I love Tanzanian fabric. Half of my wardrobe is made from it.
Kangas are probably the most common form of Tanzanian fabric, and what makes them unique is that each pattern has a saying or proverb written along the bottom. When I found this one, I knew I had to get it for my kids and made into outfits for them.
It says: Upendo wa mungu umetuweka pamoja.
The love of God has brought us together.
Yes.
Merry Christmas!
Whenever you drive into downtown Dar and stop at a major intersection, little boys run up to your car. They are about 10 or 12 years old, and hold a jug full of soapy water and a piece of a broken windshield wiper. As soon as your car stops, they splash water on your windshield, “wash” the window in about 10 seconds, and then hold out their hands to be paid.
I used to get annoyed at these boys. I really didn’t need my window washed two or three times in a half hour (once at each intersection), and I didn’t like that they assumed I even wanted my window washed. I also didn’t like that I am always targeted because I am white.
These boys are most likely all street boys. Runaways from abusive homes, orphans, or cast out for one reason or another, and now literally living on the street. Which is the life that very likely my Josiah could have been living, had circumstances turned out differently for him. And so, a couple of years ago, when one of these boys tried to wash my windshield, all of a sudden, I saw Josiah’s face there instead.
And I started to cry. And instead of shrugging him away, I paid him. Now I do every time.
Like every other American (and much of the world), I have been thinking and praying and mourning over the terrible tragedy of 20 lost little lives in Connecticut. But what has struck me about the situation and how it is being presented is that this tragedy is somehow unusual for our world.
Did you know that in the past couple of weeks, 700,000 refugees have fled Congo? That they are fleeing a militia that has been bombing and burning down their villages, raping and shooting indiscriminately? Ironically, they are fleeing into Rwanda, country where only 10 years ago, the majority tribe massacred one million of their fellow countrymen/women/children, neighbor against neighbor, and usually with machetes?
Did you know that often in some African countries, children suffer a fate far worse than being gunned down by a crazy person; instead they are handed a gun, forced to murder their own parents, and then conscripted into an army to kill their own neighbors and friends?
The United States will corporately mourn those 20 little lives lost on Friday, and rightly so. But I can’t help but ask, why are those little lives so much more valuable than the ones over here? Why do people care so much about this tragedy, and barely cast a glance at Congo? Why is anyone surprised that such an event would occur, when it has been happening in the rest of the world since Cain and Abel?
And I’m guessing it’s because that people see their own children, or themselves, in the faces of those children from Connecticut. They can imagine what it would be like to send their own little ones off to school, only to never see them again. But they can’t imagine a crazed, drug-induced militia entering their neighborhood, raping, burning, and shooting their small children, ripping open their pregnant women before handing their 10-year-old a gun and telling him to shoot his mother or die himself.
The American children have names and faces. The African children don’t.
Adopting three Tanzanian children has broken my heart for other African children in ways that I never imagined, even after growing up here. I see children here suffering and I see my children’s faces instead. I think about my children starving, alone, frightened, separated from their families by tragedy, fighting in wars. Or even just living on the street, trying to make enough money for a meal by washing car windows.
So yes, mourn this tragedy, America. See your children’s faces in the newscasts and hug your own children tighter today. But don’t forget the millions of children and families who endure even worse things every day. Adopt a child. Sponsor a child. Send money to churches in Rwanda who are helping the Congolese.
And remember that we’re not celebrating Christmas because of the warm fuzzies and fun and sugar plums. We celebrate Christmas because our world is desperately, horrifically, tragically broken and our only hope is in Jesus Christ.
A thrill of hope; a weary world rejoices. For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!
(name that movie)
When I taught in California, there would be this big moving-van type truck that would arrive in the parking lot once a year with a mobile aquarium in it. The kids would be shuffled through and allowed about five minutes each to “touch and feel” the ocean animals.
First grade visited the tide pools last week to finish up their seashore unit. The kids at HOPAC don’t know how good they got it, with their own non-mobile aquarium five minutes away from their school, and they got a good two hours to “touch and feel” the real thing.
The octopus provided the most entertainment of the morning, when it proceeded to spray black ink all over the screeching children standing over it.
Mikayla, Nurdin, and their jellyfish friend.
Sometimes I laugh when people think our kids are deprived, growing up way over here in Africa.
In 1990, for the first half of ninth grade, I lived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Ethiopia is a fascinating, beautiful country with even more beautiful people–people full of grace and dignity that is not seen anywhere else. Its history goes back thousands of years; it even has links to King Solomon, and it is the only African country to have successfully resisted foreign rule.
However, in 1990, Ethiopia was being ruled by a tyrant, and the city was full of horrifying things for a 13-year-old girl to see, even one who had already spent many years in Africa.
There were sections of the city where the islands in the middle of the road, usually covered with carefully manicured grass and flowers in developed countries, had been turned into toilets. Except without the toilets. On a regular basis, you would see dozens of people–men and women–doing their business on the patches of dirt in the middle of the road. The smell was so bad that we always had to put our car windows up.
Beggars and homeless lined the streets. Of course, to a certain degree, this is common in Africa, but usually (as in Tanzania), the beggars are only adult disabled people (which is horrifying enough, of course.) But in Ethiopia in 1990, the beggars were children. They were filthy, in rags, and covered with disease.
I remember once I was waiting in our car while my parents ran into a store for something. Two small children came up to my window with their hands outstretched. The older one, who couldn’t have been more than six years old, had one eye that looked at if it had grown five sizes too big. It protruded out of the eye socket and sort of hung there, limp. Flies covered it. And if the burden that this small child was forced to carry was not enough, she held the hand of an even smaller child.
That image has stayed in my memory for my whole life. I believe it’s one of the things that compelled me back to Africa. One does not see such a thing with her own eyes and not be profoundly affected for the rest of her life.
And yet, in 1990, this was before the AIDS pandemic hit Ethiopia like a tsunami. So for those children on the street? Things just got worse.
Today? “81 percent of Ethiopia’s people live on less than two dollars a day, and 26 percent live on less than a dollar a day, the marker of absolute poverty in the world.”
“By 2010, between twenty-five million and fifty million African children, from newborn to age fifteen, would be orphans. In a dozen countries, up to a quarter of the nation’s children would be orphans.”
We are adopting from Ethiopia. And our agency asked us to read this book:
There is No Me Without You is part biography of one Ethiopian women’s quest to save the orphans of her country, and part history of the AIDS orphan crisis throughout Africa.
It is a deeply moving story and I highly recommend it.
“On dirt floors, in shacks and huts across beautiful Ethiopia, children sat cross-legged together, quietly starving. Experts dubbed them, ‘child-headed households.’ UNICEF noted that the ‘survival strategy’ of the child-headed households was ‘eating less.'”
However, I need to warn you before you pick up this book:
If you are positive you would never want to pursue orphan adoption, then you should not read this book.
If you want to remain complacent about the orphan crisis in the world, then do not read this book.
Because I promise you, this book will completely turn your world upside down, as you sit in your bed weeping at midnight, unable to put it down.
“Mekdes soon told her [adoptive] mother [Mikki] about the day her aunts took her to [the orphanage]. ‘Yabsira cry a little. I am scream.’
‘Why did you cry, baby?’ asked Mikki.
‘I don’t know this Ethiopia. I want my Ethiopia with [Grandfather] and Fasika. I don’t want new Ethiopia.’
‘You were sad,’ said Mikki.
‘No hope, Mommy. I have no hope.’
‘Oh, honey….’
‘Because no one told me, Mommy.’
‘Told you what?’
‘That you are here in America. I will not feel so sad if I know you are here.’
‘Yeah, I was here getting ready, getting your rooms ready. I was here, me and your daddy, waiting and getting ready.’
‘I am cry because I don’t know you will coming.’
Of course, for most of Africa’s ten million, fifteen million, twenty million orphans, no one is getting a room ready. No one will come.”
(I need to add one other comment if you do decide to read the book. Though the author gives powerful and convincing data regarding the history of AIDS and ARVs in Africa, I do believe she is somewhat one-sided. I am not an expert, but I do wish she had been more fair in her approach to patents and ARV’s, and especially given more time to applaud the work of President Bush’s PEPFARprogram, which really has made a significant difference in Africa.)
4 1/2 years old, only 30 pounds. All muscle. Energy coming out of every pore. Got to get that kid some gymnastics lessons.
There are a few advantages to having lots of blown out tires.
Daisy says, I’m getting too old for this….
He’s not saluting Hitler or Black Power. It’s all about Superman these days.
See? Superman.
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