Before the trip, the only ministry experience I’d had with kids was a church camp I helped out with a few years ago. I was assigned to the nursery. Babies can be cute, for a short time, but the rest of the time they cry and scream and it seems like there is constantly some liquid exiting their bodies. By the end of the first hour I was covered in so much slime, that I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to get clean.
So after 3 days of traveling from Georgia to the town of Big Bend, Swaziland, when we finally arrived at the orphanage, I wasn’t too excited. Kids flowed out, and I could already feel myself tense up. I spent that first day unpacking, cleaning, and generally occupying myself with jobs that did not involve little sticky fingers and screaming. That night, I sat in the front room after everyone had gone to bed, praying, and trying to figure out what I had gotten myself into. While I was wrestling over the thought of staying in the orphanage for two weeks, I heard footsteps behind me.
A little boy, named Mluci probably no older than 4, came out from the back room. His face was set, his steps sure. He swung the heavy gold ring of keys as he approached the front door. When he came to it, he fit the key in the lock, and turned. The lock clicked into place. I watched as he circled the small building, locking each individual door, securing the building for the night. When he returned, he came quietly up to me and dropped the heavy key ring into my hand. I would later find out that this was his evening chore.
Mluci was the first child I saw that seemed to be swept into an odd situation; children taking care of responsibilities that I wouldn’t even trust myself to take on. My team always took care to point out these children. The “babies carrying babies,” as we called them, referencing the hundreds of young children we saw with their siblings strapped to their backs.
These children, as I slowly came to understand, had been deprived of a childhood. Growing up orphaned, they had learned to survive on their own, cooking, cleaning, even prostituting themselves, they took up the responsibilities and found a way to survive. The hardest thing that I soon realized was that these children had never been loved. Few of them had ever had parents who cuddled them, held them, or simply cared.
By the end of my trip I’d experienced every bodily fluid you can image. I’d been surrounded day and night by screaming children grabbing every limb of my body. And I loved every minute of it. By the end of my trip I began to understand more fully God’s vision for our world, God’s vision for the next generation, the children.
