Greetings from Sierra Leone.
Today is our last day before beginning our travels home. Our team was just a part of the certification ceremony for 50 UMC primary and secondary teachers who were trained as part of a collaborative program that began in 2018 through HCW, the CRC, the UMC, and our July mission team members. In the closing ceremony, there was so much joy and appreciation for the learning achieved. Teachers grabbed mentors and church leaders for pictures to commemorate the proud moment.
These emotions are in harsh contrast to the ones I experienced earlier today as I traveled with CRC staff and the occupational safety specialist on our team from Texas to “the dump” for a collaborative exchange with city staff that manage local waste. I was warned that there would most likely be children “picking” the trash as part of a network of resale and recycling that is necessary here for some to survive.
As a mother, I cannot get the image of young children working in this way out of my head and heart. One girl wearing a black, sack-like dress stood out to me. She was maybe 7-years-old walking in adult-size slides (plastic shoes) across dumped medical waste where I had spotted syringes and broken medicine bottles from a hospital. I’ve seen this similar situation in other countries, but even so, it does not make it easier to think of her life today. What is it like picking for plastics with bare hands where she may receive pay from someone depending on what she finds, or her family perhaps exchanges a volume of plastic bottles for sale later this week? This image, her story, is the story of children struggling in an impoverished society with little resources and a narrow way to find sufficient income just to eat.
With that in heart, I must say as I close my blog on this journey that the call of the Gospel here in Bo is certainly strong. The example of Jesus calls us all to care for children and all those struggling from poverty. This includes empowerment of local people to seek out resolutions so that they can carry their next generation forward in health and wholeness, without dependence. That call is not diminished since the early joint Sierra Leone UMC Annual Conference and Floris UMC vision more than 24 years ago. It just sounds a bit different today because there is new hopeful work in process that empowers families and villages toward a better tomorrow. In that tomorrow, our concern, our generosity, our presence, and our compassion hold potential for vital, life-giving and life-sustaining change.
As an HCW board member and the lead pastor of Floris/Restoration UMC, please consider beginning now to save for our 2024 Christmas Eve offering and I encourage you (if you have not done so already) to step up to support a family or perhaps even a village through Helping Children Worldwide. To learn more, please feel free to reach out to me, HCW staff members, or visit the HCW website. Join me also in-person or online for worship on Sunday, July 21, where we will continue our conversation.
