faith like a child

hiii!

i hope that yall are all doing absolutely wonderfully and enjoying the summer! it’s so weird that it’s the smack dab middle of “winter” here in mongu, with a lovely swing between 40F at night and 90F during the day. oh, desert. godda love it! ;) 

the next week or so is going to be pretty hectic and crowded at mutoya – i can’t believe it’s already time for the teams to come in from south africa, australia, and dubai (oh my!)! VOH, the orphan school run by the zambia project, is also entering into a wild and crazy frenzy at about the same time. so while the base is busy getting water pumps, catering, extra firewood, and mass transportation ready and rearing to go for 120 people by tomorrow afternoon, many of the medium-term interns are also preparing to host a “fun day” at hope church for 4 of the largest elementary/junior high schools in mongu (including VOH) on monday, a “teddy bear picnic” at VOH on thursday, and a “sports day” at the school next friday. as if there wasn’t already a bit going on, hope church itself is hosting a “women’s event” and a “men’s soccer outreach” this saturday. if it sounds like we need a lot of prayers, we do!

 

for me specifically, i’ll join ruani (a fabulous missionary from south africa) and moses (translator extraordinaire and a respected leader at hope church) in leading the dubai team in the bush. half the team comes tomorrow afternoon and the rest arrives on saturday – about 40 in all! we’ll head out with an extra 8 or so translators on sunday and return wednesday evening, just in time for the “teddy bear picnic” and “sports day” up at the school. 

but more details on all that’s coming up later! before all the details completely fall out of my head, i really want yall to know what’s been going on at the orphan school recently, especially since it’s where i spend most of my time while i’m at mutoya. up until last friday, we taught the kids at the building that the zambia project uses for its training center inside base camp. (with the teams coming in this upcoming week and a new training session about to begin, we had to relocate the school outside of mutoya to the top of the hill, right next to the school’s new – yet still unfinished – 2-classroom home.) 

the training center is simply one 6 meter x 12 meter room with a side kitchen and storeroom, and every august, leaders from the newly planted bush churches come to bible school so they can go back to their churches and preach the gospel with a solid biblical foundation. while VOH was at the center, we had a white board, mosquito net windows, and a full kitchen for jane to cook and serve food out of. the kids could also go right outside to play on a jungle gym and jump on a small trampoline during their breaks. now that we’ve relocated to the top of the hill, school is held in a large tent, jane makes do with bush-style cooking techniques, and our playground is the sand. construction on the new school building grinded to a halt some time last week because of limited finances, so we aren’t sure when VOH will be able to move into their brand new home (we’re praying for september, just in time for next term!).

as anyone who’s worked with 4-9 year olds can imagine, every day is radically different – but we do move to a groove. aunt jane serves breakfast every morning at 8 am for the first group (the “tiny tots” and 1^st graders), lunch for the same group at 11 am, lunch for the next group (grades 2, 3, and “R”) and the teachers at noon. breakfast is either fritters (fried bread balls) or what the zambians call “super rice” (protein-enriched rice with extra sugar and oil) and lunch is mealy-meal (protein-enriched porridge with, you guessed it, extra sugar and oil), nshima (think congealed grits) and beans, or nshima and veggies. money’s been tight and food’s not always available, so the teachers have recently been alternating nshima and meat with good, ol’ fashioned bread and butter. we more or less stick to a basic timed structure: 8am, breakfast. 8:30, bible time. 8:45, lessons (english, math, social studies, and/or science). 10am, break. 10:30, music lesson or sports time with jayson. 11am, lunch. our afternoons look about the same, except with a little more order and a lot fewer distractions (the older kids understand english a bit better and are much easier to manage!). 

i’d love to say that my time working at the school has been always rewarding, never frustrating, and only positive. i’d love, also, to tell you that the curriculum is top-class, the teachers flawless, the day’s events seamless. i’d love for that to be true, and you’d probably love to hear it. but a lot of what i’ve struggled with here is how much the school doesn’t look like a pre-school or elementary school that you’d typically find in the states. if you do the math (and if we’re lucky), each group of kids (morning and afternoon) gets about 2 hours of instruction per day – and half of that is time lost fighting to catch and keep the kids’ attention. we have 40+ kids in one room separated into two or three groups according to their grade, each with a teacher struggling to hear his or her own thoughts over the singing or chanting or dancing that the other groups are doing 3 meters away. margaret and stephen (the two main teachers here at VOH) are well-educated, optimistic, and have an amazing rapport with their students – they’re invaluable to the school! but there’s only so much a teacher can do when your students aren’t used to listening and learning and you’re outnumbered 20 to one. we have incredibly limited teaching resources: our pencils don’t sharpen, our personal chalkboards don’t erase, our clock doesn’t work, the kids don’t have individual workbooks to take home to practice what they’ve learned that day, and we certainly don’t have the 10am “granola bar snack break” that i looked forward to in pre-K. when we can’t buy rice one day, the kids won’t have breakfast the next morning. when we run out of paper on which to write our lesson plans, we extemporize. when we don’t have band-aids or antiseptic for cuts and scrapes, we clean the kids up the best we can with iodine, toilet paper, and a kiss. when we don’t have a white or chalk board, we hope that most of the kids are auditory learners. 

there’s just so many barriers to getting through a single day that at the beginning of my time here, i found myself overwhelmed with inefficiencies, the severe lack of resources, and my own ineffectiveness. i was frustrated that no matter how many times i taught moonga to write a “4” correctly, she wrote an “h” instead. i didn’t feel useful at all – although they label us “medium-term interns,” i’m only here for a very short while. these kids need consistency, not just someone who will come for four months and then leave again. they’ll will probably never remember my name, though they’ll stay with me forever. how much could i actually change their lives with a smile, a hug, or a lesson in the time i have left to give? 

so i found myself wrestling with two problems: one, i’m in the midst of devastating need and there are not enough people nor resources to meet it, and two, i was trying to find my worth in how i could affect visible change with impatience and intolerance and (obviously) failing miserably. 

me with john and isaac

about two weeks ago, right at my low point in how i viewed my place at the school, stephen and i were sitting in the grass chatting while a group of 3^rd grade boys played soccer around us on their afternoon break. he started telling me about panda, one of the students who i knew was really struggling in his schoolwork compared with the rest of his classmates. stephen found panda in one of the villages around mutoya on an outreach two years ago, when panda was 8 years old. stephen visited the village a few times that year, and each time he talked with panda, panda opened up a little bit more. one weekend, panda told stephen that he didn’t want to go home – that he wanted to go wherever stephen was going. stephen eventually found out that panda’s mom had died when he was young, his father was abusive until he died as well, and panda now lived with an aunt who alternately emotionally abused and completely ignored his existence. a couple visits from child protective services later, the zambia project moved panda into one of its orphan homes and enrolled him in VOH, where he could receive positive attention, enough nutritious food, and love for the first time in his life. panda’s past has damaged his future: severe deprivation of both food and love for so long now makes it difficult for him to learn and retain knowledge. however, stephen explained that his and the zambia project’s vision for panda was to help him through the 9^th grade so that he could eventually attend a training school and make a living as a carpenter or a mechanic. 

 panda, john, beauty, me, wamulume, and isaac (left to right)

if that’s not a humbling wake-up call to how patiently and how much God loves us, i don’t know what is! i realized with stephen’s story that VOH provides so much more than just education that these kids would have no chance of receiving at home – though they certainly do that as well. more than half of these kids are orphaned by both parents, and the rest of the kids’ moms or dads are MIA and don’t value their children’s well-being, education, or both. more than that, though, VOH provides a safe haven for kids like panda to find food, friends, fun, and most importantly, unconditional and consistent love. yes, i wasted an inordinate amount of time at the training center begging dried-out white board markers to work, and i still sharpen pencils that shred with sharpeners that don’t sharpen. we still don’t have a board for the teachers to write on, we still don’t have walls to divide classes, and the dust from the tent is turning into a legitimate problem. i’m also far from being perfectly worry-free in how i approach my day and my short time here, but now i’m finally beginning appreciate the time that i do have with each of the kids at VOH because they are SO AMAZING and deserve every single ounce of my time and energy that i can give them while i am here. their never-fading smiles and laughter puts my anxiety to shame, especially when i remember that they have so very little to smile or laugh about. their carefree and pure attitudes convict me to the core: so this is what Jesus meant when he said that we should have faith like a child. 

 digging up sandstone to make bowls and play-cameras with mike and kahzila

more on the kids, missionaries, outreaches, and everything else is definitely on its way. in the meantime, please brag to Jesus about VOH, its teachers, its students, and everyone who makes running the school possible, and ask him to keep it and us at the forefront of his mind when he thinks of mongu. i love yall very much, and i miss you!!!

veronica and docas

in His peace,

stephanie