(Ana and her new "best friend" at Home of Love. I asked Ana if she and Fortunate talk to each other and she had to think long and hard. Kids don't need to talk to each other to be friends! Fortunate doesn't understand much English and Ana doesn't know much Acoli yet! I tried to use it as motivation to learn Acoli for Ana. The kids love drawing in the dirt, playing with stones and sticks and the goats and the pigeons!)I’ve never been a really paranoid mother. I wash their hands and vaccinate them and keep them in car seats and helmets but otherwise feel that a little dirt is good for them.
But what paranoia I did have is being tested.
The first two weeks’ of vehicles that we rode in here did not have functioning seatbelts, so Josh and I were constantly evaluating if a partially or non-conventionally secured car seat was safer than no car seat. Our personal vehicle is equipped with lots of seat belts and we praise God for that!
It’s impossible to keep the children from tasting the tap water. What kid doesn’t drink some bath water? Or last night when I stepped away for a second while Ana was brushing her teeth, I heard the ominous trickle of faucet water after the girly “spit” in the sink.
At Home of Love yesterday, I had to make some quick decisions. Do I let Ana drink the bore hole water untreated like her friends were doing? Do I chew off the bark of the sugar cane straight from the field so that my children could gnaw on sugar cane with their friends? At the market, do I let the stranger hand Noah a peanut that he was eating? Or do I try to insulate my children, put up fences around them, make them appear different from their friends, all in an attempt to protect them from the unknown?
There are many times that the love of Jesus is going to be more clearly portrayed when we live WITH our new friends instead of apart from them. So Ana has graduated to drinking non-treated bore hole water, we’ve all been inoculated with garden dirt, Noah ate a random person’s peanut… and I pray that we are a little bit more approachable and that the cultural and racial barriers are a little less as we are a little more vulnerable, a little more dirty, and gnawing on sugar cane with everyone else!
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