God Puts It All Together

God Puts It All Together

June 29, 2020

It’s Just the Sweetest Thing!

In December a newborn was found abandoned and the police were called to pick him up. The baby’s total history was on a paper tag on his wrist with the name “Tuesday.”

Today baby Tuesday has a new name, a new mom and dad and he will never be abandoned again. Thank you, God, for the plans you had for this baby from the beginning. From such sadness comes such great joy. This sweet couple could not wait for the virus to be over so they could come in and pick up their new son. Can’t you just feel the “Is he really ours!”wonder in this picture!!

That is baby Tuesday above, we called him Austin.

Our MAP program at Neema Village helps moms who have been abused, used and abandoned. This week Anna, the MAP Director and our daughter Kim White (below) went out to visit a mom who was in trouble.

Until a few months ago, Aneth and her husband were leaders in the small town of Usa River outside Arusha. They had a nice home and two children, they were looked up to in the community and were leaders in their Seventh Day Adventist church. But polygamy is accepted in this country and Aneth’s husband wanted a second wife. With Aneth resisting he decided he would just take off her head. He swung the machette but she put up her arm and he made a deep cut in her arm instead. Then he ran off abandoning the family and Aneth and the children lost their home and became destitute.

After the interview Aneth was enrolled into the MAP program. She makes seventy-two women who have had a dramatic life change thru MAP (Mothers Against Poverty) at Neema Village. Have I told you lately how much I love this program!!

But now read how God orchestrated the rest of the story.

Meshack, our second baby at Neema was one month old when he was brought in from the Maasai village eight years ago. His mother had died at his birth and Meshack was starving. At the father’s request we brought the baby in to Neema and he stayed with us for about a year then went back out to his village.

He is a very loving, gentle, eight-year-old now. We have had him in boarding school but we recently learned the boarding house had some big boys who had been on the street and were rough with the little guys and stealing their food. We desperately needed another home for Meshack. (Our daughter Kim and Meshack below)

This is where the lives of Meshack and Aneth converge. A cleaning lady for the boarding school told Neema about the problems Meshack was facing at the school. A friend told Aneth to check out the MAP program that helps women at Neema Village. Aneth needed help and Meshack needed a home. MAP has now moved Aneth into a two-room home close to the school, bought her beds for the children and will set her up in a business. We will pay Aneth each month for Meshack’s care and food. It’s a win win for both Aneth and Meshack. Isn’t God amazing!!

Neema’s newest baby is this little heart-faced baby bull. Five baby bulls in a row, what’s with that! Scott suggested we name this one Ribeye. We are not too happy with our cows right now, they got out and ate the vegetables in our garden last night.

We have been harvesting dried beans at Neema. You let them dry to a crisp in the field, the women bring them in on their heads, then you beat the bushes so the beans fall out onto the tarp. Kim decided this would be a good job for our big kids and it looks like Jackson had fun!

Kim says we may get enough beans to last the whole year. That would be nice since we feed about a hundred meals a day at Neema Village and we cook a lot of beans.

I love seeing pictures of our road at Neema. We made those bricks on campus three at a time. It took us months to get enough bricks to make this road! It is usually full of babies and strollers.

We are anxious to get back to our Africa home and meet the ten new babies who have come in since we left in February. It has been a bizarre trip home and not much we had planned to do has gotten done. We did get another audit finished and were tickled when the Auditor told us our administrative costs for Neema Village were still under 5%.

We have tickets on Ethiopian airlines, now if the planes will just be flying into Arusha and we won’t have to quarantine for 14 days!! Please be praying for us!

All by God’s Abundant Grace

dorris and michael