Dear Mission Friends and Supporters,
These days I am at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro on another mission of love and compassion toward our suffering brothers of the Maasai tribe: specifically, at our orphanage with these wronged little children. I spent time sitting with disabled children, blind, lame, deaf, etc. as I wanted to touch the veins of their souls, listen to their heartbeats, sympathize with them for their pain and deprivation.
Our conversations were indeed revealing and highly didactic. I was most impressed by the 17-year-old blind boy. He wanted to learn everything. His questions had a point and were deep and thoughtful. When we sat at the table at noon and had lunch together, the blind boy spoke on behalf of all the children. In fluent English he thanked us for our visit and our contribution to the beautiful charity work of our orphanage. Honestly speaking, I was so impressed and moved at the same time that tears filled my eyes.
The next day I was present at the children’s lunch. Naturally, I started telling our Maasai priest Fr. Titos about these clever children whose deprivation of biological parents led them to the orphanage, where they found paternal and maternal affection from the priest and his presbytera. When I started talking about the blind youth though, the priest began to tell me the background story.
According to the Maasai traditions, when a child is born and is disabled, it is definitely not entitled to live. They have to kill it in the following way: They take the child to the forest, strip it naked, slaughter one of their animals and smear the child with the animal’s blood and fat. The strong smell will attract the wild beasts to come and devour it.
So when our priest learned about the case of the blind boy, he searched everywhere to find it, surpassed the reactions of the relatives who insisted on observing the custom of their tribe (!), took the child and brought it home in order to save it. The youth does not yet know about the rescue background and considers the priest and his wife his biological parents!
Fr. Titos confides in me: All the children of our orphanage, since they have never met another father in their life, call me “dad”. How sweet! All our orphans behave themselves and do not differ from the rest of the so called “normal” children who are brought up in traditional families. They do not disappoint us by any means and make us proud of them. They have a loving home, food, schooling, church attendance in a proper church and above all, caring parents who look after them and do everything to ensure that they will have progress in their lives.
Let us all praise God, who enables us to do charitable work and save lives and souls.
† Makarios of Nairobi
