Care Points Update

 Here’s a little ministry update. So there are many ministries here at G42 that we each have taken as our “babies” and basically oversee to everything about it. One of my “babies” is the Care Point ministry. Ok so Care Points are where the children from infants to teenagers go to receive food, if they are sponsored or not. There kind of how this country is still living, so they’re pretty crucial. AIM is partnered with a non-prof organization called Children’s Hope Chest and they work together to feed the kids and the community and to get the kids and Care Points sponsored. Sponsoring is also crucial to the community. I never knew really how important it is for something in a poverty state of being to be sponsored; it’s basically a life or death. Either you or your Care Point is sponsored and you eat, or you or your Care Point isn’t sponsored and you don’t eat, or the random person who you have been given to so they will take care of you isn’t sponsored and you don’t eat. Do you remember those commercials where the white people are asking for “only 30 cents a day” and they show a bunch of depressing shots of starving kids with pot-bellies “and you can save this child’s life…for only 30 cents a day,” well those commercials, causing poor people to get sponsored really is a life saving thing, I guess we just always over look the poor when they aren’t under our noses. But anyways, we go to one of the 8 Care Points that AIM/ G42/Children’s Hope Chest is specifically over in our area every morning, and we do tons of things with the kids and teachers (also known as “Gogo”). We play a bunch of Swazi games; games kind of like duck duck goose or ring around the rosie, but Swazi style, so they are way cooler and usually involve dancing and stomping. We also just do random games and just hanging out and have fun, like there is a game that just evolved from nowhere, where I chase the kids around and spit water at them and they try to get away from me and hide but they really do a bad job at hiding because they want me to see them and spit on them ha. I mainly play soccer with the older boys though, and wrestle and play karate with the younger little stud dogs. Then we tell some bible stories and act them out and stuff and get the kids involved. Basically, it’s just Vacation Bible School like they do back home. But our main focus is to teach the gogos how to teach the children, so they can continue this after we leave. So now that school is back in session, for the kids who don’t/can’t go to school, we are going to be teaching them and teaching the gogos and also bring Christ into everything.

Alright so that is one aspect of the Care Points. The other is what we’ve been doing more recently: profiling. Profiling is getting the information from the kids that Children’s Hope Chest needs so that people can sponsor the kids. So I make sure the Gogos know when we are coming and they make sure all the kids come to the Care Point, and then we go and interview about 100 kids at each Care Point. Then we come home and I type up all the information that it can be burnt to a disc and ready for churches or people to see so they can sponsor the Care Points or individual kids or whatever. This is one of the most important things for these kids future’s, without getting profiled, they won’t get sponsored, and then they won’t eat, won’t go to school, won’t get a job, become a prostitute, get AIDS, spread AIDS, get or make someone pregnant, and then die, all in a few years. I promise that that wasn’t as exaggeration. So it’s pretty cool to have this responsibility in my hands ya know? We get the information, through translators and questions, of their name, age, Care Point, number of siblings, number of parents living, if the parents are employed and if so what do they do, who takes care of them, their gender (sometimes you can’t figure it out), how many languages spoken, their favorite color, favorite animal, favorite food, what they want to be when they grow up, and their favorite thing to do. The answers are depressing really; these kids have lived in oppression for their whole lives they don’t know what it means to dream, most of their favorite animals are goats and chickens, they favorite food is rice and beans, most of them want to be farmers when they grow up (not because they want to be but because they can’t see anything past weeding in the sugarcane fields), and a random Gogo takes care of them because their parents are dead or can’t get a job anywhere.

“Everyone needs Jesus man” – Blair Nightingale