Day 4: Our orphan is position ONE!
Malindza Village day! Our amazing teacher gave me all of our
student’s reports. Mpendulo – our extremely
hard working orphan – made position ONE!
I couldn’t have been more proud.
This little boy’s mother died when he was only 6 months old and now, at
6 years old, his father is dying too. He’s
been bed ridden for the last month and hasn’t been getting any better. Mpendulo, now basically alone, still attends
school daily and always has a huge smile on his adorable face. His school shoes fell apart from all of the
walking so he’s been coming bare foot. We
bought him a new pair as a graduation present! He also got a brand new bookbag
from my sister-in-law Kelly. Along with
our other orphaned students (thanks Kelly for your bookbag drive, the kids
LOVED them… one boy said he was happy to no longer have to carry his books in
his cardboard box he had been using).
Then we did an art project with
the pre-school children. My Aunt June
donated drawstring backpacks and fabric markers. To be honest, there were only 2 of 10 artists
in the group… the rest of the children created blobs or a single straight line
across their bag and called it a masterpiece.
But they all had fun and now have a bag to carry their belongings to and
from school!
We then delivered food to our
Go-go headed homes. These are homes
where the grandmother’s children have all died and now she is left to raise the
grandchildren with no job, no money, no husband, and no resources. The one granny had a pot of water
boiling. I asked her what she was
cooking. She said that she was not cooking anything. That she put a pot on and prayed to God for
food and just as she was grabbing her wheel barrel to go around the village to
beg, we arrived with rice, beans, mealies, brown sugar, cooking oil, fish,
baked beans, peanut butter, and chicken stock (Thanks Mitali/FOODOM). Another grandmother was very drunk. She was almost incoherent. She lives alone in a small hut with our
student, her grandson. The teacher told
us that when the grandmother is drunk, she beats our boy. He stays late at school and then idles around
the village in hopes that when he gets home his grandma is passed out. He is only 6 years old. Life is tough for our children, even when
they have a “caretaker” it isn’t easy.
We then went to our neediest
homesteads where the go-gos are raising their orphaned grandchildren even
without a decent home. The corrugated iron
roof consistently blows off in the wind.
The dirt/rock walls are in a constant state of erosion leaving holes in
every wall. They hang sheets and
cardboard on the walls to try to prevent rain from coming in while they are
sleeping with little success. The
teacher said that our twins always come to school asking if they can sleep on
our floors to avoid the rain. Neither
home has a toilet either. The children
have to hike into the bush to relieve themselves. When my mother-in-law and father-in-law
arrive at the end of December, we are going to build two new homes and toilets
for these hardworking go-gos and their ever deserving orphaned
grandchildren. If you’d like to donate
toward this project, you can mail a check to GHFP 2436 N Alabama Street,
Indianapolis IN 46205 or you can do so online: http://www.ifightpoverty.org/donate.html
No comments:
Post a Comment