The Boy with the Beads

by

Sharity Reese

It was the second day of Vacation Bible school at Ishe Anesu (translation: God With Us), the mission site where we worked. The number of children had doubled from the day before and we had managed to stretch our supplies for the simple craft to accommodate 600 children. (To our delight and disbelief that number would nearly double the next day). It was nearing six o'clock in the evening, almost time for the children to walk down the hill to their homes in Subkubva, a suburb of Mutare. When they left us to go home, it was as if they vanished behind a black curtain until they appeared again the next day.

I had little idea what their life was like away from the time spent on top of the hill. We drove by their homes to reach the mission site, sure. We saw their tiny homes; four units for four families in a building approximately the size of a single-wide trailer. We saw women cook over open fires. We saw worn clothing. It is a way of life that feels so distant from my own that it looks like a snapshot. I turned the snapshot over to read the rest of the story, to see what lies behind the images, but it is wordless and I am left to guess.

I suspect what is represented by the images I saw looking out the window of the bus as we rode up the hill are three cold truths; mass lack of food, healthcare, and education in the lives of the people in the snapshot. One response to my description of the images, once home, was a somewhat naïve attempt to glorify the Franciscan poverty attributes to this way of life. “There's something about their simple way of life.” Okay, sure. I might be able to reconcile those images in my head and heart by repeating that mantra…except for what I'm pretty sure that “simple way of life” means day to day for the people living within the snapshot.

And so…it was the second day of Vacation Bible School . The children, ranging in age from two to 18 years, were gathered in the courtyard, in front of the make-shift stage. The song leaders were leading music while a young boy sat on some steps, quite intent on completing a task that had little to do with singing. Since each child was so eager to participate in any activity we laid before them no matter how feeble, this boy stuck out.

I approached and sat beside him. I learned quickly that he spoke no English. This told me that he had not been in school for awhile, if at all. In Zimbabwe , English is introduced in school from the start and school is taught completely in English beginning in third grade. This boy was clearly older than a third grader, although it was his voice, and not his size that indicated his age. Before he spoke to me in Shona, I would have guessed him to be six or seven years. His deep voice indicated he was closer to 13 or 14 years. His small size startled me.

The children I interacted with up to this point appeared healthy enough. I did not see the swollen bellies and tiny limbs I feared I would. This boy, however, had wrists about the size of a two-year-old. His movements were slow and strained. His knees were the largest part of his leg. His clothes were the most worn I'd seen and his smell was intense, though not unbearable. He wore no shoes. These things were all pills I could swallow compared to the discovery I made a few moments later.

Every child I saw, I wondered if they were one of the statistics; one of the children without parents. The reality being what it is, meant that we were in the company of many orphans. During the first night at the mission, when a small child fell asleep in my arms during the singing, I had a startling thought at the conclusion when the children were going home. “What if this child has no one?” I was befuddled at the logistics of that possibility. What would I do with this sleeping child? I pictured myself asking an older child to bring him down the hill, but where then would he sleep? The only sensible thing I could think of – if in fact he was without parents – was to let him sleep in my room at the inn. I knew that solution would create problems. Our leader would never go for it. She spent three years here. She knows you cannot possibly house the many parentless children in your room. When you can't stop at one, you can't start with one. So what? What was I to do with this small child? I walked around with him for a time in a daze. I knew one thing. The decision to simply leave him asleep somewhere outside was dreadfully in front of me. I thank God I never had to make that decision. He belonged to a woman who worked in the kitchen at the mission. She swooped him from my arms with a smile and “thank you.” He had someone.

The boy I sat with on that second day either had no one or…no there was no other possibility. He had no one. How could he? As I began helping him with his project; collecting the beads that had escaped their binding thread – that day's craft; I feared he had lost something imperative. I studied him as I strung the beads that he handed me; beads that had fallen off because there were too many to make a secure knot. I removed some of them and placed them in his shirt pocket. I gestured the question, “Do you want this around your wrist or neck?” Neck. I tied it around his little neck. He's missing something, I thought.

He's missing something that every other person I've ever seen in my life has; even strangers on the street, even children in Africa with torn clothes. I picked up a few more beads and kept looking for more, placing those I found in his front pocket. I kept looking for a glimmer, a spark, something that would indicate even the smallest bit of joy. His approach to retreating these beads was systematic and without visible affect. I realized that he had not yet looked me in the eye. He had not looked at me once. He has lost something, I thought. There was something missing in him that I'd never seen missing in anyone. What was it?

It wasn't until I was home that I could identify it. Hope.

…If there is one message I want to share from my experiences in Zimbabwe it is this: I saw hundreds of children in poverty; poverty unlike any I've ever seen. I became blind to that poverty, not due to my own need for self-preservation, but because of the well-spring of joy that was ready to erupt for the smallest reason. Any chance to sing, to dance, to laugh, to play was seized as though each opportunity was a small, plastic bead that would do no one any good to remain on the ground. I basked in the warmth of these gifts that the children so freely gave us, each other, and themselves. But the most terrifying truth I encountered was that here was a process through which the human spirit could undergo that could leave one without hope. I have to believe, as a person with a heart oozing with hope, that this is not the end of the story for this child – or any other who has lost such an irreplaceable commodity. My faith tells me that the process of loosing hope is reversible. My faith tells me that the God who created this child can rescue this child. The ache I feel for this child tells me that God wants to use me to help in the retrieval process of hope. And my question continues to be, “How?” I pray for those answers.