Shattered To Pieces

That, and other variations of that,
have been spoken over me ever since training camp in Gainesville,
Georgia. To be honest, I never really knew what it meant. Get
wrecked…like stop living like ignorant Americans? Don’t bathe as
much? Hold babies? I really had no idea, and in my time spent in
Guija, Mozambique I learned what that term, “get wrecked,” really
means.

What is wrong with me that these things
would not bring out a holy rage in me? The night all of my Novas team
members and I left Mexico for Nicaragua, Uganda, Swaziland, South
Africa, our director Tag gave us this letter. How I am feeling, or
was feeling, brings me back to parts of this letter:

“‘There is a lot wrong in the world,
why don’t you do something about it?’ God has given us gifts to
accomplish this task. The most important gift we suppress most of the
time, but it is the gift we must use at every stage of our life.
Anger. Anger at injustice.”

For my trip from September to up about
now, I was not angry at injustice. I had settled. And just thinking
about it disgusts me. Me settling for the brokenness of this world
disgusts me.

The first night we were in Guija,
Mozambique we were talking to our contact about some of his life
story. He is South African, and was in the army. Before he met
Christ, he was racist. But since he has come to know Christ’s heart,
he has been purified from this racism and can see people the way that
God sees them.

That really motivated me. I’m not
saying I am racist, because I am not. It made me put into perspective
that the problem was with my heart. I was not seeing God’s people the
way that He sees them. That is why I was not having this anger at the
injustice of the world. When I made this realization, I began praying
that God would let me see His people the way He sees them. Within a
couple days, he answered this prayer. Everything changed.

As my team, our contact, and our
translators walked through the community to do house visits, we could
smell people brewing alcohol in their cauldrons over the fire from the
streets. The smell was so strong, even though we were yards and yards
away from it. As if being able to tell how bad alcoholism is in this
community just with our noses, we found out some depressing
information. Most of the men here go into South Africa for the year
to make money for their families, since there is no work in
Mozambique, and come home around Christmas and bring home their
earnings. What happens sometimes is that the husband and the wife
drink all of that money away that the husband made for the past year.
All the money will be gone in a week. Whenever Tenny would receive
donations of food, he would go out and give them to the more poor
families in the community. He would find out later that they sold
that food for alcohol. These people that he gave the food to ate
maybe once a a week, and they sold that desperately needed food for
alcohol.

My heart started to fall into even more
pieces when we spent around a half hour visiting the local clinic.
Almost every patient was there because of malnutrition. Men, women,
babies. There were 3 older women that I got to pray for with Claire
and Jenny, but then when we walked out of the women’s ward, we sort
of split up. We were heading towards the baby ward, but we didn’t
even need to walk into that ward, because it was overflowing. There
were several mothers and their little babies just waiting to be
admitted into the ward. I don’t have any idea how to explain this
sight to you. These were infants, but they didn’t look like it. I
couldn’t fathom how they could possibly be as skinny as they were.
Even if you used your imagination to see what these babies look like,
you would be wrong because they are far more unhealthy than any human
brain can visualize.

There was one baby that just tore me
apart. We saw him on his mother’s back as she walked into the clinic.
Tenny pointed his hair out to us, to show that you can see
malnourishment through hair color. I managed to find him in the baby
ward because he stands out from all the other babies there. This baby
was African, but his skin was yellow and his hair was orange. He did
not have jaundice. This baby’s story is that his mother is mentally challenged and doesn’t feed him. Whenever someone gives her food for the
baby, she eats all the food and gives nothing to her child. That is
why this baby is so sick. When I looked at him, he really didn’t look
human. In addition to the yellow skin and orange hair, his body was
also disfigured. His head was disproportionately large compared to
the rest of his body, and you could see bulging blood vessels through
the thin layer of skin over his skull as he screamed in pain. His
limbs didn’t look like they could be arms or legs because they were
too frail. Even if he didn’t have any baby fat on his bones, there
was still no way that they could be so thin and frail. His body had
been deprived of the nutrients needed for his bones to grow…and
because of that, his bones didn’t grow. They were as thin as they
were when he was a newborn. As I prayed for this baby, it was
something new. Sometimes when I pray for someone I feel like my
prayer isn’t going anywhere. Like the person I am praying for isn’t
receiving it, or that is bouncing against a brick wall and not going
up to God. But this time was not one of those instances. As I prayed
for this child, I didn’t close my eyes, I stared into his undeveloped
iris’s. Staring into these eyes was like being lost in the heart of
God. While I prayed for him, I could see how God felt about what was
happening here in Guija, but specifically for this child. I felt like
I was at the throne of God in heaven talking to God about this baby
boy’s life. If that’s where I was spiritually, I don’t know what was
actually coming out of my mouth on Earth. Maybe it was English, or
Shon-gon, or tongues…I have no idea, because I was lost in the
heart of God.

The next day was when I completely
broke. We were visiting mud huts that orphans living there. There was
one group of huts that did something different than all the other
places we had seen. The owners of the huts support HIV/AIDS positive
women in the community who have children. This family gives these
women and their children shelter and food, until the mother has built
up enough strength to go home. A place that does that is really
helpful, because there are so many HIV/AIDS victims in Guija. If this
family wasn’t supporting them, the mothers and their children would
starve to death because the mother’s don’t have the energy to go into
the fields for 16 hours a day and get food for themselves and their
children.

Most of the people living in that
community were out in the fields, so we only met one of the mothers.
She was AIDS positive and she had 2 babies; one newborn, and one
between the ages of 1 and 2 years old. Her older baby boy had full
blown AIDS and was in unbearable pain. His skin had a tint of yellow,
and he had orange hair, which means he is malnourished. What bits of
skin were showing were covered in sores and scabs. There were so many
scabs on his face that he was being attacked by the flies as he
cried. There were flies going into his mouth as he cried out.

Since this mother has AIDS, she isn’t
allowed to breast feed. That is how most of the women pass the
HIV/AIDS onto their children. I stood up off the grass mat and as I
did this, the mother started to breast feed her newborn child.

After I had gained composure from that
incident, I was able to think through it clearly. I realized the
hopelessness that these women face. Because of the powdered milk
boycott in Mozambique in the 1990’s (A really unfortunate story. I
have a lot of information about it, I just can’t post it because of
the Mozambican government), HIV/AIDS positive women have limited
options for feeding their children. It is a deadly cycle. If you have
AIDS, you can’t breastfeed your babies. When you have AIDS you more
than likely will not have the energy to work the long hours in the
fields farming. Because you can’t farm and sell the food, or even eat
the food you farm, you won’t have food to feed your baby. Powdered
milk is the most ideal option to feed babies who can’t be breast fed,
but since it is illegal and ridiculously expensive, it is not an
option. The mother is then faced with 2 very difficult and deadly
decisions; the 1^st option is to breast feed the child even
though it is illegal, and pass HIV/AIDS on to your child, and the 2^nd
option is to follow the law and not breast feed your child. Because
of this, the child won’t get AIDS, at least from the mother, but the
child is guaranteed to be malnourished. And because of the AIDS,
there isn’t much food coming in, so there would be no food for the
child to eat to survive.