Day 8

Still no internet, but i found a working computer to post from! here is news from day 8:

Today I moved from the slum I was working in first, to the other slum which is located on the other side of Vasco, the big city we live by. We worked in the preschool all day today which will not normally happen but they had teacher training in the afternoon so we stayed for that rather than going to do house visits. This school is bigger than the other preschool I have been to and its obvious that they need our help in order to keep it running but I still struggle with being here. The teachers do not do much because we are there to help out and teach, they just sit around basically. And therefore doing all the work for them while they do nothing while knowing that in 6 weeks we will leave is not a godly way of volunteering here in my mind because we are only setting them up to fail when we leave. I will see how the week goes, it was only the first day so it’s a little early to jump to conclusions. Today we were also fasting from food which was way harder than I expected. I have fasted before but this time I was so hungry all day I had a hard time thinking of anything else. It got easier as the day went on though. It just made me realize how much the Lord wants us to be hungry for him and hungry to spend time with him. He has so much to offer and many times we are satisfied by picking up crumbs off the floor and calling it a meal rather than asking the Father for the feast He desires for us. We experience a crumb of Him and say it is enough and do not pursue His presence further, or we find a crumb of a job or a relationship or even of joy and call it a meal all the while He has so much more for us! After work we road the bus back to where we live (I will call it “home” because they do not want us broadcasting the part of the city we are living in, just because this blog is open, etc) I went to go visit Leila, the sweetest woman you will ever meet. I don’t remember if I already told you her story- but her mother had already had 3 girls and was pregnant with Leila when her husband died. Therefore she was desperate for a boy. When she had Leila and heard she was a girl she tried to strangle her minutes after Leila was born. The nurses took her away to protect her but her whole upbringing she was abused and neglected. She never went to school and was just passed around from family to family. She was married to her cousin who drank too much and beat her. She sells things on the beach to tourists and locals and learned English and Russian simply by interacting with people on the beach. She had 2 girls and everytime she would have a girl her husband would beat her, he beat her when she was pregnant also and she has experienced at least one miscarriage- there is no protection for women here. When she was pregnant with her third child she prayed desperately for a boy because she was being shunned by her community and family for having two girls. 3 days before birthing her third child her husband came to her shop and took all of her things and money and told her never to return to his house. He left her alone in the city 9 months pregnant. The Lord sent her one customer who bought enough to pay for a bus home, she ran to make the last bus home and returned home safely only to be beaten badly until she gave birth: to a boy named Robbie. Since then she has had one more daughter and she says that she has never loved anything more than her girls because she knows how hard it is to be a girl in India. She is still with her husband and he is still not a believer but he has not beaten her in a few years. We pray daily for protection from her husbands hand.