Life Goes On

I'm posting tonight from the "Smoak Compound".  Thomas and Suzanna invited me to stay with them for the weekend at their house so I'll be getting to know the Smoak family a little better! Thomas used to be the head of ABBA and now works for Action US with responsibility for people across the whole of Latin America. 

So, what have I been upto since I last posted?! Working at Casa Semear full-time is keeping me busy! Most days we have about 15 kids in the morning and up to 40 in the afternoon. I've started teaching some english for the 5-10 year olds. My portuguese is improving enough and I'm able to have a good laugh with the kids when we play games and do activities. It's still frustrating though when I see kids who need to talk about important or serious things and I can't engage in conversation well enough, but we get by and I'm building a lot of positive relationships. 

There are some changes to the team: We now have one full-time social worker who will be responsible for helping the families and putting together information about the children who come to Semear. Caio and Dorothee return from Holland on Monday and return to Casa Semear on Thursday. So, we'll have a full team back on track which is a blessing because sometimes we struggle when 40+ kids turn up! However, people cost money and there are the usual struggles of how to finance the team when the current budget is barely being met. It's a day to day struggle just to keep the ministry above water financially and there is a lot of work to be done to ensure that we can afford to have so many people with us. On Sunday we also have another Scottish person arriving - a friend's niece who is coming for three weeks to work at Casa Semear, so that will be more company for me!  

On Thursdays the team stay at Casa Semear for lunch and a team meeting. We've been discussing ways to move the ministry forward, what some of the most pressing needs are and what we can think about for future work.  There are some serious issues regarding the infants who get brought to the kids club - some of the girls age between 8-14 years old arrive with little brothers and sisters under the age of three. First and foremost we're not currently equipped to cope with having too many infants in our care, yet some days find ourselves with four or five of them being brought. Secondly, many of them are 'failing to thrive' (FTT). I've noticed a lot of young children with serious developmental delays due to their living conditions and the lack of developmental stimulation at home. Some infants are completely unresponsive and aren't developing cognitively the way they should be. This is something to be taken into consideration for the future ministry of Casa Semear. We'd love to be able to provide better care for the little ones but at the moment with only four of us working every day it's difficult.

On Fridays we do the visits to the families in the favela where the kids come from. Today was particularly hard. We met the mother of a couple of the kids who was telling us that when it rains the house floods, sometimes up to their waists, with sewage water and the kids have so sit up on top of the bunkbeds for a couple of days until it goes down. Of course it means they can't use the electricity (including the cooker etc.) and everything is covered with sewage. We also met a young girl who is eight months pregnant. The baby currently only weighs about 1kg and she hasn't eat for a couple of days because she literally has no food. These are just two cases and there are hundreds more like them. Having the kids playing around at the kids club during the day sometimes makes it easy to forget the horrific circumstances they come from. Sometimes it is disheartening for the team as they try to work out how best to help the kids and their families when there is so much need. 

On a brighter note, it looks like some of the boys from the Elohim house are going to be returned to their family. A couple of weeks ago I went with Delton - one of ABBA's social workers - to visit the family of the three brothers who had been dropped off at ABBA the day I arrived. The visit was a positive experience - the family seemed to regret losing custody of the boys and were willing to work out how to get them back. It's a rare but precious blessing when families are reunited and we're still praying that things work out for the boys. Last weekend was the first birthday of Mike and Hedi's son, Samuel. Mike is the head of the Elohim house. He and his wife live in a big house out in the country with a swimming pool etc. I was invited to go along and join the celebrations. The greatest thing about it was that all the boys from Elohim were also invited. For them it was a real experience of family celebration and time to make some good memories. Hopefully for the next couple of weeks I'll be working at Elohim again so that I can spent some more time with the boys and the team there before I leave. 

So, that's about it for now. For the next few weeks it will be more of the same - but every week has it's suprises and I've learned (again) to expect the unexpected! One thing I can say is that the hospitality of the ABBA family is immense. I'm always being invited out, people make a point of speaking to me, offering things I might need etc. and I am always humbled to watch the people who give so selflessly to this work every day. I can't believe I only have three weeks left here. It might not be enough....