I Can Relate...

“Heal my heart and make it clean.

Open up my eyes to the things unseen.

Show me how to love like You have loved me.

Break my heart for what breaks Yours.

Everything I am for Your kingdom's cause,

as I walk from earth into eternity.” 

– Hosanna by Hillsong

I’m not sure when I first heard those lyrics, I’m not sure when they first struck a chord with me, I’m not even sure the first time I sang them as a prayer for my life.

I’m sure this song has grown my faith and stretched me to love more like Jesus did and often to realize when I didn’t. It has challenged me to wrestle with just what it looks like to love like Jesus and I’ll tell you I still don’t have the answer.

This last year with starting The Widow’s Might, my eyes have been opened, I’ve done my best to love and my heart has been broken in brand new ways. To me these three lines of this song can be summed up with one word… compassion.

I left for Moz in April, knowing that I would be living in an unfinished house with half the floors being dirt and the other half cement, no running water, no electricity and no bathroom… well there was a bathroom but it looked more like a walk-in closet with a rock floor. I remember thinking to myself that I would really like a toilet, but cement floor, electricity and running water I could live without for months if not years. No big deal.

Wrong.

Within days of arriving at our house, I had some of the most intensely itching bug bites and they would blister if scratched. I noticed one blister popped and turned a quarter-sized patch of my skin into something that looked like leather. So I began to dress my bites with toothpaste and Band-Aids 24 hours a day; at times would wear knee high socks and boots.

 Bug bites day 2, 3 and 4.

 Without electricity, we had no fans, so Nunu and I would spend the hottest hours of the day outside under a shade tree. It worked great until one day, I got burned… badly. So bad in fact that I couldn’t stand up much for the next two days because the burn would turn purple and my skin would throb.

And I thought no one would ever see me in all my bandaids. 

I still have the lines 4 months later.

Wearing these, I felt like I was trying to
make weight for the wrestling team,
because my feet were so HOTTT!

While we have a generator, the cost of gas prevented us from using it much. On average we used it about an hour a day and there were weeks when it didn’t work at all. We relied on a solar light and portable solar panel to charge our phones and anything else that was USB.

I would have to shower each day by 4:30 in the afternoon, because if I didn’t, it meant taking a shower by cellphone light. Cooking was much the same; I would rush to get it done before dark, cooking outside on a charcoal stove. Cooking in the dark not only meant relying on my cellphone flashlight, but also getting bug bites, even though I was using bug spray.

Cooking spaghetti on a charcoal stove.

We had a large blue barrel for water. About twice a week we would pay Binti to fill this bucket which we then used for showers, washing clothes, dishes and cooking, but not for drinking. I always tried to keep 3 water bottles full and out in the sun, as 6 hours in the sun will kill 99.9% of bacteria in the water.

Water bucket in our Kitchen/Living area.

One morning the sun was hitting the water barrel just right and I saw movement: mosquito larvae, lots of them. I spent the next 30 minutes scooping them out. It’s hard to say if they were brought in with the water or if mosquitos were entering our house and doing this. Anyway, we began covering the water barrel and from then on only found the occasional swimmer.

I don’t share all this with you for pity or to complain. If these are the conditions I have to live in to bring The Widow’s Might to fruition, then so be it. I still have it better than most and that is the point: I know the conditions I was living in are just a small portion of the life my neighbors live… my eyes have been opened.

A few weeks ago a video popped up on Facebook and it said “Akon Lighting Africa.” I decided to watch. To be honest when I started watching I was conflicted. Was this a hand-out (giving away things) or a hand-up (giving knowledge, helping)? It felt like a hand-out, but then it hit me. There is no way these people could pay to bring electricity to their village (we are faced with a $12,000 bill to bring our electricity 1,500 feet) and odds are that their towns are too small for the government to do so. I had to realize that sometimes a hand-up comes in different forms. And this electricity is bringing so much good to these villages, allowing safer streets, giving people the ability to work past dark (and not cooking dinner by cell phone).

While I’ve never dropped my cell phone into a pot, I’ve cooked dinner more nights than I can count by cellphone light. When I heard that woman tell her story about dropping her phone into a pot of sauce (about the 4:00 minute mark), I lost it. I continued to cry. Scratch that; I bawled through the rest of the video and beyond. Why? Because I can relate.

While I can relate, I know that it shouldn’t be like this. I know how the other half lives. I’ve been given more compassion for my village than I know what to do with. I don’t just want to see my neighbors and friends scrape by; I want to help them be better. I want to see all their children go to school, not just the boys, and be able to come home at night to do homework at a table while mom cooks dinner with the lights on… and that is just the beginning of my dream.