The orphanage where I will be spending the summer is now home to two more little girls, Brenda & Esther. They are sisters who were brought out of heartbreaking circumstances. Their mother had abandoned them and left their father to care for the girls. Brenda & Esther were left alone during the day while their father went out in search of work, and at night the girls and their father all slept on a single mat on the dirt floor of their tiny, one-room home. The girls' bellies are distended from malnutrition. To get water, the girls had to walk a narrow trail through fields & forrest to a small hole full of statgnant, muddy water where they filled 2 fuel cans with the water and carried them back down the trail. Brenda, 5-years-old, carried both water cans because her 4-year-old sister, Esther, is too weak to carry the second.
So many things are wrong with this! These little girls are 4 & 5 years old. They should be in school, not hiking to get water, wondering when they will eat next, and being left alone with no one to watch over them. Young girls get raped all too often in Uganda walking to get water on their own. And what kind of things are swimming in that water waiting to infect those girls' little bodies?
Praise God that these little girls were taken in by Rafiki Ministries! But what about all the other children who suffer this same plight? There are over 2 million orphans in the city of Kampala alone - 2 million precious faces with no one to love them, no one to provide for them, left to face the world on their own. More than 26,000 children died today due to starvation or a preventable disease - TWENTY-SIX THOUSAND kids whose bodies withered away until they couldn't take another breath. Poverty is a daily reality to more than a billion people around the world who attempt to survive on less than one dollar a day while an additional two billion live on less than two dollars each day. Less than TWO DOLLARS A DAY! And it doesn't stop there. AIDS, tuberculosis, rape, war, kidnapping, sexual slavery, religious opression, torture, terrorism, government corruption. I can't even begin to imagine all the horror that some people are faced with every day. My heart aches for the poor, orphaned, sick, windowed, enslaved, victimized, opressed, imprisioned, and lost.
The question I can't seem to escape is why them? Why Brenda and Esther? Why Elise? Why Ronald? Why Evens? Why Dilven? Why were these precious children orphaned, abandoned, beaten? Why were they the ones who saw their parents killed in an earthquake, who suffer from malnutrition every day, who are forced to wander the streets begging for food, who are infected by preventable disease with no access to medical care?
Why not me? Why not you? Why was I blessed with a loving family, a safe home, a bounty of food, a life of privilege? Don't get me wrong, I'm not angry for the blessings I have enjoyed. But I am angry that there are children all over the world who will never know the life I have, the love I have, the safety & security of having their most basic needs met.
