Nani

                   Are you having a bad day?



I had dinner with a single mother far less than half my age, she and her 6 year old daughter joined me and my wife of 44 years.  The menu seems important, we had Salisbury steak, steamed asparagus, and scalloped potatoes on the side with bits of cheese cake for dessert.  No one left the table hungry.  Did some eat better? Did some eat worse?

I listened to the story of a single mother with a beguiling daughter of six whose only fault seems to be three missing teeth. She is full of life and healthy.  I have distant memories of such an innocent look at the world.  The single mother makes enough, perhaps not what she desires, but enough.  We all need to celebrate that.

In my office only a few feet away sits a prayer request.  The missionaries who never have enough to give what is needed are in grievous need of our prayers.  When they have given all what is left?

Your Money winds up buying weapons, and food rots on the docks.  Think about this.

Are you having a bad day?

Think about this and maybe your day won't seem so bad.

Thousands of (LITTLE GIRLS) forced by circumstance and geography find themselves like 17 year old Nani.

She leaves a tin shack with a grass roof and dirt floor where she lives with three babies. At 4:00 each morning she starts her daily trek. One baby she carries in a sling, along with two five gallon plastic buckets on a pole over her shoulders, through the blistering heat to a filthy polluted river for water, 13km each way.

It is so hot she has to stop to feed the babies and give them a drink. The water at the end of the trek has to be filtered and boiled just like the UN people taught her.

When she returns they make a meal from the rice and legumes that have been soaking since before the sun was just an orb over the horizon.

When she returns from the river she immediately busies herself threading beads which are brought to the village by the ton to be sorted by size and color onto strings for the buyers who distribute them to whole sale merchants worldwide.

For a week's work she is paid in rice, (a few handfuls) and legumes, (a few handfuls) PLUS, a ration of salt and a few dried spicy leaves. That is lagniappe, a little extra, for hours of work, piece work of course.

At night when Nani finally lies down with a baby at her breast she dreams of fresh water, a falls somewhere she heard about when she was a child. "Are there really such places?"

When your world seems grim, would you trade places with Nani?

I drop to my knees and thank God I have a dry clean place to sleep tonight and know that tomorrow I will hear no hungry children crying in the night. Location! Location! Location!

YOUR DAY WASN'T REALLY THAT BAD WAS IT?