Wedding

We were privileged to be invited to a wedding last Saturday for one of the women who works at FS. She married a fellow believer and the wedding was at our fellowship.

Her eyes were culturally appropriately downcast for the whole ceremony, but it didn't hide the sweet joy that was on her face. But my favorite part was at the end when the groom instead of a kiss in this modest culture was told, "You may now unveil your bride," and he pulled the veil off of her face and over her head!

Kids and Compassion

A friend asked yesterday how we help our kids handle the things that they know about and see where we live. I thought I'd share my response to her here, too:

The main thing that we've pointed out to our kids is that this isn't the way G0d intended it to be. J said, "The poor will always be with us," because He knew the sin nature. But in the O.T. going into the promised land if they'd followed all of the law there wouldn't have been any poverty. So when our kids are feeling angry about things they see, they know where to pin the blame.

My mom has always said that when we asked difficult questions as kids that she'd listen and answer whatever it was we were ACTUALLY asking. Without adding a lot of extra information from the adult perspective. That way we learned as we were processing the questions at our own rate without being overwhelmed. So when they want to know more about something here that's what we do.

But kids are quite adaptable too when they need/want to know! When we were in NZ before coming here our then 6 year-old was having a long chat with a European tourist somewhere. When he walked back over and we asked what they'd been talking about he nonchalantly said, "Oh, I was just telling her all about the prostitutes we're going to go help." Wonder what that lady thought!

Since being here he has realized more of what his conversation was really about, but he still doesn't know it all. And he still has days of being upset because no one should have to live like people he sees and knows.

I think it's awesome that our kids aren't afraid of the poor, though, and that they see human beings with a soul sitting on the side of the road, not just the circumstances. I think that's the key: that each person has a face.

Compassion

A friend in a different country who also works with trafficked women wrote the other day that she'd been to the States recently and was part of a forum on trafficking there. She said that seeing it from the American perspective really brought the realities of what trafficked girls go through home to her heart again in fresh way. She realized that she had let her heart become a bit calloused to the plight of the women where she is located.

She got me thinking about the balancing act that we attempt in our day to day lives of keeping our hearts soft and open to those around us, yet not letting the realities that they face tear us up so much that they keep us from functioning. Walking that wire here is harder than I thought it would be. The reason? Because when the faces are people that you know it's so much more personal. And the longer we are here the more we're aware of the underbelly of the city as well.

For example, there's an eleven year old girl that I've come to love. Her name is Puja and she's homeless and basically alone. She gets picked up by a bus 5 mornings a week and is fortunate to go to a school that takes a percentage of kids off of the street. Then she comes home and carries a basket around a large market selling hair clips, nail polish, etc. in the afternoons to make money. She's got a cheerful, precocious personality and speaks English well because of her school. Tourists love her.

Sounds like she's in a difficult circumstance but is making the most of it, right? That's true. But here's the reality that she lives: while she's not living in a brothel, statistics of street children in this city say there's no way that she hasn't been trafficked on the side by some adult around. There's no way that she hasn't been raped and generally abused. When you look close she has burn scars to prove it.

I have no answer for how to untangle her life! I've offered to try to get her into the hostel that I know her school operates, but she doesn't want to for some reason. I can be kind, offer her friendship, buy things from her, share with her how I live my life, but at the end of it I go back home to my family and she's on the street alone. Her situation is far from uncommon here.

I have daughters who I'm teaching to be pure until marriage but for thousands of mothers in my neighborhood that is an unrealistic option. Not necessarily because of loose morals on the part of their girls, but because in tight communal living and in an atmosphere of people just trying to survive (plus it being a red light area) the odds are that someone will use their daughters before then. They just do their best to look after them and hope that their daughters won't be trafficked away from them into full-time usage.

Behind the scenes knowledge makes walking the wire of compassion difficult. It's also hard when the sufferer has a face that you know and care about.

But the man who walked on water was described as 'a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief' (Is. 53:3) He knows EVERYTHING behind the scenes. And to Him EVERYONE who suffers has a much beloved face....

I can't even imagine His pain.

Holi

Today is Holi. In our city it's become just a fun day of going into the streets with colored power mixed with water and throwing or spraying it all over each other! Sounds strange, I know, but apparently it's pretty fun. (So they tell me because I haven't done it myself! Neither has Rachel. We are possibly the only truly sane ones in the family!)

The rest of the family has now bathed, but let me tell you it wasn't a vast improvement! They'll work on bettering themselves a bit more tonight, but I anticipate getting helpful comments from random people for the next week of how to get the color off. And our family will probably try them!

The local population looks pretty normal in a few days but fairer skin takes longer. And fairer hair a LOT longer! Hannah loves to 'play Holi' but wore a swimming cap this year. Last year it took about 4 months for the pink and purple to mostly fade!

The crazy crew of foreign people that we work with and short-term volunteers who 'played'. The one bright spot near the front isn't a clean person who jumped in the picture. He somehow ended up metallic silver instead!

Cobwebs

"I am weary, O G-d;

I am weary and worn out, O G-d.

I am too stupid to be human,

and I lack common sense.

I have not mastered human wisdom,

nor do I know the Holy One."

Prov. 30:1-3 (NLT)

Do you ever feel like this? I do sometimes! Too often, really.

I have a weekly chore of cleaning the cobwebs out of our house. Yes, it's a weekly chore around here! No matter how clean I have it, by the end of the week sticky, grey strings and webs have moved into the corners and crevices with a coat of dust settled on top.

That's like our hearts, too. As clean as we may have them sometimes they can get cobwebs in the corners just by existing. It would be easier if life were lived in a vacuum. Where we could clean out our hearts, make everything right with the Father and then just cruise along. But that's not the way it is. Life happens! Things filter in and affect our hearts.

Too much busyness and not enough time with Him? Cobwebs. Little irritations, hurts, and resentments that don't seem significant on their own but add up? More sticky stringy stuff. Small choices to do what's easy over what we know is right? Dust settling in. Selfishness or even selflessness with wrong motives? It's getting crowded in the corners! Time to clean again.

When my heart is clean and cobweb free I never feel like the verses above!

Shame

Yesterday morning Steve was in one of the old Ambassador taxis that clog the streets of the city where we live. Out of the corner of his eye as he passed a street he saw something really disturbing, a woman around 20 years old running down the road completely naked with a crowd looking on. That is something that would be startling enough in our home cultures, but here where modesty is extreme by western standards it's a sign of something deeply wrong. Before he could react his taxi had zipped along and was caught up in the traffic ahead.

From books and newspaper articles I've read and stories I've heard about this part of the world a scenario quickly forms in my mind:

Public nudity here, especially for a female, is probably meant for the purpose of deep, profound shame. There are stories of girls falling in love with someone that her family or community doesn't approve of and being paraded around nude as punishment. It doesn't even mean that any sort of relationship happened between the couple, just that it was considered. There are lots of possible reasons, but most of them probably involve the girl being considered somehow immoral.

Also acutely alarming is that she had probably already been subjected to some form of molestation or rape as her real shame. The walking around might be to make others aware of what had happened more privately to her as the 'culprit' and enhance her shameful feelings.

What was done to to her would linger long in the minds and on the tongues of the members of her community who witnessed it and the feelings of humiliation would go on and on. Unless her family was not involved and gathered around her to be supportive after and unless she was already a product of the sex trade, there is a statistically probable outcome....that she would then be ashamed enough to kill herself.

I am theorizing here and have no idea what happened to that particular girl. I hope I'm wrong. We routinely see situations of injustice and as foreigners have to wade through the tricky waters of quickly deciding 'What should I do?' when far too often there's not much to be done because as outsiders we'd likely make it worse for the targeted person in the long run. Steve by himself trying to grab a naked women even if to help her would be incredibly culturally taboo. It would incite rage in an even larger crowd which would probably later be turned back on the girl as the one who 'started the problem'. There just aren't easy solutions. And in our western thinking we can easily make wrong assumptions to start with.

In a city so full of needs you have to know what your focus is. Even though it's confusing, we're glad that we're here and glad that we get to be part of something that does provide freedom and brings about change. Because in our area young girls are shamed, abused, dehumanized, and abandoned every day.

Note: I've been reading the book "Half the Sky" by Kristof and WuDunn who are secular journalists. It's a very good overview not only of trafficking and modern day slavery around the world but it covers other women's issues as well. I don't agree with all of their conclusions, but they have a lot of valuable insights.

Picnic Time!

Yesterday four big buses took the entire staff of FS on a trip two and 1/2 hours outside the city for the annual picnic. What a fun day it was! The location was a small amusement park (don't picture anything fancy in your mind, though!) with lots of trees and flowers. The best part was watching the women enjoy themselves.

Some of the older ones spent a lot of the time sitting in the shade, feeling the breeze (a lot less smoggy than in the city), and looking at natural beauty. The others playfully road the rides, chattered and laughed. A lot!

One of the best parts of the day was when Steve and I took one particular lady on a couple of rides. She can't hear or speak but her smile never fails to light up my day. Priceless grin and giggles!

At lunchtime it was wonderful to watch women who have been outcasts of society sit at tables and have several courses served them by men in matching purple shirts. The tables were plastic and the shirts not too flash, but to the ladies, I'm sure, it was a five star experience. Perfect!

Watching some of the new women who are either in training or have started work in the past year was significant, too. They would never have had a day like it in their lives before. And their lives are very different than this time last year overall.

On the bus ride home, I watched Adam and Hannah dance Bollywood-style in the aisle with happy women who didn't want the day to end. Aaron snuggled a sleepy 2 year-old while the mother danced. Rachel was laughing and smiling with friends, and I thought, "What an awesome way for our kids to grow up!"

Later I took the sleeping boy from Aaron because he was soooo soundly asleep that Aaron couldn't resist making the poor kid pretend to punch the air, etc, (!) to demonstrate just how out of it he was. As I held the little guy I remembered his story. His mother is currently in training so is not on full pay yet. It's a process that there are good reasons for that I can explain another time, but he and his mother still live on the street. But not for long! She'll be able to find housing soon when she officially starts work. When she started training he spent his first week in the nursery with a head full of infected sores. Now he's healthy and well fed and was wearing a cute outfit donated by a recent team.

Nice to see change!