Tag Archive - Swaziland

San Jose CA… Extinct by 2050?

May 11, 2010 in Across Our Street, Across Our World, Swaziland with 2 Comments


San Jose, CA Population just under 940,000

San Jose.

The 3rd largest city in California.

Know anyone who lives there?
Imagine in 40 years from now all the people who call

San Jose their home are dead.

All 939,899 of them.*

Not because of an earthquake, but from preventable disease & poverty.

40 years.

What would you do to save San Jose’s people?

~~~~~~~~~

Photo Courtesy of Dan Fellner; www.fellnertravelinfo.com

In Swaziland, Africa

this is a REALITY.

Right now.

According to the UN statistics

By the year 2050,

the entire population of Swaziland could be dead.

900,000

Literally Dead.

Wiped off the face of the earth by

famine, disease & crimes against its children.**

What WILL you do to save Swaziland’s people?

Let’s be the HOPE to this dying country.

~~~~~~~~

Now obviously I have stretched this comparison for all it’s worth. I hope you hear my heart behind comparing two completely different cultures.

More important than cultural differences is the paramount similarity:

HUMANITY

We are all human beings deserving of safety, love, education, health care, and a future for our children. I admonish you to let that soak in. We are one with the Swazi people.

Awareness is needed. Workers are needed. Teachers are needed. Funds are needed. There’s not time to say, “somebody else will do it.”

It’s time to be awakened from our comfortable slumber and reach out with all we have (and compared to them, we have a lot), and give in whatever way possible.

Don’t allow yourself to be burdened with guilt so that you harden your heart and close your eyes.

So today, all I’m asking from you is this: Think. Take a few minutes to read further statistics below about the Swazi people, whose hope is quickly dying without the world stepping in to help them.

A crazy thing happens when we think ~ we start to question. We start to get upset because of the injustice. We start to FEEL other people’s pain & suffering. And watch out, because when we start to FEEL, we become passionate & moved (no one is guilting us) with active compassion.

Allow the fact that an entire civilization could be dead in your lifetime, to penetrate your conscience and soften your heart towards change. It’s not a popular topic, trust me, to talk about people across the world that we’ve never met. But when did doing what’s popular get us anywhere?

SOS {Shine On Sisters!}

*Report taken from 2007 Top 50 Cities in USA

**This post contain even more alarming facts & statistics The Nation of Orphans

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Twins Stadium Builder Moves to Africa

April 26, 2010 in Across Our Street, Across Our World, Swaziland with 0 Comments

Just goes to show you can have the respect of your peers, be successful, make a name for yourself, but when it comes down to it, your heart can still be empty and LONGING to impact lives! That’s how the man that built the new Twins Stadium felt. What’s fantastic is he & his wife are DOING something to make that dream a reality! That’s what I call a GRAND SLAM!!!

Twins Stadium Builder Moves to Africa

We are all called to do different things with our lives. But do you think you could ever sacrifice, sell it all, give up the so-called American dream for the greater good of others?

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What moves you to get off your butt and do something?

April 20, 2010 in Mom Matters, VIsion with 0 Comments

What moves you to get off your butt

& do something?

For some disciplined people little things move them to change.

Can you feel my jealous sarcasm already oozing from the screen? Yeah, you know the ones that get on the scale, have gained  1.43 pounds, who suddenly realize they better make a change before it gets any worse!? and then DO IT!!!! This might even be you! I congratulate you  in a confused, envious, what planet were you birthed on, sort of way. :)

That’s not me, in case you didn’t guess. And anyone who knows me would tell you the same (if they had the guts!).

I’m the one that steps on the scale & questions the integrity of the machine. If it says I gained a pound… even 20 pounds, I try to reason it away, “That stupid scale! I knew I should’ve bought a digital one, ‘cuz this one has a mind of its own!” I’m the delusional one that tries on jeans and thinks, “I just know they are making clothes sizes smaller to fit skinny girls with no hips. The cut of the jeans is made for a 12 year old’s body! Darn America’s obsession with a size 2!!!!”  Okay, you get my point. Enough about my self-induced delusions!

What moves YOU to change? Catastrophes? Like Hurricane Katrina or more recently the earthquake in Haiti? To be honest I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t do much to help in these tragedies. I prayed for the people & the volunteers, but it didn’t cause me to make a change or to give in the way that it did many others who sacrificed their time & resources to help.

A few weeks ago, though, something clicked for me, and it wasn’t my mouse. I started researching (keyword: started) topics I’m interested in. I’m interested in all sorts of things like scrapbooking, making money, coming up with lame jokes, cooking, music, movies, planning events, and books. At the moment my favorite fiction books are The Twilight Saga. I know, I know I hear the groans! Can’t help it, it’s an addiction really…

Okay, back to my point. My answer to what moves me is this: Passion. Passion Moves Me. In any form, it stirs my soul when passion is involved, (which actually would explain my Twilight obsession). So, I started researching topics I’m passionate about, not just interested in. That research led me to articles, books, websites, videos of injustice that, in my head I knew was happening, but my heart hadn’t connected. Yet.  I got to a point where my stomach felt sickened and quite frankly I was pissed (yeah, i said it) that I’ve cornered myself into this little bubble of my comfortable life.

Let me stop here & say I really do love my stay-at-home mom life, my family, and I do my best not to take anything for granted. But educating myself on what’s happening in my both my town & across the world brought my life into perspective. I needed to change!!! Not wanted to. I needed to be moved out of my complacency. My heart began to soften & look outward. I need to challenge this Comfortable American Mom {CAM} to do more. I challenge you as well. Here’s the knowledge you NEED to have.

Photo Courtesy of Dan Fellner, www.FellnerTravelInfo.com

We can be a passionate voice for those who can’t speak for themselves – the orphaned children who have been stripped of their families due to the AIDS pandemic in Swaziland.

Swaziland has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS anywhere in the world.

If you are a 15-year-old Swazi, your chance of reaching 30 years old is only 6%.

I read  that by the year 2020, if the death rate continues to soar, there will be

NO ADULTS LEFT in SWAZILAND!!!!

***

We can be a passionate voice for the young women who are being sold, SOLD! into sex trafficking.

In Moldova, a small country in Europe…

There are more than 250 brothels in Chisinau, the capital city.

One of the greatest targets for sex-trafficking are girls

who leave the orphanages.

There are 30,000 women who have literally disappeared in Moldova,

many of them believed to have been captured for the sex trade industry.

Yeah, it’s an industry funded on the

repeated rape

& brutality

of women.

I will be talking about them a lot in this blog. It’s not pretty. It’s ugly. It’s despicable.

Before knowing all this, we could have easily turned aside… NOT NOW!

With knowledge comes a responsibility to make change.

When change comes, chains are broken, and joy abounds!!!!


So this week, go about your days with this new knowledge. IF you let these words & truths pierce your heart, you’ll find yourself thinking about them through this week in some random way. Please take time to pray for these orphans & slaves. And think about how you can get off your butt & do something. And I mean that in the nicest way.

Keep Lovin’ Moms!

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An Orphan Spirit, Part One

April 15, 2010 in Across My Heart, Across Our Table, Mom Matters with 8 Comments

I’ll admit right off that this is a difficult post for me to write. I’m having to dig up some deep emotions

that took root in my heart when I was just a little girl.

What brought this to the forefront is a live streaming webcast of a Colorado Pastor’s sermon I listened to this past Sunday. The crux of his message was answering the question, “Why do people feel like they don’t belong?” This sermon could have went any number of ways and most of us would relate in some fashion or another. His first answer to that question hit me like a ton of bricks. The Orphan Spirit.

The Orphan Spirit is one of the leading reasons people feel like they don’t belong or  ’fit’. I don’t believe it’s literally a ‘spirit’, but a type of individual who struggles as if they were orphaned. There are kids that grew up literally without parents, and are the definition of orphan. Of course, we readily see why an orphan would feel haunted with the thought that they don’t belong or aren’t wanted, after facing the ultimate rejection by the very people who birthed them.

But there’s another kind of orphan, those with the Orphan Spirit. These kids may have had parents physically present at one point, but absent emotionally, never really connecting with their kids. I think it would shock us all if we knew how many kids’ parents never said “I love you”.

I can imagine both sides of this Orphan Spirit. One I don’t have to imagine.

You see, when I was 5 or 6 (details aren’t clear), my birth father (whom I’ll refer to as Steele) & mother divorced because of their volatile and violent relationship. My mother did her best to take care of me and my older brother, while trying to keep food on the table, after Steele left. He left her and us with nothing. He took everything, including the heart of his little girl who could not figure out why on earth Daddy would forget all about her. He never called. He never contacted me. All the birthdays & holidays came & went without anything. Honestly, as far as I knew, he could be dead. And to help myself cope with it, I often pretended he was dead.

Most of what I knew of him could be found on my birth certificate.

Today, as I’m writing this, is Steele’s birthday. It brought up some emotions in me that I thought I’d dealt with. The truth is at my core I’ve always had a fear that everyone else in my life that said they cared would eventually leave too – my mom, my husband, my friends. This has been the deep struggle of my life – that I’m not worth anyone’s time.

I know what it’s like to be rejected by a person that helped give you life. There are many children, like me, who’ve had one or more parents walk away and never look back. We spend our lives overcoming that “Orphan Spirit” of fear & abandonment. Moms ~ maybe you know exactly what I’m talking about. This could be your story. You now are a parent who feels so much love for your child you could never imagine doing to them what was done to you.

Yeah, I know that as a kid I couldn’t have seen all that was going on in my parent’s marriage or the real reason Steele left. But that’s just it, kids don’t know. So what do they do? They think it’s because they did something wrong. They weren’t good enough. They didn’t love Daddy/Mommy enough. They were in the way. They spend their life trying to measure up.

I like to end my posts on a positive note… and I will. This is Part One of the post. In Part Two I share the redemptive side of the story. No, Steele never came back to make our family complete. This redemption story is so much bigger than that…

An Orphan Spirit, Part Two

 

Keep lovin’ Moms!

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