Shortly after this morning’s breakfast we headed towards one of the feeding centers supported by Orphan Network. The bus left paved roads for dirt paths, and meager homes for shacks. We stopped outside of a small rectangular church building consisting of four block-walls and a tin roof. The pastor and his wife warmly greeted us, he through words and she through hugs, and then led our cluster on a tour through dusty and uneven “streets”. The shacks that we walked shared the same floor as the road outside of them, lacked restrooms or running water, and except for a couple of jimmy-rigged splitters, none had electricity. Our pastor/guide knocked on the blue wooden door of a blue-block house that was behind a blue fence. A mom of three answered with one of hers’ in her arms, and opened her door wide for us to walk through. The pastor wanted us to see how the people in his neighborhood were living, and we did.
But the walk ended back at the church where it had begun, and we served lunch to the school children and moved blocks from carts pulled by donkeys. After the meal we played red-rover with the children from the neighborhood and then loaded them into our buses with us. We were off to a Super Secret Location. Light chatter ended when Rihanna started singing about her “Umb-er-ella ella ella a a a”. Everyone, including the old old leathery grandma’s from the neighborhood started raising their arms above their heads and singing the same sounds that we were. A moment of certain joy, for sure, but a moment small in comparison to when the children realized that we were on the long windy road up the small hill to the Super Secret Location---AKA, La Piscina—AKA, The Pool. So the children started screeching and slamming their little excited fists against the walls and roof of the bus, and we remembered that we too are not too old to be excited about La Piscina, and so we too started screaming and hitting things until the doors burst open and released a rushing stumbling flood of child like spirits rushing towards the mirage like rectangle of blue amongst all of the brown. We danced in the pool, threw balls in the pool, wrestled in the pool, and did pretty much everything else in the pool that anyone would want to do.
We closed the night by sharing a warm meal back at the orphanage with the children we’re sharing a home with. At the end of each night we share stories or moments when we “saw Jesus”. Tonight there were many of those moments to share. Thank you for your prayers.
