The Next 365

The last few days have been wonderful and overwhelming.  I’ve settled into a little studio apartment, gotten reacquainted with the staff, made myself dizzy too many times from spinning around the kids during play time, and begun outlining how I’m going to spend the next year.

I'll be teaching an english class, helping with the child sponsorship program, writing content for newsletters and the Harvesters blog, meeting with other NGOs to develop partnerships, and mentoring the teenage girls.

The more I learn and plan the heavier this begins to feel.

On Wednesday I spent some time reading some of the kids’ official profiles.  After I’d finished the “J” folder I had to walk away for fear of ending up crumpled on the floor.   Child D found alone in the bush at the age of four.  Babies E and H who were triplets, except that their brother and mother died during childbirth and their father could not afford to feed them without their mother’s milk. Child A, left orphaned after his mother died of a snake bite and his father during a car accident. Child J, whose father was killed by LRA rebels and who then witnessed his mother and siblings shot to death by “angry soldiers” during the night.

During the next year I’ll be meeting weekly with all the teenage girls from the orphanage and the village, mentoring them, teaching them, loving them.  They’re between the ages of 11 and 20 and span all grades: a 14 year old in a preschool class, and a 20 year old in 6^th grade.   I met with the girls, all 82 of them (I’m going to need nametags stat!) and asked them to write a list of things they’d like to discuss and learn.  Any expectations I had about fun, light-hearted meetings quickly vanished

On their list (verbatim):

Sex

How to wash your underwear

Period (how to care for it)

Parents hating girls

Pregnancy cases

Child abuse

Early marriage

How to handle your family when you marry

Lack of school fees

Learning the responsibility to become a good mother

I feel inadequate, unqualified and completely unworthy to be entrusted with such responsibility.  But I’m grateful that God will not give me anything beyond what I can bear and I trust the words of Psalm 32:8, “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you and watch over you.”