Like A Movie.

A lot of my friends are with the youth group from SHBC this week in New Orleans. They’re working with Habitat for Humanity, working on houses, and taking some time to reach out to the people there.

Normally we have prayer and praise every Wednesday night, but since most of the youth group is gone, it was decided we wouldn’t have it this week. But someone got things together and a few of us still met last night. We got together to talk about unity- how God works in numbers and He works in expectancy. We got together to pray for those there right now.

Someone mentioned what they’re seeing right now. He mentioned the poverty. And he mentioned this guy that lost his wife and children in the hurricane. Everyone’s expression changed, sympathy, sorrow, and an attitude of prayer.

On a normal night, I would’ve been right there with them. Supportive, sympathetic… Wanting and praying for change to come to that area. Praying for movement.

After Africa, though, I wonder if there will ever be a “normal” night for me again. He mentioned the poverty. He mentioned death.

the face of a child.

Images, like a movie, played in my head. The shanty towns in South Africa. Even the most poverty stricken areas here have it off better than them. And even still, they were better off than a lot in the Maluti Mountains of Lesotho. Mud huts. The “Basotho salute”, asking for money, for food, for anything. The kids in only a tshirt. Images like these and worse make it hard for me to feel the same about those in New Orleans as the rest do.

Images. Repetitive. Ingrained. The double orphans who lost both parents from AIDS. Who now live with a grandmother who is also dying from AIDS. The 50 year old woman lying on a dung floor, her body under a blanket appears as that of a small child. Lifting her head up, she is, in the absolute most literal sense, ’skin and bones’. She probably isn’t alive now, even though I saw her a couple weeks ago.

I will still hear stories from New Orleans, travel to East St. Louis, and have a wave of sorrow wash over me, being compelled to action. But even then, those images from Ha Seshote, Chiena, and the numerous other villages will resurface and compete for my attention. It won’t be like it was before that life changing trip, I will no longer travel to East St. Louis, the most poverty stricken city in the US, and be able to look at it the same way, knowing those people live in mansions compared to what the Basotho live in, and the Basotho take better care of what they do have, more grateful, more generous.

The people, though, right on my doorstep need to know the saving grace offered by my Isa just as much as the Basotho. Which is what kills me. But I fear I’m forever ruined. For better or worse is yet to be known.

I do know, though, that I will never look at anything through the same eyes as before.

kadi.

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