Team #1 have now had their 2nd week, meaning it’s not long now until we have to say goodbye to them. :’-( I’ve thoroughly enjoyed them being here and it’s been great to see them taking hold of life as a missionary in the DR with both hands! This 2nd week has been characterised predominantly by working (surprisingly! ;-P)! We’ve done a lot of building and A LOT of painting! A recent discovery of the Samaritan Foundation has been that concreting and painting the outside of the houses makes them last longer; so that’s what we’ve been doing! And I have to say, the house this team sponsored looks B-E-A-UTIFUL!!! My biggest highlights of this week have been the visit to Nazareth House on Wednesday and House Dedication & visiting the current house of the family who are going to be moving into the one this team raised the money to build today (Friday)! Nazareth House is the home of a nun called Sister Mercedes, who currently has 15 disabled children living with her, whom she looks after along with a couple of staff members she pays to work with her. She has no consistent income, but relies on God to provide for her and the children; and he has! They have never gone hungry or without the medicine they need, and they certainly know what love is. Sister Mercedes is such an incredible woman, who I can’t do justice to in this post, so will definitely write a new post on her at some point in the next 3 months. We got to spend a few hours playing with her kids, and they just absolutely adore her! The more vocal of the children would shout across, “Mummy, Mummy!” when they managed something cool they wanted her to see! And the ones who couldn’t speak, we would sit and stroke their hands or their faces, and they would look at us with the most beautiful, big, brown eyes and smile such beautiful smiles and you know they know what it means to love. I loved going there last year, and I loved it again this year, and I can’t wait to go back again with the next team! And then House Dedication was almost equally as emotional (for a decidedly non-emotional person! ;-) ). To meet the family and see just how thankful they were for this house was great, and then to go and see where they were coming from was incredibly humbling. When you’re building these houses you kind of look at them and think, ‘is this really going to make THAT much of a difference?!’ It’s small; 2 small bedrooms, a basic toilet and shower room, and a living space. But to see what they came from… They were living in one little room; 2 double beds taking up most of the space with a worktop, a fridge and an oven crammed into the corner behind the door. Their clothes were hanging from the roof in the corner, so as not to take up any more floor space, and there were holes in the roof where rain, bugs and even snakes get in sometimes! The toilet was an outhouse behind the building next to a river which, when it rains, floods. It was terrible. And now they’ll be moving into something that won’t leak and flood; where they have more than one room(!); and where there is no threat of being evicted because they can no longer pay the rent. It will make SUCH a difference!
In my Journal, at the bottom of the page in which I wrote about today, it says this; “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” ~ 1 Corinthians 15.57 We CAN be victorious over even something so seemingly endless as poverty. One family at a time!
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AuthorI'm a recent Cambridge Theology graduate now studying for a Masters in Biblical Studies and blogging about all sorts of things! I'm interested in faith, Church, theology, social action, the great outdoors and being creative, and all of those things - along with many more - come through in my posts!
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