Washing hands and feet

Since January I have increased the number of ‘school’ hours to five hours a day. That means that I have not been working at the orphanage. Instead Jake and I have joined Bonnie and Mike Timmer of International Teams in their baby washing project.

A number of families live at the local dump. They search the dump for anything they can salvage or sell. Needless to say it is not the nicest place to live and the aroma leaves a lot to be desired. There is not adequate access to water so a team goes each Thursday night and washes the babies. Now these are not all babies. If the ‘baby’ can fit in the washing tub, it can be washed. If it is too large, we will wash hair, hands, and face. After a good wash, the child is dried and we provide clean clothes. Some weeks we also bring along some chocolate milk and bread. The children are brought by their older siblings or by their mothers. Often the older sibling really needs come type of care also and the first couple of weeks I had older boys begging for a pair of pants since all they had were shorts. I found a pair in our pile of clothes and received permission to give them to the young boy – in exchange for a hug. I now have a good friend.

One day we drove up to the community center and there were a number of children with a homemade go-cart. We asked who had made it and were told that the children made it themselves from scraps they found in the dump. Kids are the same all over the world.

Last week we came upon another problem with children’s health. We only had a small team so we just washed hands and feet. We found a couple of them with tender sores on their feet that appeared to be infected. When we asked about them we were told that it was a worm that entered their feet because they did not wear shoes. When the worm matured, it would release itself from the skin and become a butterfly. Yes, it would be possible to lance the sore and take out the worm, but then the child would have to ensure that their foot remained cleaned. It was a better alternative just to leave nature take its course since it didn’t do any harm. I still have mixed feelings about the whole incident but we have to be careful not to make their lives worse but bringing our ideas that we think should work.

We wash and bring a bit of sunshine into about 60 to 100 children per week. There is another group that washes children in the city plaza on Saturday afternoons. They work with many of the street people – people that have made their way into the city from the mountains, hoping for a better lifestyle.

This is one ministry that we will really miss when we leave.