A Divine Appointment

A Divine Appointment

November 24, 2019

It started out like any other day at Neema Village. I had gone down early to watch the milking in the new milking stall. Pretty Cool! No more bending over on a stool!

Babies were getting their bottles like any other day at our baby home in Arusha, Tanzania.

The big babies were anxiously waiting their turn to eat.

It was bubbles on the big front porch that morning. Little did we know what would happen later!

The new baby who had come in the night was being weighed and washed. She was screaming.

Her Maasai mother had died, and the baby was starving. At three months old little Joyce weighed only about six pounds, was long and skinny with a mouth almost as big as her head! The nannies had put her in one of Maria’s old jackets and she was sucking both her middle fingers for comfort.

We had planned the day before to take our two volunteers on some MAP runs with Anna our MAP director. MAP is our Mother’s Against Poverty small business program. Anna is always explaining how God works this program for women.

First on the run we wanted to take Mama Noella twenty of our Rhode Island Red chicks to upgrade her stock. We are so proud of this woman! With a seven-year-old special needs child on her back, a husband who had abandoned her and a new baby on the way we had set her up a year ago in a chicken business.

Now she has become the chicken entrepreneur and all the neighbors around know to come to her for eggs. Our Julius is helping give her the chickens.

She has chickens in various stages of growth stuffed in chicken condominiums all around the yard!

The Rhode Island Reds are supposed to lay about 285 eggs per year, per chicken! A few months after her first chickens started laying, Mariya had gone out to check her books and make sure she was recording everything. Mama Noella pulled out a box from under her bed and said, “What do i do with this?” It was 200,000 shillings! Mariya said “It is Yours!”

We continued on and stopped to check out the new business site for our triplet’s mom and watch her sign the lease. The triplet babies have been at Neema a year and half and the two boys are ready to go home. You can see how much smaller Esther is in the middle, the boys are much bigger.

The triplet boys, Edward and Elesha are double trouble but cute as little buttons. Esther the smallest triplet is not yet stable enough to leave Neema. Their mom had been living off the street until she became ill with the sickness. She takes her medicine and is much better now so we are setting her up in a vegetable stand business and a used clothing business so she can support the triplets. She has been learning, too, how very precious she is to God and how much He wants for her to succeed and be a good mother.

After the MAP visits we wanted to drive down into the slum area of Arusha and hand out lollypops. That is what we thought we would do, Little did we know!

Veronica, who works at an orphanage in Haiti, is volunteering at Neema for a couple of weeks of vacation (who does that!!) and wanted to surprise a couple of new moms with an unexpected gift of money. So, our task was to find two new moms for her.

The first new mom we found had the brightest smile after she learned what these crazy Wazungu, who wanted to see her one-month old baby, were doing. I’m sure she and her husband are still talking about the day the white people came and put money in her hand!

As we were driving out of the area, we had not yet found the second mom when we saw a woman hurrying down the dirt road toward our car. She did not have a dress on but had quickly wrapped a kanga around her body and was holding a small baby in front covered with a blanket. It was her eyes that stopped me. Puffy as if she had been crying, she was scared, and looked as if she would panic any moment.

We stopped the car and I called, “Mama!” as she rushed on by. She turned and came back to the car. We asked if it was a baby under the kanga. Yes, she said, but I am on the way to the hospital, the baby is sick. We said, “Here is money to help.”

I can’t even describe the look on her face. Shock, fear, disbelief, I may have had the same look on mine as I once again saw the power of God at work in the street. A Divine Appointment had just happened, and we were there in awe to see it.

God is so far ahead of us we can’t even dream big enough for Him! But sometimes it is just the small things He does, like giving a bit of cash in a critical moment, that takes your breath away.

May you ever be watching for those divine moments!

Dorris and Michael