building bridges

The next few days we spent our time at a new site for Hope Chest. We were the first group to ever visit. Tucked behind some busy streets and some construction site materials, near a rushing river is the small community of Jemo. Each day children young and old come to the church building to be given food and fellowship. The building is just one large room, cement walls and floors, a few windows, with benches scattered around facing the two-step stage in the front of the room. The pastor and his family live next door in a small, couple roomed home. They, and a handful of others, coordinate the fellowship of children in this community. This is a very low income/poverty area. A lot of parents come and just stand around as well, because they don’t have jobs or school to go to themselves. 

One of our days here we took time to walk around the neighborhood. It was sad and hard to see. There is no sidewalks or pavement, everything is small rocks covered with mud or just dirt paths with puddles. Their homes were merely shacks and rooms made of tin, metal, mud, wood or whatever one could find.

The pastor took us to the end of the road where a bridge spans across the river. It looks like its made out of toothpicks! A couple of large tree branches connect the sides of the river bank, yet only small branches make the foot path. No sides or hand rails. The pastor told us children have to use this bridge in order to attend the government school on the other side, and every year several children fall from the bridge, some are even killed. Hearing how often it rains, watching the water rush by below, and thinking how slippery those tree parts could be-I fully understand-I didn’t even want to get on it!

During our time at Jemo we led the children in activity stations both inside while it rained and outside in the thick mud when it was sunny! We made paper crowns, bead bracelets, twisted balloon hats, and played with parachutes and soccer in the muddy field besides singing silly songs. One of our team members taught about God’s love and peace and we taught the children several Bible songs like Jesus Loves Me, I Have Decided to Follow Jesus, and Allelu-allelu! We loved to hear them sing and smile. They loved to see and hear white American people!

Each day we went the children wore the same clothes and the same shoes, yet they became more and more fond of us and less shy. Later we were told that most of these children hadn’t seen white people or heard English before we arrived! We were hoping to show God’s love to these little ones, yet what we found was the light of Jesus already shining in this poor community of people. On our last day the people surprised our team with gifts. They hand painted a banner/quilt with all our names and decorative pictures besides giving each of us beautiful scarves and bracelets. We were not only in awe of their generous hearts, but the time it took and the money they sacrificed in their giving. We were blessed by these people!

2 Corinthians 3:2-3 “You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all. And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”