric ward was filled with babies suffering from Measles to epidemic proportions.  The emergency area was lined with unseen patients and the orthopaedic waiting room was not unlike the one I had visited in Addis earlier in the year- FULL of people with something broken.  This in the small town of Soddo.  A city surrounded by rural villages and neighbouring tourist towns.  A city whose streets are lined with homeless orphans with no shoes and monumental statues with classic cultural attire.  Oh, my heart ached for the city of Soddo.  This is where God requires His light to shine.  So we pray for his resources to flow and fill like the lake that furnishe. 

After a final girl talk over tibs and injera washed down with chlorine tasting Ambo water, my sis helps me get on a bus in the crowded bus stop.  The reality of being in the middle of nowhere hits you when faced with the realization that if I didn’t get on a bus at this time, I may not get on the road at all that day.  So we push and she asks the first man on the bus to save a seat for me to be the last girl on the bus.  The seat is saved and the way is paved for me to get on the road.  

We set off back along the road that I saw many people collect water from on the way down.  Puddles of water created by the night before’s rain, allowed people to drink that day- to wash their clothes, to cook their vegetables and lentils.  I saw people beating piles of corn and wondered if the popcorn I ate on many coffee ceremony occasions was sourced from the sides of these roads.

I listen in to the sound of Israel Houghton and switch over to Brooke Fraser.  Blessed to be a blessing is the theme that runs through my playlist and I am thankful for the blessed life I live.  Blessed to be around family and to have mine still intact.  Missing my husband more than ever, I wonder if I can be separated from him again to be reunited with my son.  Maybe its okay if I don’t go, I think.  Other alternatives are contemplated.  Something to talk over with the hubby when we reunite.  However, another reunion is awaiting.  I have three hours behind me and I arrive in Shashamene- the home of Rastafarianism and I jump off one bus and onto another.  Three hours later, I arrive in Koka.  It’s eight o’clock at night and I find myself walking in the dark again.  Boy, two days go by fast.  Instead of getting into a van full of strangers this time though, I jump into the back of a Ute filled with friends.

Comfort Eyes

This past March my mother celebrated her 60^th birthday.  A woman who’s eyes I sought comfort in so many times in my life.  From visits to the doctor as a child, counselling sessions as a teenager and labour pains as an adult.  Within the depths of her pupils, I found solace.  Whatever circumstances I faced, if I could eyeball my mother I knew there was peace.  In that place was lack of judgment because out of every one in the world, mum knew me best. 

When I would feel unhappy or depressed, my mum would be the one who would lift my spirits and tell me that I WASN'T FAT OR ugly or uselss!  She would defend my self-worth and pick it back up again.  Everyone loves my mum and it's not hard to understand why once you get to know her.  

On her own, she raised five of us children, even when she was married to my father.  She worked long and hard to give us the best life she knew how to give.  Yet she wasn’t perfect.  But she was there.  Her eyes never failed to meet the expectations I had of them; to melt away the problems of the world.

So in knowing this love, I wonder what it’s like for those who don’t have those eyes to sink into-those eyes that bring comfort, that heart that brings love.  Are they the ones who seek comfort food, or who expend themselves on work or exercise?  Are they the ones who abuse their bodies to try and satisfy that need for comfort?  If our children don’t have those eyes to look into and know that everything is going to be okay, then how will they survive?

This is the plight of the orphan, the cry of the boy who stopped me on the street a couple of weeks ago to tell me has no mum or dad.  To ask me to help him.  Will I be the one that will fill the gap, the wide-aching, gut wrenching gap that's been left by the death of his mother and father?

A few months ago, I spent a couple of days in Addis with friends.  Over two days, we attended a concert and a church service.  On both occasions we as an audience were challenged to help meet the needs of the orphan epidemic that exists here in Ethiopia.  The challenge was expressed in many ways but one of those was through a poem entitled, Whose Children are They?  It was all in Amharic but I got the gist of it. 

THOSE children who walk the streets and beg for food and make you feel uncomfortable with their stench…whose children are they?  They are YOURS (the words sent goose bumps down my spine.)  They are MINE.  They are our responsibility.  They are the responsibility of the church.  They are the responsibility of God's children who see them and are able to give to them. 

Even this morning I spoke passionately to my daughter about US (her...I...the six of us that are left) and why we are in Ethiopia.  "God wants to impact this world" I said..."And HE [the Great Almighty God] does THAT by using PEOPLE [small, incompetent, sinful US] to do that!  He places them strategically in places [and spheres of influence] so that ultimately HE can accomplish what He wants to accomplish.  We can either live selfishly and accomplish what WE want to accomplish, or do what HE has asked us to do.  And for us right now, THIS is where He has strategically placed US."...a bit harsh, I know.  BUT she gets it...I know she does.  God is using her in this place EVEN at 12 years of age.

WE are responsible to give THEM [the 4 million orphaned children] comfort and LOVE and nurture and CARE.  Eyes that look into the depths of their souls and say, it’s going to be okay…I don’t judge you but I love you- unconditionally. 

I read an interesting blog recently about a woman in South America who had adopted kids from one particular country.  Her revelation was that in the thousands of dollars she had spent on adopting these children, was the potential for those children, or children of that country, whose parents were so desperate to give their children a better life that they would put them up for adoption, to keep their families together. 

The statistics that were shared in the service we went to were that around 22,000 Ethiopian children had been adopted out overseas over a 5-10 year period.  While I don’t disagree with the adoption of children, I think how much money had gone into that and what would change for those children if they were able to be supported in their own family, in their own country. 

Our friends from BringLoveIn have a program called Keep One Home...this addresses that exact need.  And THEY are looking for sponsors right now.  Check out their website if you can.  We will have similar programs running in the future.  

I am passionate about this.  

This is a need that needs to be addressed.  

There is a way, a solution.  All we need to help solve this program is for good people to strategically place themselves, their spare cash, their arms where God wants them to be.  

"All it takes for evil to exist in the world is for good men and women to do nothing"