Striving for a God-honoring daily legacy amid life's beautiful adventure.
I used to only see the poverty.
The broken pieces.
The suffering.
As if somehow it defined things
Trapped things.
Deprived things.
Then I began to see better
The poverty was in my perspective.
You see, there’s no poverty of friendship here.
No poverty of love.
No poverty of creativity.
Oh sure, we live surrounded by poverty.
But there’s no poverty of being together here.
Dare we see poverty
while also seeing where there’s no poverty?
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Just sharing some wonderful memories from this year here in the land of perpetual summer. 😉
They say bordem fosters creativity.
But sometimes bordem just fosters… bordem. 😂
*No children were harmed in the making of this bored moment (Contrary to Ms. Drama’s persuasion.)*
#reallifeMKmoments #servingthroughwaiting #lovingthroughsacrificingentertainment #lifeskillsaquiring
Just wanted to share this with our sending church:
You’re on our minds.
Thank you, Miamisburg FBC for continuing to journey with us.
When given the opportunity to crate our belongings from the United States to Mozambique, we were certain to bring many, many books. Thanks to my sister’s research and hard work coupled with homeschool funding through the IMB, my girls are given the gift of English reading in our Portuguese world!
Since access to English books is quite challenging in a non-English speaking country and access to any literature at all is also quite challenging, we came up with a fun idea:
🎉Stauffer Library! 🎉
Stauffer library began with measuring the kid books, measuring the wall space, doing a little math and hand drawing the blueprints to three happy bookshelves. Proce negotiations, logistics for retrieval and three weeks later, the local carpenter produced some happy (and heavy!) book shelves. The girls and I then alphabetized all our chapter books by title and shelved them. Picture books were organized into topics and shelved. Sections were divided and labeled (yay, happy laminator machine). We also filed a section for magazines and a handful of newspaper articles (again hard to find in English so we picked a paper up after waiting for a few months for our trip to South Africa) which was also laminated for durability.
The girls each have their own small basket for the books they are reading each week. Once per week the girls get to rotate being the librarian, serving their library patrons who come in to switch out their books, and reshelving each book alphabetically (for chapter books) or according to topic (for picture books). While waiting for another patron to borrow their books, the girls have enjoyed reading magazine and newspaper articles.
My librarians have been ECSTATIC to get the chance to recommend books that they have read to their sisters and have been perfecting their alphabetizing skills (the littles with adult help).
At the end of library hours everyone has enjoyed returning to the homeschool shelves with their small basket of new books for the week as the library is closed up.
The library has also proven lovely in selecting books to share with English-learning friends and English-speaking teammates as well as making it easier to pull books for homeschool use.
And we even have a library cat! 😉
(This library is cat approved, for sure.)
It’s fun to see my girls still get to “go to the library” while living at least a day’s drive from any potential English library (though we’ve never yet found one).
My bookworms are VERY happy. ❤️
I wrestle with it. It keeps me up at night. I struggle to put it into words. To assign it a voice and a depth of meaning. Like a Mama bear pacing in front of her cave in some moments. Like an obligation I do not know how to quite carry. A spiraling into the unknown.
I swing between complete responsibility, wrestling to discern maturity during full disclosure, and an “it’s beyond my grasp” deflation. This unknown people becoming known. Because some white people showed up.
How does one portray them? How can I explain them? Things I wrestle with about their culture that I’m still processing, sometimes aloud. Things I admire. Overwhelming lessons. Overwhelming obligations and responsibilities.
All while walking on a thin line. How can I keep them from becoming a stereotype? They’re not just faces to push a platform. Faces to represent a statement they never made.
What would their mother think? That baby who could be portrayed as helpless that she has nursed through the first two years of life as her utter prize. Her long awaited miracle. What would his father think seeing his son be portrayed as desperate? That son he is intentionally raising to be a man.
Tread lightly, beloved, as you tell a story that is not your own. Step carefully and carry the responsibility well as many may unknowingly place an agenda on their shoulders, words in their mouths, or an ideal written on their faces that they would never say.
He is N’s boy. F’s baby girl. F and Y’s precious sister who my girls run to hug from across the field. They are my precious D and L who pushed past my foreign ways with giggles and I always just so happen to find sitting right beside me each week. He’s A’s boy who always looks after his brother, and holds his hands out to the little ones to make sure they know there’s a seat for them. They and countless others. They are real, live, and utterly amazing people.
People with voices.
People with stories.
People with hopes.
They are ours because they’ll have us, not because we claim them.
I wrestle with it. And I think we all should. Because they’re not props. They are people. A bright future. And we have a responsibility to them, whether we know them personally or not. They’re not a status. They’re not a symbol. A poster child for a lesson they never intended to teach.
Tread lightly, beloved.
Step carefully and carry the responsibility well.
There’s always so much more to learn. Growth to be had.
(She reminds herself at 2 a.m.).
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How can it even be put into words?
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