Despite having had a wash, my feet are still wearing a little of the dirt from four days living in a small community not far from the Hands @ Work base. 12 of us stayed in different homes across the village, some with 14 kids and no adult carer, some with a Gogo (grandmother) and her orphaned grandchildren, some even with TVs! As for me, I stayed with a family I will certainly never forget - a 26 year old brother, his 18 and 14 year old sisters (all of them orphans) and beyond the house an extended family comprising a couple of other brothers and their wives and kids. These young people stood over their father’s grave in 2004 and then their mother’s in 2007. The youngest was just 10 when her mother died and she was left in the care of her brother and sister. I couldn’t help but think what kind of a story this would be back home in the UK, what I would do if I were to wander into the lives of three orphaned kids living in my neighbourhood, left alone in a house with two rooms, two chairs, two beds, a single mat, a stove for cooking and two spoons for cutlery. What would I do? What would the local church do? I don’t know, but what is for sure is that this family would be the talk of the town. With such a tragic story the local newspapers would eat it up, take photos of their home. Before they knew it they would be in the great care of the UK’s social services and government benefits. That’s if it was in the UK.
Actually, the world is wrought with this story.
Literally millions upon millions of children in sub-Saharan Africa, not to mention the entire third-world, grow up without a father or a mother. Staring into the face of such a monstrous statistic, the human mind simply can’t comprehend and the human heart simply can’t cope. I once watched as George Snyman (the founder of Hands) poured approximately 130,000 grains of rice into a big bucket to indicate the number of children made orphans in sub-Saharan Africa every month. It was difficult to muster the compassion and anguish for such a great number until George pulled out a single grain of rice and reminded us: “Every child has a name.” Why don’t we make a difference? Why don’t we read this story daily in the newspaper? Because we don’t know their names. For every single orphan there is a story. Don’t feel guilty that your heart doesn’t break at the Oxfam advert you see while you’re eating dinner. The human mind simply can’t comprehend and the human heart simple can’t cope until you meet one child, one family, one story. A name is more powerful than a statistic. 130,000 orphans may not move our fat hearts, but the face and name of a single child will. Why? Because they’re cute? No. Because as you get close their story invades yours, and yours invades theirs. You discover that they have a thumbprint. You discover that, just like you, God has counted every hair on their head and, just like you, gazed over every moment of their life in awe. I like this comparison: In a single field there might be hundreds of thousands of plants and flowers. Most of them will never be seen, most of them never plucked and smelt or admired. Yet God crafted every one of them. He intimately designed each one, set it in its place and adorned its quiet few days or weeks on earth knowing that it would never be seen. This isn’t soppy Christian sentimentality, it is solid truth. And there are fields and fields of orphaned children. Most of them we will never know, and I’m learning that that’s okay. It was not an overwhelming anguish that brought me back to Africa but the memory of a 7 year old Zambian girl named Grace who I met a year before. I came here for two people, Jesus and Grace, and yet the more stories that invade me and the more names that etch themselves on my heart and memory, the more reasons I have to stay. Not one of these children is forgotten. Not one nameless. Not one that God hasn’t created and cherished. I encourage you, in whatever direction and to whatever cause Christ has called you (and he has called you, whoever you are), to boldly position yourself to be invaded by the names, stories and lives of those you seek to help. Every new name, every new story, serves to empower the cause. We probably won’t change the world if it’s the whole world we seek to change. Better rather that we serve to rescue an orphaned world for the sake of just one orphaned heart. Statistics are no weapon against apathy, but apathy has no power over a heart scarred by faces, names and stories. I cannot live in lethargy while I know that that family I stayed with lives in hopeless poverty. My heart won’t allow it. You have to make the choice between half-heartedness or broken-heartedness. There doesn’t seem to be another option.
