From last week

Today did not start out very good. I had a rough night last night because I was up late baking after the electricity came back on around 10pm. This morning Beto went to preach at the alcohol rehab center at 6 and when he returned our worker who sells for us was here early. She came to tell us she didn’t want to work for us anymore. Thanks for the two weeks notice! Yea right! So since we had no one to sell and the weather is too nasty for me to sell and we didn’t have much product to sell nor ingredients to make more, we went back to bed!
At around9am our good friend and missionary calls us to ask if we can do her a favor. The situation goes a little like this. There’s a family…a single mom with 5 kids all by different fathers. The oldest is 18 and the four youngest are something like 8, 6, 4, and 2. The mother pretty much never works and if she does it’s to some extreme of like 12 hours a day so she isn’t ever home with her kids. She relies on the oldest daughter who also goes to school. The oldest has worked with our friend for many years and the mother is always asking her for money and depending on her for everything, and if she doesn’t give her money she gets unreasonably angry with her. The other day the mom asked for money for food and instead went and bought a pair of unnecessary sneakers for one of her sons, instead of at least buying the pair of shoes he needs for school.
So that brings me to today. The mother has been sending her kids to a school far away. It takes the kids an hour and a half to walk to it one way at 6am and again in the afternoon. What doesn’t make sense is that there’s a school only about a 10 minute walk away but she claims that the teachers aren’t as good and that the kids stay after and get in fights. So for the last two years she’s been sending her kids to the farther school. But because sometimes they wouldn’t show up they both failed this past year. But she still says they are learning more than they would at the closer school.
This year both of her boys didn’t pass their respective grades because they arrive too late or just don’t go to school but tell their mother that the teacher didn’t show up or some other excuse. If that really is the truth how are the teachers any better at the farther school? Anyways, so our friend was fed up with this mother because school starts Monday and she hadn’t gone to enroll them or buy them any supplies or uniforms. So our friend went yesterday to the closer school to enroll the two boys, and she told the mother that she was going to do it.
Well, the mother got very angry and was yelling at her oldest daughter and threatening to do something rash with her anger. So that’s when our friend called us this morning and asked us to go with her as witnesses to talk to this mother. Well, she wasn’t at home. So we hunted her down and found her, of course, at the farther school trying to enroll her kids there. It turns out it’s good she was there because there were two other teachers as witnesses who agreed with us and who didn’t want to let her enroll her kids in the school because they know the situation and that the kids had failed. The mother claims that the closer school is also more expensive (I don’t think so, it’s just another public school) but she claims that she gives them money for food and to ride the bus. So either way she’s spending money, but about riding the bus, that’s not true because they have to walk by our house to get to school and some days they’d be so tired, dirty, and sweaty, walking in the street, almost getting hit by cars. We’d bring them in sometimes and give them food and water.
We had a looooooong discussion with her this morning at the school and it’s just unbelievable why she doesn’t want to accept help from someone. It doesn’t make sense to us to send her kids so far away. So finally she was given two choices: send her kid to the closer school and our friend will pay for everything, or we go to the judge and the kids get taken away to live in the orphanage. She finally decided to put them in the closer school but booooooooooooooooy was she mad! When we left she wouldn’t even look at our friend and had such an angry look on her face. I don’t get it.
Well, after that fun filled episode, we, Beto, our friend and I, did our grocery shopping and then she invited us out to lunch at the nicest restaurant in town. Let me tell you, I thought I was going to explode I ate so much. It was so good.
And this is what I learned today.
God is always faithful. His mercies are new every morning, and yet I sometimes wake up wondering, “What is God doing?” in a doubting sort of way. And He always blesses us, like today. We weren’t happy when we weren’t able to open the business today, but God always goes before us and has his plan. Today we were able to help a friend and spend time with her and have a day of blessings.