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| My beautiful family |
Happy New Year from the Maxwell family at Project Canaan, Swaziland! I am incredibly thankful for my beautiful family
being together over the Christmas holidays. May the year 2013 bring you joy, peace and love.
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Some of you have asked me privately what I struggle with
and/or how you can pray for me? My
first answer is usually asking for prayer for El Roi funding so that we never
have to turn away a baby in need.
But today I have a different request based on several women I spent time
with this week.
Being a girl or a woman in Africa is very hard. Females are not valued as males are
valued, but they are the backbone of most African cultures and societies. I remember reading a statistic that 75%
of all food that is planted, grown, harvested, prepared and put on the table to
eat on the whole continent of Africa is done by women. Women are beasts of burden and are also
responsible for fetching water (many miles away), giving birth, raising
children and providing love and care for the entire extended family. In
Swaziland and the woman is also responsible for building the home that the
family lives in (typically made from sticks, rock, mud and grass). Their bodies are not their own (often used by male family
members) and their real value is in the number of cattle or goats they are
“worth” when it comes time for “lobola” to be paid for their hand in marriage.
I have met several young women in the past few months who
have really impressed me, even through the tragic situations that brought us together. They
seem to want to break the cycle of poverty, but it is virtually impossible to
do in a country that doesn’t value women, has an unemployment rate of 70% and where sex is the easiest and quickest way to provide food for your children (or yourself).
I am really struggling with this because I want to help
these young women, but don’t know how to do it and don’t have the funding to do
it at this time. Let me tell you a short
version of three stories from this week. Some of these you may be familiar with
if you are a regular blog reader.
Woman #1 – She is 30-years old, has 8 children, is HIV
positive and has been in the woman’s prison multiple times over the years
because she steals food to feed her children. She is now in prison for three more years. Her youngest ones (age eight months and
the other is two years) are living in prison with her. The next five (ages eleven years to
three years) are living alone with no food, no clothing, no adult care. We have been working with police, Social
Welfare and the Correctional facility for seven months to try to get assistance
for the little baby in the prison and the young ones living alone. This continues to seem like a hopeless
situation, but we haven’t given up hope yet. While we are trying to provide a medium-term solution for
her children’s care while she is incarcerated, the question remains how she
will be able to care for them when she is released in 2015? She would like to live and work at
Project Canaan, but we have no housing or facilities for her at this time.
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| Baby Hope |
Woman #2 – She is 26-years old and is the mother of two-year
old twin boys. She was violently
raped in 2012 and after several failed attempts at aborting the child she
recently gave birth to a beautiful girl, who now lives at the El Roi baby home. She is a hard worker (she cleans at a
local factory) and tries to provide the best care she can for her twins on her
$100 US per month salary. She
recently discovered that her boys are being neglected (to say the least) by the
woman caring for them while the mother works 12-hour shifts. She would love to come and live at
Project Canaan and work on the farm or in the baby home, but we have nowhere
for her to live and no one to care for her twin boys. Her own parents kicked
her out of the homestead when they heard she had been raped because they didn’t
believe her story and believed she was just being promiscuous. The father of the twins is unemployed
and refuses to help with the boys.
She is stuck. And I am
stuck because I want to hire her, but I have nowhere for her to live with her
little ones.
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| Leah and Rachel |
Woman #3 – She is 24-years old, is HIV positive and has
active Tuberculosis. She has given birth to five children - one single birth, a
set of girl twins and another set of twin girls on November 19th
(which just happens to be my birthday).
The first three children are being raised by their fathers parents. The new twins live at El Roi and were
brought to us by the Social Welfare department when the young mother was being
taken to the National TB (Tuberculosis) hospital. She is deathly ill and could not begin to care for her
newborn babies in her mud room home.
She has what is called DR-TB – Drug Resistant Tuberculosis and is a
sanitarium that is designed for acute cases of this highly infectious
killer. Each day she gets 18 pills
at 10AM as well as an injection in her boney hip. At 10PM she gets four more pills. When I asked how she got in to this situation her simple
reply is “bad behavior – and it will not happen again.” IF she responds well to this
treatment and IF she lives she will reside at this TB Hospital for the next six
months to two years. Each and every day she will receive the 22 pills and
injection in order to save her life.
She was quick to tell me that she is trusting in the healing power of
Jesus more than she is trusting in the medicine, which makes her vomit
violently and often results in long term effects like loss of speech or
psychosis. If and when she gets
well, she wants to come and live at Project Canaan and learn to make jewelry
and sew. But right now we have nowhere
for her to live when she is health again.
All three of these women have become my friends. I visit them as often as I can and think
of them and pray for them daily. But each day my heart gets heavier and heavier
for them. They remain hopeful
about their futures, while I stand in awe of their hopefulness. My hearts desire is to be able to help
these girls/women just as we can help their babies. I know we can’t “save them all”, but maybe we can help the
one who is right in front of our eyes; the one who look through the prison bars
and ask for help to save her children’s lives, the one who stands against a mud
wall and shares her fear about her babies being abused by a caregiver while she
works, the one who looks over her Tuberculosis mask and thanks you for caring
for her twins.
Next week I will blog about my visit to the National
Tuberculosis hospital. It was a
shocking and life-changing experience for me and I want to do some research
before I write next week so that I can best articulate what I saw and what is
happening here in Swaziland with AIDS and TB.
Please join me in praying for these three women and all the
others of millions of women who are suffering every day. May the God Who Sees us all provide His
hand of protection and provision as only He can do.
Live from Swaziland … my heart is hurting.
Janine
