Alam

Her name is Alam. She has dark eyes and a shy smile. You can tell that she does not get noticed often, although she is beautiful. But life is hard. She is a widow and she lives in a house made of mud that she pays a little less than $15 dollars a month for - I don't know where she even gets that much money each month.

The house is smaller than my bathroom, and her children sleep on the ground. There is a "kitchen" next door that she shares with several other families. By kitchen, I mean a place to build a fire. There is no running water at her house, or in any of the houses in the village.

Alam. I love her. I miss her. I can't wait to go back to her house, and tell her that she has not been forgotten. That God loves her with a deep unending passionate love, and He will not let me forget her.

We visited several women in their homes on our first day in the village. They were all gracious and inviting, and they all have huge needs. For some it is 18 month old children who cannot walk because something is wrong with their back, or walls that are caving in, or rooms that flood in the rainy season, or 4 extra orphan mouths to feed now that the neighbors have died.

The Church has a long prioritized list of women who are ministered to by their leaders, but the best part is that they have big dreams of ways to help these women.

The Church wants to provide micro-finance opportunities for these women. We taught four of the women, including Alam, to make the magazine bead necklaces. We left money with the church to buy the necklaces from the women, and I pray that this opportunity provides hope.

The church would also like to build a well and community center that would provide drop-in childcare for the women. The women will take their babies with them to the trash dump to find food or items to sell, and when they get tired from carrying them on their backs they will just set them down in the trash. There is a need for daycare. This community center would also have showers and bathrooms, it could house some of the children we are sending to boarding school next summer when they are on break from school, and it would serve as a new church building.

I love big dreams. Dream in such a way that if God does not show up, it will surely fail.