Been way too long, I know! Only three blog entries in a month is pretty pathetic. Staying busy! I have so much to share and to say but I can´t possible write it all down. Where to start... with the kids, I think!
I continue to be surprised at how different orphans are from anyone with whom I´ve before been in contact. As always, I am captured by the intense need for love constantly displayed, but another aspect of these precious ninos quickly revealed itself. Unexpectedly, they can be extremely cruel. Not only to eachother, but to the volunteers and workers, as well. As difficult as it is to comprehend, I believe I am beginning to understand. Although there are various causes for the kids´prescences´here, all causes rob them of security. Whether abandonment, abuse, familial death or simple poverty are to blame, what they have learned is that who or what they depended on failed them. For most of the younger ones, this created a need for any kind of assurance that they are loved. For the older, it created a need to lash out and tear down people around them. For all of them it created an insecurity that will always be with them. Can there be anything more heartbreaking?
In the past week or so we have gotten about 6 new kids here and are now one child away from full capacity. Scary to think that in just a short while it will become necessary to refuse an abandoned or abused child a safe place to stay.
But beautiful things happen here, too! A sibling group of five children are being adopted and are moving to Colorado in April. How amazing that they will have a family to love them, for always! And even for the kids that will never have a family, we are able to give them a safe envirement to sleep and to play and to learn. We do our best to instill in them a God-centered moral code and to teach them that He, at least, will never leave them. I sometimes feel as though that is all I can truly offer them. I can not give them a home. I can not give them a family. I can not stay with them forever. What I can do is give them the love that God gave me for them, and I can tell them where it came from. That is my mission here. He is the only promise I can make.
