“I Know God is Watching”
Two days ago I wrote about a family of six that had only one broken bed. It was more of a cot than a bed. Their house was utterly bare. The 11-year-old sister, Dania, took care of the younger siblings all day while their mother worked in the fields. The little girl had no more than a first grade education.
We left their house promising ourselves to do something about it. Beds are expensive, we were at the edge of our budget and we didn’t even know where to find a bed for sale. But we wanted to give those children a place to rest their heads. The cold, dirty floor and crowded, broken bed were not sufficient.
Hermes, our translator, told us there was a recent shipment of new beds from the United States to his mission organization in Comayagua, a nearby town. He is the principal of the school at the mission and has control of its distribution storage unit.
After a phone call, he informed us all the beds had already been given away.
“But we have other things in the warehouse, and you can pick anything,” Hermes said.
We were on our way to Comayagua anyway, so we stopped at the mission. We walked through the warehouse looking for something to give that family.
“Look! There’s one bed left!”
It was a king sized bed. Hermes immediately offered it to Jenny for the family.
“Those are the things that keep me going because I know God is watching,” Jenny told me later in the evening.
We were excited to drive toward the family’s home last night with a huge mattress strapped to the back of a pickup truck. I couldn’t wait to see Dania’s face when the bed was placed in her home.
The mother and her two youngest were the only ones in the house when we arrived. Some of the children were in the mountains with their grandmother and a few of the children were in the park, the petite mother said. We were disappointed to not see Dania and the children, but we happily set the new bed in the woman’s rented house.
We had woken the baby when we entered the house, but he stopped crying and quickly as fell asleep as he was placed on the new mattress and box springs.
“I didn’t think in my whole life I would get a bed,” the mother said.
It only makes me wonder how many more families in Cane are in dire need of beds? How many more children lay dirty and cold at night? How many mothers need to be educated and taught how to make a better living so their children can go to school? How many lives can we help change?