Day 3:
This morning we took Lungelo to pay his university fees.
This is our first Give Hope, Fight Poverty orphan who has been accepted to the
national University of Swaziland (SUCH a feat to get into the only major
university countrywide) and he will succeed like a freaking rockstar. I am one million percent sure. I couldn’t be more proud of the extremely
sweet, humble, and hardworking little (TALL) boy! Thanks to the Inboden family
for supporting him, he will be able to pay it forward in a few years when he
becomes an accountant and sponsors his own orphan from his community.
Then we went to purchase & deliver stoves for our
child-headed families… thank you SO MUCH to my aunt Mary Margaret, Maria,
Shelby, Kirsten, Mo, Angie, and Linda for giving these kids a chance to eat
even when it’s raining or they do not have enough time to start their fire from
logs outside to cook their donated beans and rice! You should have seen their eyes when I showed
them their new stoves (basically camping stoves). One girl said it looked like it was from the
future and another called it “absolutely beautiful”. Thank you for giving them the nourishment
they need!
One of our boys is going to technical college in January (if
anyone wants to sponsor him, it’s $1,250/year – even part of it would help!) to
study Mechanical Engineering (automotives) and until then he is working
excessive hours at the George Hotel to save up money for his bus fare to the
college (it will be $40/mo which is unattainable for most village Swazi’s). He is a waiter at the restaurant and has
begged me for months to come in and watch him serve (he is so proud of what he
has learned!). So, tonight we took two
of our newly sponsored sweet boys Mduduzi and Sanele to the restaurant to have
Njabuliso serve us. It was a treat on so
many levels!!
First, Njabuliso was VERY professional pulling our seats
out, calling us Ma’am, and opening our menus for us. His service was just as great as his
impeccable smile. I love him so much for
his effort to help us support his college career because he knew we would have
helped with the bus fare but wanted to do that for himself.
Then, our new boys, Mduduzi and Sanele were the sweetest
ever telling us stories of their lives and giving us inspirational speeches
about life. The boys asked Njabuliso
early on if they could take their leftovers home. At the end of the meal, I realized their leftovers
were just the chicken on their plates which shocked me that this was not the
first part eaten. Then I realized as I
watched them fluster with their fork and knives that it was due to their
struggle with the utensils. They said
that they did not want to embarrass us by picking up their chicken in this nice
restaurant. They said it was their first
time eating with a fork and knife and their first time at a restaurant. I told them that they should eat however they
wanted to – that we were the only ones in the restaurant (we were!) – and that
if I ate chicken (and were not a vegetarian of 17 years), I would eat it with
my hands too. But they insisted. So instead of eating, we chatted about
life. Sanele opened up about how his
mother died in 2003 and since then he has been struggling. He lives with an aunt now and is happy to just
be alive. When dinner was over, Mduduzi
(a 7th Day Adventist) said to us “I want to thank you for helping me
but I do not thank you on behalf of myself, but on behalf of our Almighty
Father. I do not know where I would be
without you in my life”. I noticed that
Emily and Casey had not eaten their food either and didn’t realize until we got
home and they started shoving their faces with a cheese sandwich that it was
not because they weren’t hungry; rather they wanted the boys to have more of
the leftovers.
When we dropped Sanele off, we left him with one of the
stoves. He lives with his aunt and her 8
children. One of the children is
physically and mentally handicapped and lies on the concrete floor on a blanket
all day. His aunt was telling me that
she has been begging for support for her impaired son since he was born and he
is 13 now and has never gotten anything.
She also said that she resisted taking Sanele in because she already had
8 kids of her own and did not have enough to even support them – another mouth
to feed scared her. But she said God
told her to take him in and since she listened to Him, they have now been
receiving Give Hope, Fight Poverty donations (thanks Mitali) and have been less
hungry than before. She said this
inspired her to give more. She has been
traveling to the children’s ward of the hospital and bathing the kids, reading
to them, and keeping them company. Then
Sanele gave her his leftovers from the restaurant and told her that he wanted
to share with the family. I don’t know
how far that tiny piece of chicken and vegetables can stretch among 10 people,
but he was willing to only have a bite if that meant he could give to his
family. He said all he wanted from the
restaurant was a picture of himself in a room so beautiful. When we told them we had to leave he said, “Yes,
I want you to go now so you don’t see me cry from happiness that you were here.”
Half of the time I am writing this blog, I am crying from
happiness that I am here. And the other
half of the time I am crying from sadness that these kids do not have the little
things they need – like the sanitary pads, soap, and toothpaste we were able to
buy for them today with the donation from our volunteer Heather’s coworkers. (Thank
you!)
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