True change...

A treasure from a friend...

In The Meantime

Imagine for a minute. You are a 32 year old married mother of 3. You rent a house. Well actually you rent a room about the size of a western bathroom. The five of you live in this room. Your rent is barely affordable but you have some employment and you make it work. But now, given this room's proximity to the lucrative red light area, your landlord wants to charge daily brothel rates, which will mean making rent payments completely out of your reach. Also your relationship with the landlord is not the best. Your huband is frequently out of town for work and your landlord takes the chance to assault you. Black eyes are not infrequent.

What would you do? Well probably for most of you reading this, you would never have rented such a small space in the first place. You would have a 3 or 4 bedroom house, 1 or 2 bathrooms. And what? Your landlord hits you?? You would have him charged with assault and move house while you wait for justice from the police and court sytems.

But this is the story of a woman I have come to know. For her, the options are much less. Poverty it is said, is not just lack of food, clothing and material goods, but a lack of choice. She cannot choose to just leave. Her situation is horrid, but it is better than this family living on the streets. Rooms are hard to come by and particularly in this area, rent is expensive. She is looking hard, and prayerfully she will find a safe, affordable home for her family. And in the meantime she is vulnerable to a male landlord who by virtue of his gender and improved financial position, holds the power.

'In the meantime'. So many people living 'in the meantime' here. The space between the already and not yet. And while we wait for restoration and redemption, the meantime people continue to suffer. Their situations become dire.  Who can imagine a landlord having such physical and emotional power over us? For those of us who have choices, it is so foreign.

Yet, two days ago for another lady in this same area, the meantime became too long. After a fight with her landlord, she consumed enough alcohol to become drunk, doused herself in kerosene and set fire to herself. She leaves behind 2 daughters, the oldest of whom is 12.

And in the meantime, because of the hope we have been given, because of the light we continue to glimpse, we continue to pray. Come, Lord Jesus.

Last week we were very lucky to have our friends Eline and Remko and their beuatiful little bub Ella come to visit. We were impressed by their willingness to venture into our world and it was great to have them with us. We were able to show them a little bit about our daily life, our house and our neighbours. So here, in a limited way, I will attempt to do the same here with more of a visual post today :-)

Disclaimer: when I took these photos, I had no intention of using them in a blog. And now I am too lazy to take any more. So there is no 'Home Beautiful' treatment.

Here is our kitchen. The first thing you see after coming up the stairs to our door.

And here is our kitchen with cooking lesson in progress.

The playroom

The playroom at Easter

Easter - activities in process

And finished.

The honeymoon suite.

Our favourite place in the house and an  unexpected blessing is our verandah. It allows us to be outdoors and also have (sometimes much needed privacy.) It's rare to be able to combine those two elements!  Right below is the duck pond. Which is great for looking at the ducks, but unfortunately also has a lot of rubbish in it. Those trees are mango trees, and here is another beautiful surprise we had one day.

A gorgeous kingfisher right outside our house. With nature a precious commodity here, I felt pretty blessed on this day.

Directly below the verandah is our water pump. We use this water for washing and showering but not for drinking, although a lot of people in our area do drink this water.

This is the view from the side of our balcony. In the background is the edge of one part of our community. The thatch building in the foreground is the community clubhouse. Basically that's a room for men to watch cricket in.

Fun new use for a palm frond. The lane that our house is on.

Ok, that's it. Hope you enjoyed the quick tour. Pop in if you're ever in the neighbourhood.



There is much beautiful imagery attached to water in the Bible. Healing pools, thirst quenching water, streams of life giving, life sustaining water. 

There are many beautiful examples of calming waters, clear streams, teeming-with-life rock pools that we have played in. They bring to mind the beauty with which our earth was created, and often remind us to slow down for a moment. Sometimes we even drink of their purity.





Our canal is not one such example.  Our canal is a shared, connecting feature of the four otherwise separate communities that our team occupies. Our canal is polluted with toxic chemicals causing it to change colours you never thought possible. It is the sewerage system for our communities. It is full of chicken bones, last night’s left over rice and lentils, plastic, broken clay pots, rats, snakes, and washing powder. And in the last two weeks, it has borne the stench of tragic death.

First of all, a baby boy.  The circumstances of his death can only be speculated. Perhaps a family overwhelmed by the prospect of another mouth to feed? Did he have a deformity? Perhaps a family unable to consider how they might pay for the extraordinary costs involved in funeral rituals (the services of a Brahmin priest, the relatives expecting  to be fed, the cost of new white garments to mourn in)? Perhaps an awful accident stemming from the fact that low-cost housing is found so close to waste water canals – marginal land, not much other value.

And then less than two weeks later, a local shopkeeper struggling with an embarrassing medical condition. Unable to find respite, he desperately takes his own life under horrific circumstances, leaving behind his wife and two children. How much pain does one man have to feel? Too much…

And the dirty water continues to flow. Potato skins, empty packets of chewing tobacco, blood.

My friend and team mate in whose community the baby died reflects on the words of Wendell Berry, farmer and poet;

                There are no unsacred places,

                There are only sacred places

                And desecrated places. (How To Be A Poet).

My friend says the canal is desecrated to him now, and I can’t but help to feel the same. We continue to look in faith towards a new earth, knowing that much redemption of our canal is needed if we’re going to see it restored to the biblical benchmark of beauty. But more than that, our hearts cry for the families living alongside this canal, our neighbours.