Yesterday was the first day of our two-day sponsorship distributions with Sheltering Wings (SW). The distributions provide time for SW to connect with all sponsorship children, for families to connect with each other, and for the SW team to work with children on correspondence to their sponsors.
Before & After the distribution.
As we distributed bars of soap and sacks of grain to each sponsored child I noticed some sacks were frayed around the edges. When the bags were moved small amounts of grain would slip past these frayed edges and onto the dusty ground.
The image of corn amidst the rocks brought back a memory I have fought with since the distributions in 2009. It’s the kind of memory that brings with it intense sadness, but that also creates renewed understanding.
While visiting the house of a young boy in the sponsorship program we divided a 100kg sack of corn into the family’s storage bowls. While doing so a handful of grain landed outside the bowl; I thought nothing of it.
The boy helped his mother carry the grain into their courtyard, and then returned to the street. I smiled while he shook his hands and when his mother thanked us profusely replied “It’s nothing.”
And as I climbed into the back of the pickup to return home the little boy dropped softly to his knees: one by one he picked up the kernels of scattered corn with his right hand, and drop them wordlessly into his left hand. I’d been so wrong: it wasn’t nothing.
This is what I was thinking today when I watched a mother, or maybe grandmother, begin to scoop up spilled grain off the cement floor of the church. She too worked silently, but had a fierce look in her eyes; perhaps a combination of shame and her desire to protect.
a sponsored child and family leaving with grain
OOne might suggest I am simply a result of a culture that places little emphasis on the things we are entrusted with. This suggestion could explain why I am so struck by the way in which the people here have gathered up every last piece of spilled grain. However, I would boldly suggest, I have also been struck by the realization that there is a poverty mentality at work that I am not privy to understand. Perhaps, there is an understanding of the world that I simply cannot hold because I will never know what it is to be without. Maybe this poverty mentality is derived from the basic desire to survive.
My lack of this understanding of poverty is why seeing a small boy, and an aging woman, meticulously picking up grain piece by piece from the dirt, strikes such a chord in my heart. And perhaps another way in which I can know that this work is not done in vain.
these children live in a village recently added to the SW sponsorship program
Check out sheltering-wings.org for more information about the sponsorship program and to see bios for children in need of sponsorship.
