What a busy, fast track season it has been since I returned to Pemba end of May. As soon as I returned, I resumed responsibility of overseeing projects and food distribution for 240 people in our Mercy programs. In two months we have been able to get a few more thatch roofs recovered and new homes built thanks to the generous donations of visitors and mission school students. Thank you Lord for always providing for your children!
My roommates and I took on a new laundry lady in June, and she had quite the story. Beatrice is one of the ladies I had gotten to know in the Mercy program. She is a young widow with 6 children, and had no job and no way of providing for her kids, except the 5 kilos of rice and 5 kilos of beans that she received from us every 2 weeks. One day I asked her how she lived before meeting us at IRIS and coming to be part of the food program. The house they lived in before we helped them buy a new one last year had big holes in its roof and sides. It looked as if it may fall in on top of the family. They had no beds, so Beatrice would go to the town dump to find old discarded coal sacks for her and the children to sleep on at night. When the rains came they couldn’t sleep because rivers of water would come pouring through the sides of the house and when it was dry snakes came in to sleep with them. Beatrice says that the neighbors just laughed at them. The children cried to her in hunger almost every day, and the older boys would go to the dump to look for old bread and rotten food that might still be good enough for Beatrice to cook up for them to eat. Now she has income and is even able to choose foods that she wants to buy for her children in the market. Praise you, Lord, for your amazing love and provision!
Later I cried, as I thought about the reality of a lot of the poor here. They literally have nothing, and Jesus has brought us here to share his good news with them but also to help them break free from the cycle of poverty. One way that I feel the Lord wants me to help people be released from generations of poverty is through Farming God’s Way. This is a way of farming that teaches very basic and simple farming practices that produce much food. It also teaches about wisely stewarding the land that God has given us; including blessing the land and breaking off curses. I am so excited for the opportunity to go to Lesotho in September for a week long ‘In-field Mentoring’ program with the leaders of FGW and others who have a heart to see poverty broken off the lives of God’s precious people in Africa!
