What Do You Have?

(A post where I ask you for money for the famine in East Africa and also talk a little about Jesus.  If you’re not cool with that, please check back next time where I’ll be making éclairs. See? You needn’t actually live in France to taste the good stuff.  And while we’re having this conversation, I really am working on getting the blog cleaned up – I know it’s not looking great right now after I upgraded to the new WP.  The colors and widgets are all funky but I don’t know why).

We lived in the Horn of Africa for a year. We spent two months training in Hargeisa, Somaliland. (This is located in Northern Somalia and they consider themselves to be a separate country from Somalia but are not recognized by the UN). We then went to Djibouti for three months to start up operations for the charity, and just as we finally got through the bureaucratic process and were ready to begin, we were evacuated to Kenya because of 9/11. We were in Nairobi for four months and ended up returning to Hargeisa for the remaining three months because they needed someone to lead the team there and because there was no longer enough money to keep up operations in Djibouti.

We were glad. Hargeisa was our favorite place to be.

Something you might not know about Djibouti, Somalia and Somaliland is that they all share the same language and culture, and that is very rare for separate countries in Africa. The only thing that differs is the tribes that the people belong to, and it was for that reason (tribal conflict) in 1986 that the Chief Military Officer Siad Barre revolted against the government and staged a coup, starting a civil war that lasted 5 years. (It is ongoing today but in 1991 Somaliland declared itself a separate nation and has been at peace ever since).

I am friends with the wife of the former president who was put under house arrest when Siad Barre took over. Her name is Edna Adan and she courageously runs a Maternity Hospital in Hargeisa, greatly reducing the birthing mortality rate from what was once the highest in the world.

(She never liked Siad Barre anyway when he was in command under her husband; he used to get his black shoe polish on her clean white couches).

Siad Barre’s forces bombed Hargeisa so heavily there was not one building left untouched when we lived there a decade later. The people began to flee the city and so he started bombing them in the desert as they made their way to Ethiopia.  They had to start traveling by night and hiding by day. When the war was over and Edna approached her ex-husband (who had been reinstated as President of Somaliland, but whose marriage to Edna did not survive) to ask for land to build a hospital, he put her off and put her off until only her persistence caused him to give her a small plot of land.

He meant it as an insult, I’m sure. It was a low-value property in the slums and it was also the site of a mass grave. During the assault, Siad Barre’s forces had tied men, women and children together and shot them so that their bodies fell directly into the grave. When they were building the hospital, they constantly came across skulls and other human body parts, whole skeletons still tied together.

Edna makes lemonade with her lemons and she was pleased with the location. For one thing, it would be held in the slums where a hospital was most needed. For another, what better location than a mass grave to have a maternity hospital – to bring life where there was once only death.

We worked closely with the nursing students and the hospital staff, and full veil coverage and religious beliefs aside, we only discovered how similar we were. The girls giggled and fell in love, the mothers proudly showed pictures of their children, the women were hard working and ambitious, wanting to do the best for themselves, their families, their country. One of the women escaped her abusive older husband from an arranged marriage when she fled the city in 1989 but she lost her baby in the process. She never married or had children after that.  There had been enough sorrow.

We worked in the orphanage, which I wrote about here. The children slept on floors and used outhouses. There was no running water at the time and they ate their corn meal off plates by licking the food off their hands. They played with rocks and bits of glass; and when we came over, they were happy to have any attention we could give, even if it was just getting their hair braided or their nails cut. They didn’t need much.

When we returned to Hargeisa, there was a small cache of toys in our NGO house, and I wanted to build a playroom for the orphanage. Other team members were working with various groups to get running water for the orphanage and to build a playground. We started the process to secure a room and have it painted for a playroom. I knew that we didn’t have nearly enough toys, but I thought that anything was better than nothing, and better let the few toys be played with than collect dust in our compound.

A short while after that, Edna contacted us about a charitable group that brought Christmas shoeboxes to underprivileged children. There were two whole shipping containers full of them and they needed help distributing them! Edna took care of sending them to various parts of the country, but we were free to give them to the orphans.

We were responsible for reviewing every single shoebox and taking out any religious articles, as well as toys that were hazardous to young children. We needed to ensure that any food items were still edible and that each box was evenly distributed so that the ones chock full of goodness could spill over into the ones that were a bit barren.

I didn’t realize this at the time, but we were starting to pile up toys for the playroom.

You cannot imagine this day. We had so many boxes that we were able to build two playrooms out of the abundance – one for the younger kids and one for the older kids, with toys set aside in storage to bring out later. And then one morning each of the 300+ children in the orphanage sat down and received their very first gift ever. Not just a gift, but a whole shoebox filled with toys and clothes and candy and stickers and .. and .. 

There were all the typical reactions – the kids who complained that their box was not as good as their neighbor’s (yes, it’s true), the kids that squealed with each item that they pulled out of their box. And there were the kids who sat there in shock, unable to even touch the things they found in their box. Those are the ones that bring tears to my eyes even today, ten years later.

Sir had a spiritual take on the event (one of the many reasons I married him). He remembered Mark 8 when Jesus fed the four thousand. (If you don’t know the Bible well, he fed 4,000 and 5,000 at two different times, but the 5,000 is the one everyone remembers). The disciples were worried about what they didn’t have enough of (vs 4) “But where in this remote place can anyone get enough bread to feed them?”

But Jesus asked them what they did have, “How many loaves do you have?”

He just asked what they were able to provide (in this case seven loaves) and he did all the rest. In fact there were even seven baskets full of bread left over when everyone had eaten their fill.

And that’s exactly what happened with the playroom. What did I have? Just a handful of toys. What did God do? Individual boxes of toys for every child so that they had their fill, plus two playrooms and a storage of toys leftover.

We must never think that a small donation won’t make any difference; we need only give what we have.

I’m supporting the World Vision program to raise money for the victims of the famine in East Africa (if you are not in the US, you’ll need to select your country before giving).  

Now, if you want to link up here with your own post to raise awareness, then you are just all sorts of awesomeness (grin).  The theme is, “what is one thing you will give up in order to donate?”  My one thing is new pants.  Seriously, even though my current ones all have holes in the pocket where my money seems to fall through, I have decided to save money on myself and give to the children instead. 

I felt like I couldn’t keep silent because I had lived there. These are not some random people with no connection to my own life; they are human just as we are. And those mothers are desperate for their children to survive, just as we are.

And I want to give what I have.

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