Wake Up Call
Out of the group of girls that Richa grew up with there are 3 left at her foster home. All the others have been adopted. Only one of the girls left has not aged out meaning she could still be matched with a family, but the clock is ticking. For the past year, they have been without a foster mom, they are all failing school, and so the next step is to pull them out of school and start some sort of job training. The smartest of the 3 that actually would thrive if given a good education has a large facial deformity so gets made fun of by the other kids making school less than appealing. I don’t know many teenagers that would attend school regularly if a parent (or foster parent in this case) wasn’t forcing them. What does the future look like for these girls?
During our time in India the poverty was overwhelming. If you are born with nothing you live your life with nothing. The cast system and the culture keeps you right where you are. A lack of zoning reminds every one of the social and economic divide. In between beautiful homes and spacious hotels are metal shacks (the slums). No running water. No bathrooms. People washing their clothes as well as their bodies in the middle of the day with nothing more than a bucket and a bar of soap. We saw many buildings being built with no machinery at all…. just women and men walking bowls of concrete on their head from point A to point B. The scaffolding was literally tree limbs and rope.
When I’m having a pity party because my daughter is a typical teenager with mood swings, social awkwardness, laziness, an attitude problem, as well as all the other ways that most teenagers behave God always gives me a good wake-up call or in this case a wake-up email.
I received an email from a foster mom at a different foster home with Sarah’s Covenant a few days ago, filling me in on Richa’s friends. She already has a full plate with the group of children she is assigned to, but her love for those kids doesn’t stop at her front door. Oh and by the way most of the kids she fosters are blind. Blind! A bunch of small blind kids to take care of. Can you imagine? On top of parenting them she is also trying to find a solution to the remaining 3 girls whose futures are unknown and honestly very limited.
It’s so easy to get caught up in the messiness of raising my daughter. I’m thankful that when I need it God punches me in the face and reminds me that Richa would be in India aging out with no education right now if she wasn’t here. When I look into her future I know that acing her spelling test for the second week in a row is just the beginning of a long life full of possibilities. That makes me so happy and makes all the hard days more than worth it. When I get to heaven I really hope God gives me a whining pass otherwise I'm going to be in trouble.
