And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus

Phillipians 4:7 (NIV)

This verse is what the Lord has spoken into my heart the last several weeks. MamaLand and Salone Rising are currently working on getting at least two new house mothers and 13 children to complete the first two MamaLand homes. Being that Sierra Leone is one of the most impoverished countries in the world, I assumed bringing in new children to our program would be super easy. I was so wrong. Our compound is less than a quarter of a mile away from the Ministry of Social Welfare. Over the course of my trips here, I have gotten to know the Minister himself fairly well. I walked to his office every day for a week mainly to keep him on his toes about the progression of our program.

One day while I was at his office, a village chairman arrived with a girl and her mother who begged us to take her daughter. I watched the pain on the mother’s face as we had to turn her daughter down. She began crying saying that she is a farmer and she has so many children and no husband, she can’t afford to take care of her daughter.

I left the office that day with tears streaming down my face. Walking home I questioned why God would bring these children to us, just to have us turn them away. I was so angry with Him. Even if this child had met all of our requirements for the program we don’t have enough staff yet to take her in. I cried for probably five minutes and then felt over overwhelming peace come over me. I felt the Lord say to me “These are not your children Jamie, these are mine”.

One afternoon, Dorcas insisted on us visiting a house where a potential new child for our program lived. We have started doing home visits to each orphan before inquiring them into our program, to assess their home life and family situation. After arriving at our destination, we walked up this steep hill to what looked like an abandoned house, where we met a young woman sitting down. She introduced herself and explained that she was taking care of five children but only one of them was her own. We asked her to show us where this girl was, who we had come to meet.

Out of a field came the girl I had said goodbye to forever a few weeks ago. I said hello to her, and she told everyone she knew me, and she liked me because I was going to help her. It felt like a huge knife was stabbed in my heart. What if I couldn’t help her? We discovered that her mother who I previously met, lived in a village about 30 miles away.

We are planning on visiting her village and her mother in this next month at some point. We said goodbye to this beautiful child and walked back to our vehicle.

MamaLand Update:
On October 5th, all of the MamaLand girls got to go back to school. After being home since March due to Covid-19, the girls were extremely happy to finally get out of the house and begin their education again. On the first day of school, Dorcas, Hawa (our house mother) and I walked all of the girls to their school in Kabala. The girls have been working hard at school and when they come home they have an additional two hours of tutoring from Mr. Marah. We are super proud of them!

MamaLand is currently under construction. We are working towards laying down the two foundations of the first two houses (hopefully by November). We are also working on the plumbing and water supply at the site (including the solar pump installation), which should be completed within the next two weeks. Each one of these tasks has brought its own challenges so please keep our team in your prayers!

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