A Whole World in One Room

Yesterday we went to visit Alisson and her family.

Meeting Alisson (and showing her pictures on our iphone)

 With every visit, every ministry day since we got back from furlough, I am overwhelmed with the world that God is showing me. Being a missionary to Ecuador for years, you think you know poverty. You think you know pain and suffering. You think you know hopelessness. But all of these things exist in different degrees for different people, and God is peeling back the layers, showing me that it goes deeper and deeper. It´s like I´m standing at the threshold of more pain, sadness, need, poverty, and desperation than I have ever known, and God is issuing an invitation: Will you come in? Will you enter into their world?

Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me. Revelation 3:20

This is the very heart of the gospel. God saw our miserable state, and he decided to enter into it. Even now, His invitation to us is simply to open the door to our world. If we open the door, He will come in, and He will join us there. He won´t just pass by. He won´t say a quick ¨hello¨ and be on His way. He will come in and fellowship with us. He will become a part of whatever life we have. 

When Alisson´s family opened the door to their world, I didn´t realize that it would be one little room.We went to pick out a little toy to give to Alisson before we went to meet her. We talked about what she might want. We almost got her some play dishes and food, before deciding she was likely to already have those kinds of toys, and getting her a little play jewelry set instead. I don´t know what I was worried about. There were no toys in the room.

Alisson playing with her new toy

This family´s whole world fit into one tiny room. Two beds, a dresser with a small TV, a stove (which also serves as an end-table when not in use, while the oven is the bookshelf for Alisson´s brother, Alexander´s school books), and an unplugged refrigerator (unplugged because they had no food, and the refrigerator uses electricity, which costs money that they don´t have). 

They are a small family living in a tiny house at the top of the city of Ibarra, where neighbors are scarce, and the world could just forget that these people, and their one-room world, even exist. But I can´t forget, because they opened the door and invited me in. Into their world.

Alisson´s house

I can´t stop seeing their one-room home in my mind, every time I close my eyes. I can´t stop seeing Alisson´s dad, Edison, getting out of his wheelchair and onto the bed for a family picture, his catheter an obvious reminder of how drastically his life has changed. I can´t stop seeing the tired smile on Alisson´s mother, Elena´s face as she tries to make the best of an impossible situation. And I can´t stop seeing Alisson´s beautiful, enormous smile and chemo-short black hair.

Alisson´s smile

Alisson and her mother were stranded in Quito for three days because they didn´t have the $3 for bus fare back to their hometown. When we found out, we sent one of our team members to find them and give them money to get home, but they travel to Quito every week to get chemo and transfusions for Alisson. They get lunch at the local homeless shelter every day. But still, they smile.

As we tried to encourage them with the Word of God, and our own words of kindness and love, Elena told me: ¨I only turned away from God once since I became a Christian, when I found out about my daughter´s illness. I didn´t want to hear anything about God. I was so angry. I lost my first baby when she was two months old, and I just couldn´t imagine losing another child.¨ 

One child in heaven. Another with leukemia. A husband left paralyzed after an accident while working on their property. Lunches at homeless shelters. Stranded without even $3 for a bus. A whole world in a one-room house.

And as I sit here in my three-bedroom apartment, that by American standards would be considered very small, I think how very big it is after all. We have no shortage of toys, clothes or food, and on days like today I think maybe we still have too much. I wonder why people like Alisson´s family can live in a one-room house with no money for food while I just ate two pieces of bread and two cups of coffee for dinner. And I think that no amount of sacrifice, work or service will ever be enough, because there will always be hundreds more like Alisson. 

I´ve realized that opening these doors and entering into these lives has opened a door in my heart that will never close. I can never go back to the way things were before, and I wouldn´t want to. I want to go deeper--deeper into the pain and the hurt and the poverty and the suffering and the sorrow. I want to shine the light of the gospel in dark places and bring hope to the hopeless. I want to pour out every last ounce of my strength for the One who poured out every last ounce of His life for me. And for Alisson. 

-Ashley Rodrick
Director, Revolution Infantil

Alisson´s family (including her grandmother)

Getting Our Hands Dirty

God is funny. My plea upon returning to Ecuador was that I was desperate to do more, I wanted to make a real difference: I wanted to really get my hands dirty.

I don´t know how many doses of hand sanitizer I have applied today, but I have to laugh in the midst of it all. This isn´t exactly what I meant, God. But yes, my hands are dirty.

I don´t know if you have reached a moment of desperation, but I did, yesterday. We finally got to visit one of the families I most wanted to see. The mother just two months ago passed away from uterine cancer (while we were in the US on furlough), leaving behind six children, the oldest of whom (16) just had a baby and the second-oldest (15) is pregnant. The father struggles with alcohol addiction and cannot provide for his children with his job of working at the garbage dump.

Wrapped up in this family, tucked up high in one of Quito´s worst neighborhoods, is the very core of why I am here, in Ecuador. Poverty, pain, suffering, injustice, hunger, addiction, heartbreak, hopelessness...meet: Jesus. And in the midst of it all, we sing praise songs to the sound of my husband´s tattered old guitar and we thank Him, because even when we feel there is nothing to be thankful for, we are thankful for Jesus.

I looked into the eyes of these children and I saw that they were not the same children that I knew a year ago. They are bigger, taller, and more articulate, but that isn´t what really changed. What really changed in these children is their eyes. Where there was hope, now there is pain. Where there was innocence, now there is loss. Where there was laughter and joy, now there are tears.

In Spanish, when a child loses a parent, in this case the mother, they say of the children that they were ¨orphaned by their mother¨. Even though their father is still with them, these children were orphaned, and they will never be the same.

We cried with them, we sang with them, we ate birthday cake with them (It was the oldest daughter´s birthday just a few days before, so we brought cake), we gave them gifts from the US (USA bracelets, candy and photo albums I made for each child with all the pictures I could find of them with their mother), and one by one they took turns formally thanking us for our love and support, as they (and we) struggled and failed to hold back the tears.

My oldest daughter joined the children as they went to play and we sat down for a serious talk with their father about how we can help him get his life back together. As we talked, I saw his heart laid bare right in front of us. He was orphaned, too. He feels totally alone, and while he knows he can´t raise his children or provide for them, he also knows that he can´t live without them. They are all he has left.

 

We decided to think and pray and meet again next week to decide what can be done to help the children, and help the father, too. But that is not enough. In this moment, I feel useless. I want to help, but what can we do to make these lives better?

Hence my dirty hands. I asked a question, and the answer gave me a way to help, a way to get my hands dirty.

¨Do you have a washing machine?¨

He works 7am to 8pm. He has 6 children, 1 grandchild, and another on the way. He has no washing machine.

I can´t fix this family´s problems today. I can´t even buy them groceries; it´s too late at night. But I can fix this. I can wash these clothes.

We agree to pick up the clothes in the morning. On our way, we stop to buy them groceries, too. We go to their house, drop off the groceries, and pick up the laundry. I wish I had taken a picture. The clothes were in a huge bag, which took both my husband and our worker, Victor, to carry. We had to walk quite a way before we found a taxi.

 

We got home and started separating the clothes. If I wasn´t yet totally heartbroken for this family (I was), now I had even more motivation. Each piece of clothing seemed to be worse than the last. Torn, tattered, stained, dirty, and oh so foul smelling. Anyone who is reading this would probably have thrown these clothes away long ago. Actually, someone probably did. Most of this family´s belongings are things the father has found at the dump. (Just yesterday he was content to show us the beat up old sneakers he found while working, patched up and clinging to their last few miles of life.)

It ended up being six loads of laundry. And half a bottle of stain remover. And a lot of hand sanitizer. I only gagged a few times.

I was amazed that some of the clothes actually came out smelling clean. (Some I washed twice.) A few even looked in decent shape.

When Jairo went back to drop off the clothes, he found the father had been drinking, but was still mostly sober. They talked for a long time, and the father once again opened his heart to Jairo. And in the midst of the conversation, and the apologizing for having had yet another drink, and the thanking us for our help and care, the father said,

¨I have been to a lot of churches, but you guys are the only people who have ever really showed me God´s love, and made me feel like I´m worth something.¨

Ok, God. You win. When I said I wanted to get my hands dirty, this is exactly what I meant.

-Ashley Rodrick
Director, Revolución Infantil