One day, in the midst of my wanting more, I dropped in to visit the home of eleven children in our program. They are siblings and cousins who live with their aunt. They all live, eat, and sleep together in one room a little bigger than my little girls’ bedroom. The degree of my selfishness hit me like a rock. How in the world could I dream of a bigger house when people around me live in such need? How could I possibly feel that my kitchen was crowded when twelve people lived in this tiny house? My house is even made of cement while these precious children live in a home made of dirt. I was embarrassed about my desires, but the truth is that everyone has “flesh” moments.
I sometimes got caught up in “I deserve this” moments; I still do. I have moments when I compare myself to other people and trick myself into believing that I am doing pretty well. There are still moments when I believe I should be able to relax and do nothing some afternoons, instead of taking care of one more sick person. There are moments when I think that because I have worked hard all day, I deserve to be able to sit down and eat my food instead of answering the door for one more person who needs help.
The truth is that these thoughts are not at all scriptural. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that I deserve a reward here on earth. Colossians 3:23 says, “Whatever you do work at it with all your heart.” It does not end in, “and after this hard work you deserve a long hot bath and some ‘me time.’ ” It does end with, “since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward.”
Matthew 19:21, Mark 10:21, and Luke 18:22 all make exactly the same point: “Go, sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” I live in a world that tells me that if I sell what I have and give it to the poor, if I leave my rich American life to live in a cockroach-infested, cement house in a Third World country, I am doing a wonderful and radical thing. The truth is, I am only doing what I love doing, and what God who gave His life for me asks me to do.
By most people’s standards, my little family does not have much, but we have more than enough. And we know in our hearts that, really, Christ is all we need. He said, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19–21, NKJV).
Serving Jesus and my family with all of me, that is my treasure.
ONE DAY . . .
July 3, 2009
“Mommmyyyy!” I heard a yell as I bounced quickly along the pitted road that leads to our program in my sixteen-passenger van. I stopped quickly, turning the van around to go back for Prossy, who had been walking home to get something.
“How did you see her?” asked my dad, who was visiting.
“I didn’t! I heard her yell, ‘Mommy,’ ” I replied.
“But everyone calls you Mommy. Even people we don’t know call you that around here,” Dad questioned.
“Yeah, but I know when it’s mine,” I explained matter-of-factly.
And then I thought about what I had said and tears began to well. How incredible, what God has done for me. For us. It is true, hundreds of people in this area call me Mommy. Even people whom I have not met before recognize me as the woman who cares for the children in this area and call me Mommy before even having made my acquaintance. On any given day, I can drive down the road between my home and Buziika and, if it is the right time, when kids are heading home from school, I will hear “Mommy! Mommy!” being shouted about every two seconds as I pass all the children on the road. I smile as I hear them yell “Mommy!”
But for fourteen “Mommy“s, I stop. I can hear the difference. I know. My family is all things unconventional. But it is real. Real because God has knit our hearts together in a way that only He can and real because no matter what anyone says or thinks, I am their Mommy, and they are mine.
I was reading today in Genesis, chapter 33. Esau and Jacob meet for the first time in a long time. As Jacob approaches Esau, with his many children following close behind, Esau asks, “And who are these with you?”
Jacob replies: “These are the children that the Lord saw fit to bless me with.”
My family and I get all the questions:
“Why do you do it?”
“Why so many children?”
“How in the world . . .”
“Why these specific girls?”
“Do you think it’s okay to adopt as a single mother? Don’t they need a father too?”
“Do you think they will have issues since you are not the same race as they are?”
We also get the compliments:
“I don’t know how you do it!”
“Good job!”
“You must be so responsible!”
“Your girls must be so well behaved.”
We get crazy stares and huge smiles and every look in between.
This is our perfectly God–orchestrated family.
I don’t mean to give the impression that this all happened naturally or easily; there were definite struggles involved. I believe that adoption is absolutely God ordained, but it is also about the most unnatural way to grow a family. And it comes with huge heartache and huge God–wrestling.
How do I tell a child I love her when she doesn’t know love? How do I expect her to trust me when all she has ever known is broken trust? I prove it. I earn it. I remind them over and over again with words, actions, hugs, and kisses. I remind myself over and over again that Christ incarnated in the parent is the only hope of incarnating Christ in a child. When a child bites me, hits me, or looks into my eyes and tries to shove me away so she can hurt me before I hurt her, when a child overeats to the point of vomiting because she was once so hungry and is afraid of that hunger or she hides food under her covers “just in case,” when my child cries out for a birth mother or birth father who was abusive, what then?
I love anyway. I get on my knees and I cry to God about the hurt they have experienced and I ask Him why. And then I remember that a good God who wants good for His children can give only good. I remember that all of this, even this hard part, is working for the good in their lives, for the good of God and His kingdom. I remember that these hardships are gifts that He is using to strengthen us as a family and in Him so that He may transform us into His likeness.
We cherish the grace that is this unique family. And to the questions and the comments and the compliments, this is my reply: “These are the children that the Lord saw fit to bless me with.”
15
THREE THOUSAND FRIENDS
Just fifteen minutes outside of Jinja is a hill. On one side of the hill is the city’s landfill. On the other side of the hill, I have three thousand friends who make their home in a slum community called Masese.
The majority of the men, women, and children who live in Masese are known as Karimojong, a seminomadic tribal people whose homeland is in northern Uganda, near the Sudanese border. Many governments advise their citizens to avoid this region when traveling, as it is known for being unstable. Karimojong culture is primitive, aggressive, and according to the state departments of the world, dangerous. Throughout Uganda, the Karimojong are marginalized, despised, and feared—simply because people do not understand them.
Many years ago, Karimojong families from the north fled to this hillside plot of government-owned land in the Jinja area to escape the horrors of war and famine ravishing their homeland. They imagined that the prospering town of Jinja would offer them a better life. But unthinkable poverty, hunger, and disease, coupled with lack of infrastructure, unemployment, landlessness, inadequate medical care, and rampant alcohol addiction, make Masese a deadly combination of the worst of village and city life. Because the land on which they live belongs to the government and cannot be purchased or owned, the people cannot farm to feed their families. For their livelihood and sustenance, they turn to brewing al
cohol, prostitution, and picking trash from the landfill or rubbish bins in town, hoping to find things to use for themselves or to sell for a small sum of money.
The fact that the Karimojong cannot farm not only creates the immense problem of not being able to grow food, it also prohibits them from being who they are as a people. As a tribe, Karimojong are cattle herders. In fact, cattle are the currency of their culture; cows equal wealth. Every aspect of Karimojong life as a community—their social, religious and political activities, and of course, their economy—revolves around cows. The number of cattle a person owns determines his social status, and those who do not have cattle are considered “sick.”
Traditionally, Karimojong farm and grow crops in order to feed cattle. The cattle, in turn, feed the people, as the Karimojong diet consists predominantly of milk mixed with cow’s blood. Without agriculture and livestock, they feel helpless and purposeless, estranged from their own culture yet not welcomed into any other Ugandan culture either.
The Karimojong people are even more ostracized by the local government’s push to move them back to their native land in the north. They don’t want to go; the sandy desert that characterizes Karamoja and only one rainy season that is becoming increasingly unpredictable justifies their fears of another famine. Many of them remember or have heard horror stories of the 1980 famine in Karamoja, which wiped out 21 percent of the population, including 60 percent of their infants.1 Now estimates say that approximately 250 of every 1,000 Karimojong babies die before their fifth birthday2 and that 82 percent of the Karimojong people live below the poverty line.3 Life is difficult for these people.
To say that I am in love with the people of this community would be a huge understatement. I do not really even have words to describe the way I cherish these beautiful people. They challenge me; they love me unconditionally; and they allow me to see Jesus in their faces.
I visit Masese several times a week. As I drive into the community, bright yellow flowers line the narrow dirt road and the cool breeze and beautiful view of Lake Victoria allow me to forget for a moment where I am headed. The simple, beautiful scenery fills me with the joy of creation and life as I head into a dark pit of unimaginable poverty and death. Despite their horrendous living conditions, though, the people greet me with gorgeous white smiles on ebony faces, waving their hands and shouting “Auntie Kate!” along with traditional Karimojong greetings.
The people in Masese have not always been glad to see me. The first year I lived in Jinja, I made many friends among the young Karimojong children who lined the streets of Jinja, begging or picking through the trash for something to eat. Their wounded feet, scarred and dirty, and their beautiful faces caught my attention, as did the primitive, exotic sound of the language in which they attempted to speak to me. As I had seen often, though, the language barrier did not discourage us from forming fast friendships. On many occasions, I took these friends home with me for a meal and a hot shower before returning them to the streets, where their parents had sent them to spend the day begging, so they could make their trek home, wherever home was.
One day my friend Abra, a girl of about ten years old, stepped on a bottle cap and cut her foot badly. I took her and her younger sister to my house to clean and bandage the wound, but I was worried that if I took her back to Main Street, she could not possibly hobble her way back to wherever she slept. I insisted on driving her home.
She was hesitant at first; she didn’t know what her village mates would say if she showed up with a mzungu (white person), as the Karimojong are traditionally very distrusting of outsiders, especially those whose skin color differs from theirs. But she finally relented. Because Abra knew only back routes through bushy trails and over railroad tracks my large van could not cross, our journey took us quite some time. Eventually, I put the van in “park” and we all climbed out and walked into the bush.
After walking only a few minutes, we came to a clearing jam-packed with little shanty houses and bustling with people of a totally different culture from that of the Baganda and Basoga people who fill the town of Jinja. The harsh accents and tribal jewelry of these new people intrigued me, but what grabbed my attention most was the sheer poverty of this place. I had experienced squalor before, but this was unlike anything I had ever seen. Some appeared to be starving to death, literally. Children were covered with deep infected wounds, fungus, and other sores, with their bellies round and distended because of worms and their skin pale and peeling because of severe malnutrition.
Tentatively, nervously, but also with a bit of excitement, Abra took me to her house, where I was offered chicken feet, which lay on a smoky pile of charcoal roasting, without a pan or a rack. Abra’s family of twelve would share these five feet, all their aunt could find as she picked through the trash that morning, as their only meal of the day. When Abra and I showed up, she was immediately scolded for not bringing home enough charcoal from the rubbish bin and I apologized profusely, explaining that I had taken her from her work early to bandage her foot.
“These people are sick,” I told myself. “They are hungry.” I could not imagine pulling myself away without at least trying to do something for them.
I soon remembered that Amazima had been given a feeding grant that provided for more food than was currently needed to feed our sponsored children. In what I now recognize as stunning naïveté, I thought, Well, I can bring the extra food here. These people are hungry. We will share. It seemed a reasonable, fairly easy solution to a basic human need.
The next day was Sunday and I woke up early to prepare to take food to Masese. “Today we are going to have a different kind of church,” I told my children. We cooked a huge pot of beans, another pot of rice, and loaded the van with Bibles and two hundred pounds of food. Into the bush we drove, excited to help the people with whom I’d become acquainted.
The villagers were not glad to see me or my children or our large van in the midst of their community. I don’t know why I believed that taking food to them would be similar to feeding the children in our sponsorship program. We had taught our children to form an orderly line in which to wait patiently for their food, to say thank you, and to move along quickly so others could be served.
Perhaps I had some skewed picture of a modern-day “loaves and fishes” moment, all of us sitting around, eating together happily. This is not what happened. Chaos ensued. These people had absolutely no idea why I was there, what I was doing, or what I was saying. They were simply hungry, and they saw food. People were pushing and shoving and shouting; and one drunken old man stood beside me as I served, hitting my head with a plastic plate. I promptly locked all of my children in the van and firmly told them not to get out.
I could hardly keep my balance for all the crowding, but I continued serving my food as best I knew how and tried to avoid falling into the huge, hot pot of beans. Rain began to fall. I began to sing.
And then I whispered, “This is not what I had in mind, God. I just wanted to feed the hungry, like you said, you know?”
I estimate that maybe half the people in Masese ate that day. Disastrous would be a good word to describe the whole experience. I drove away drenched, exhausted, and covered in mud and bean juice, but not discouraged. Somehow, God was going to reach these people. Not through my hauling our extra food and trying to throw them a picnic, but somehow.
On one of my first visits to Masese, I noticed that a school sits at the top of the hill. After a bit of research and a few weeks of meetings and organizing, I was able to negotiate a deal with the school’s headmaster. He agreed to let me use the school’s kitchen (which hadn’t been used in years) to prepare meals for the children in Masese if I would also feed all the students in the school. As a bonus, if I would also provide the lunch for teachers, he would allow some of the older children from Masese to attend school without paying fees!
This arrangement was an answer to prayer. It would keep the children of Masese from having to beg for food on the streets and prov
ide, at the same time, a way for some of them to be educated, offering them a previously unthinkable chance to someday leave behind the life of begging and foraging that was all they and their families knew. I was blown away, once again, by the way God was orchestrating His plan for these people all around me in ways I never would have imagined.
We started slowly, during a school holiday, feeding the students, the teachers, and the village children twice a week at the school. Raoul and I led a Bible study and time of worship in the big open field behind the kitchen for those who chose to come early. As people from the States found out about my new endeavors in the community of Masese, money poured in and soon allowed us to provide the children with food five days a week, Monday through Friday. As financial support increased, we were able to feed the children once at the school and also send them home with a plate of food that they could share with their families for an evening meal. Later, we were also able to provide free medical care once or twice a week, which included deworming all the children once every six months.
These children became my doorway into Masese. I often walked them home and spent hours sitting and talking or doing sign language with their parents or adult relatives. And then something happened, something that is incredibly rare in this broken, slum community: We became friends.