HARD RICE

I parked the truck between the tree and the old white van with four flat tires. Two “red can kids” (Muslim boy street beggars sometimes as young as four or five) sat a few feet in front of the truck at the edge of the sewer ditch between us and the road.  Janet exited the passenger seat and trod the dusty path to the small alimentation” or grocery store to grab a few items.  I waited for one of the young boys to walk up to the truck and to point to his mouth with bunched fingertips—the common sign for “hungry.”

There he was, maybe 13-years old, definitely underfed, pointing fingers to his mouth with his other palm pressed against the window.  I reached into the box normally filled with small sacks of peanuts that we keep between the seats and found only one.  I leaned over and half rolled down the window, smiled and handed him the peanuts as I said “Tu dois partager,” (“You must share.”)  He half smiled and walked towards his friend. I watched as they divided the sack between them and devoured the contents.

The other boy turned to look back at me, likely hoping for more peanuts.  I looked in the box and all that remained was one of our sacks of rice and beans that we give to mothers with children who beg along the road.  The begging women can cook the contents where the red can kids cannot.  The boys are routinely underfed by Muslim overseers who collect whatever money they garner from passing motorists.  The beckoning face at the window was too much.  I gave him what I had, the sack of rice and beans.  Perhaps he knew someone who would cook it for him.

Janet climbed into the truck with her bag of groceries.  I started the truck and as I prepared to shift into reverse I glanced over to where the two boys were sitting.  I paused.  They had opened the sack and were warily testing the uncooked rice.  Their experiment didn’t last long and they closed the sack.  I continued backing out from the tight space between the tree and the white van with four flat tires and slowly drove along the narrow road. I slowed even more as we passed the small, road-side mosque where the collection of sandals outside revealed it was the Muslim sunset prayer, the Salat al-Maghrib.

Even after eight years of sharing food with the hungry of Burkina, the image of the boys testing the hard rice lingered before me as we bounced down the rutted road towards home. This is another unmet need among so many.  Now to find something a bit more substantial than peanuts.

God is always good.

GOOD SIGNS

 

Meet Isaiah.  

I encountered him while I was cleaning trash from the street in front of our home.  He is deaf.  He began helping me to pick up trash.  He tried to say something to me but I could not understand him.  His friend standing next to him gestured with her hands. They shared a manual patois. She turned to me and told me his name and that he wanted to help.

I turned to Isaiah and made the American Sign Language (ASL) sign for “deaf” and pointed to myself.  I am significantly hard of hearing and rely on hearing aids to communicate.  He smiled when I showed him my hearing aids.  I thanked him in sign language for his help as he waved and skipped away.

A few days later Isaiah again appeared as I was flushing out the fuel tank from our generator.  He again joined me in my project.  I tapped him on his elbow to get his attention. I finger spelled his name and pointed to him.  I then gave him a paper with the ASL finger spelling alphabet.  I helped him to spell his name.  The photo is Isaiah practicing his name.  Later I finger spelled my name and pointed to myself.  He nodded excitedly for we now shared something unique.

Later that day as Janet and I were backing the truck out our hangar, I saw Isaiah picking up litter in front of our home.  As I was about to drive off, Isaiah caught our attention.  He smiled, signed my name, and waved as we drove off.

God is good.

CRAWLING MAN

There he was again, sliding his way along the dusty road pushing his crossed legs before him. ‘Flip-flop” sandals protected his hands from the abrasive red soil. I had seen him once before. I slowed then but did not stop. I promised myself I would the next time I saw him.

I pulled over to the right side of the road in front of a sand-blasted block wall. Faded, hand-painted letters testified that an auto mechanic once worked within. A middle-aged Burkinabe sitting in a bent metal chair propped against the wall, chewed on a sprig of wood and watched us with drowsy interest.

As I got out of the truck, I glimpsed two older (about my age) Muslim men in white robes sipping tea in a small café across the road. They noted me with squinting curiosity. They turned away in unison as a blast of dust blew in on the seasonal Harmattan wind.

I walked back as the crawling man rounded the rear of my pick-up. He stopped a meter or so away so as to not to need to crane his neck. I squatted onto a knee and offered my hand. I asked his name. He spoke with a crackling voice as dry as the dust in which he sat, “Kareem” he replied. “Je m’appelle Don,” I offered.

I told Kareem that I had seen him on the road once before. I thought that he might be able to use one of the hand-powered wheelchairs commonly seen in Burkina. Kareem told me that he was almost completely blind and can only see where he is going while on the ground. That pretty much ruled out crutches as well.

He took hold of my hand and pulled himself to his feet. His stick-like legs wobbled and he held my hand to steady himself. He peered into my face. He smiled, shook my hand with both of his, and sat back down in the swirling red dust.

I gave Kareem a few sachets of roasted peanuts that I carry in the truck and use as calling cards for the beggars, street vendors, shopkeepers, and children who I encounter each day. Kareem thanked me again. I bid him a “bonne journée,” as he put his flip-flops on his hands and returned to his shuffling journey down the ruddy road.

I watched the crawling man fade into the dust. I became aware that the dozen or so observers of our conversation were now looking at me standing alone in the road. I got back in my truck and drove away. Kareem waved a flip-flopped hand as I slowed to drive by.

I realized that Kareem was happy. He was accustomed to his circumstances. There was no purpose in me planting an unfelt need in Kareem. This could be one of those times when helping would hurt.

I will look for Kareem whenever I drive down that road. When I see him, I will stop and greet him. I will give him some peanuts and water and ask how he is doing. And if the day comes when I no longer see Kareem shuffling through the swirling dust I will remember him.

And I will smile.

Going Viral

 

“Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;

Light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death.”

Psalm 13:3 ESV

 

After being dogged by an unidentified illness for the better part of a month or more my symptoms grew more severe—fatigue, weakness, brain fog, but most oddly no fever. In celebration of the new year, I completely lost my senses of smell and taste.  Dear friends almost dragged me to the clinic where I was diagnosed with Malaria and, as a kicker, a dose of the “maladie de la année,” Covid-19. My symptoms continued to grow more acute.

 

One dark night the following week I sat in bed anticipating meeting Jesus. I had never felt so ill as the “sleep of death.” While it would be my joy, not fear that would mark our meeting, I remain uncomfortable with the review of my life that will follow.  Christ bore my sin burden and freed me from the torment of hell, but as King David observed, “my sin is ever before me.”  God has forgiven me more than I have myself.  I was sure that night would be my last.

 

I embraced Psalm 51 in prayer.  I acknowledged that all my sins were against God. I grasped at his steadfast love and abundant mercy. I begged of Him a clean heart and a right spirit. He opened my lips to declare his praise.  I then dozed only to be awakened sometime later by novel sensations at the base of my chest, something like warmth, but not temperature, something like vibration without movement. I dozed some more.

 

That morning I awoke after a peaceful sleep.  I felt renewed as if it were a Saturday morning in spring filled with breeze and birds.  I felt surprisingly better. I savored the first moments of wakefulness and bid God good morning. There was an air of peace and calm in the room.  There was a palpable sense of the numinous—a feeling of the presence of the divine.

 

Each day since then I have felt better.  I still experience a bit of fatigue and some weakness, but the dark night has been replaced by a warm sunrise.  The abundant prayers of so many in the form of the merciful, healing hand of God are obvious.  I owe much to those who have and continue to pray like persistent widows on my behalf and to my wife Janet who has encouraged me and asked for prayers for my healing.  On that very dark night I could feel the effect of your prayers.   I am surprised at the pace of my healing.  The doctors and nurses have expressed pleasure at my vitals such as a pulseox level of 98%-to 99% and total lack of a fever from Malaria or Covid.

 

I am not sure why I have been graced with such an uneventful recovery from two potentially serious illnesses.  I can only think to attribute it to the abundance of prayers of my wife Janet, our many friends, acquaintances, and colleagues and the response of a God who loves me in spite of my very abundant and profound human failings.  Thank you all so very much.

 

“But I have trusted in your steadfast love,

My heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

I will sing to the Lord,

because he has dealt bountifully with me.”
Psalm 13:5,6 ESV

NEVER NORMAL

Working in one of the poorest sub-Saharan countries of the world, there are things that you get used to like frequent power failures, water cuts, and myriad diseases waiting for the opportunity to knock us or one of our staff members down for days or weeks. There are other things that you want to get used to like the collisions between your home culture and the new culture. 

Then, there are the thing that you never want to get used to, like the 24-ounce, month-old baby staring into your eyes as you try to comfort screams pouring from an empty stomach.  You never want to get used to the one that arrived too late for even the most intensive medical intervention but whose fading, agonized cries echo in your heart.  You never want to get used to that.  Never.

More than one million internally displaced persons (IDPs) have been chased from their farms, villages, and lives by Islamic terrorists, a history of poverty and malnutrition, rains disrupted by climate change, and a global pandemic forcing the world-wide reallocation of already insufficient resources. Bug-eyed babies arrive at the Oasis of Hope ready to fall from the knife’s edge of existence.  You never want to get used to that.  Never.

We are encountering an increasing number of profoundly malnourished babies and distraught mamas at the Oasis.  There are nearly 80-babies currently in our feeding program and the number continues to grow, now because of twins and a record number of triplets that will force an underfed, nursing mother to make a heartbreaking decision.  Our resources and reserves run low.  We do everything we can to cut expenses to continue to buy costly formula.  We are horrified at the prospect of asking Social Service or the hospitals to not send any more babies to the Oasis.

As we prepare to celebrate the birth of Him who came that “man no more may die,” we hold each of these blanket-wrapped, tiny bundles and pray over them.  We have no adorned tree, twinkling lights, or colorful papers.  Each family goes home with cans of formula, rice and beans, mosquito repellant, mosquito netting, perhaps a soccer ball for an older child, maybe small bags of roasted peanuts, and a good deal more hope than when they arrived.

“Born to raise the sons of earth,

Born to give them second birth.

Hark the herald angels sing,

‘Glory to the newborn King.’”

 

We pray that each of you will enjoy a most meaningful Christmas and a blessed year filled with renewed hope.

 

“Let all within us Praise His Holy name
Christ is the Lord, O praise His name forever!

His power and glory evermore proclaim.’”

 Waiting for (the) Queen

She was somewhere between limp and dead with eye slits focused on nothing.  Nine years old looking like six, wrought with fever yet cold and clammy, staring eternity in the face and just hours or even minutes from going to be with God.  We rushed mom and her small charge into our truck with dad following on his bicycle. The heavily pock-marked roads lit only by the truck’s headlights forced me to drive painfully slow-- just over walking speed to the local hospital.  Once there, we waited as time crawled by before “Reine” (Queen) was admitted.  And then we waited even more. 

We are spoiled by western triage and urgent care.  Here it’s mostly first come, first served.  One learns to wait with prayer if not with grace.  Culturally short-circuited frustration is always lurking in hospital waiting rooms.  It’s too easy to imagine the worst when it is the worst that you most often encounter.  We waited and waited some more.  Drenched in sweat, I began to wonder when someone would turn on the fans that dotted the steaming hospital hallway lined with benches of those waiting to be seen and the anguished faces who waited with them.

We filled Reine’s prescriptions at the hospital pharmacy.  The shotgun shell of medications is normal when tests take longer than the patient may have to live. Often multiple IV antibiotics, saline solution or Ringer’s lactate, calcium and vitamins begin to stir life.  The next morning with more targeted treatment, Reine could almost sit up with her back against the hospital wall and her mom cradling her head.  She had dodged eternity and survived an especially severe case of malaria,* for now.  She will likely make the same dance many times throughout her life.

Days earlier, Janet and I were still moving to our smaller home located between the local garbage dump and the nearby “nonlotit” (unofficial) warren of one-room, tin-roofed homes of brick and blocks made with cement and the local red dirt.  We need to cut our expenses to pay for increasingly larger orders of imported baby formula. As we prepared to bring another load of belongings into our smaller home we encountered Reine’s father.  We knew him from months before when he and his wife brought twins, one suffering from acute protein malnutrition called Kwashiorkor--a ruddy, bloated boy who cried his way through a couple of weeks in a local hospital before a gracious and loving God called him home. The family was now our neighbor living only a couple of hundred meters away and with a limp, unblinking daughter who was close to joining her brother.

We returned to the hospital two days later to visit the family and to pay their hospital bills.  Reine was standing and walking albeit shakily.  Her parents thanked us repeatedly as we walked to the truck to bring them to the home they shared with at least four other families. Reine was greeted by the others, hugging her like a local celebrity.  They thanked us in at least four languages.  We told them that all that was done for Reine was a gift from God.  Now whenever we drive past their home, someone sitting beneath the sprawling acacia tree is sure to smile and offer a wave and a warm greeting.

Last week, Rein and mom knocked on our door to share their joy with us.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a child’s smile is worth billions.

We encountered God between a garbage dump and a hovel where the ubiquitous plastic bags fly about and inhabit the sparse trees, goat-chewn cartons blow in the smoky breeze, and hope can be as rare as rain.

And that’s exactly why He sent us here.

Dieu est grand tout le temps. (God is great all the time.)

*We have started a new program to distribute insect repellant, mosquito nets, fumigant, and Malaria medications free of charge.  If you would like to support this unbudgeted project, please go to the Sheltering Wings website at: sheltering-wings.org.  On the home page, scroll down to “Be the Hands” and click on “Donate Today.”  In the “Donation Center” go to “Don and Janet Guizzetti West Africa Projects” and click on “Donate.”  Scroll down to “Emergency Medical Fund” to make your most needed and appreciated donation to help with the most urgent, life-threatening needs.  Thank you and may God bless you abundantly.

Urgent Medical Appeal

Hundreds of children, many with critical medical needs have passed through our baby feeding program.  We have used individual appeals for the funds to provide critical surgeries  This slows vital medical treatment.  Jihadist warfare has displaced hundreds of thousands and has disrupted and overburdened services.  We now have a Critical Needs fund with which to provide immediate treatment.


A tiny baby girl just returned from open heart surgery in Kenya to close a large hole between the ventricles of her heart.  She would have certainly died otherwise.


Two babies are awaiting surgery.  One baby boy entangled with his twin had both legs broken during delivery—he weighed less than two pounds. At five months he contracted meningitis.  He recovered but then developed hydrocephaly.  Emergency surgery has drained some fluid from his brain, but a shunt is needed to continuously drain fluid from his brain.


A baby boy had a blocked urethra that keeps his bladder from emptying.  Emergency surgery made a temporary drain from his bladder through the wall of the abdomen.  Constant contact with urine burns his skin and results in frequent urinary infections.


Critical surgeries range from a few hundred dollars to more than $5,000.  Please consider contributing to Sheltering Wings/ Guizzetti Emergency Medical Fund.  Anything helps.  Thank you.







If you would like to become a ministry partner, tax-deductible donations may be made online at:  
http://sheltering-wings.org/our-missionaries/#don

Or you can make checks payable to Sheltering Wings and attach a note that it is for "Guizzetti" and mail to:
Sheltering Wings, 5104 Old 66, Leasburg, MO  65535.  (314) 635-6316.

We invite you to share real-time in our day-to-day experiences:
Friend us on Facebook:    Don and Janet in Africa, Don Guizzetti, and Janet Guizzetti

Smoking Ants

It was one of those languid, midsummer days when dungaree pockets were made for skate keys, big, fat pieces of colored chalk, and  a couple of pieces of Bazooka Bubble Gum.  Kids spun in Hula Hoops, fat Robins hopped and paused in the small patches of New York City grass that passed for front lawns, and the smell of red ribbons of caps in Roy Rogers pistols wafted through the air.  Dads mowed lawns, moms hung wash on clotheslines to dry, and the droning hum of a distant Piper Cub dodging woolen clouds in the blue sky set countless imaginations soaring.   Baseball cards clipped on with clothes pins made countless Schwinn’s sound like motorcycles.

Billy MacAfee was the “old man” of our gang—at least a year older than we six-year-olds.  Matches were forbidden us, so Billy held an enthralled court when he made dry leaves smoke with a large, round magnifying glass.  “Hey! Watch this,” said Billy as he turned to face an anthill of soil where workers were busily laboring to push sand grain boulders to the edges of the growing Lilliputian pile.  Billy focused the needle beam of sunlight on one hapless ant that instantly made a small puff of smoke and curled into something resembling a poppy seed.  A chorus of “Wows” rose as the magnifying glass was passed around.  We each took turns frying a half-dozen or so ants before passing the magnifying glass on.


No one noticed my mom, still in her laundry apron leaning down and watching us wreak havoc with the newly arrived soldier ants searching for an unseen attacker picking off the workers.  “What are you all doing?” came the voice that froze us into a huddle.  Billy almost boastfully replied that we were “smoking ants.”  I knew well enough to hope that Billy would continue to draw fire. 

My mom, who I already suspected was a closet Buddhist-Lutheran bent down and picked up the remains of one of the ants.  She took my hand and turned it over.
  

“Take this.” She said as she put the seed-like remains of one of the ants in my palm and closed my hand over it. 

I looked at her. 

“Make it live again.”  Open mouthed, I scanned my small cadre with questioning eyes. 

“I can’t,” I replied. 

“Try,” said mom. 

“I don’t know how.  It’s impossible.” 

“Remember that,” smiled mom as she turned back to hanging bed sheets on the clothesline.

Three decades later, I was driving an old pickup truck through the alpine heights of Colorado with the carcasses of a half-dozen field-dressed Pronghorns partially covered by a tarp.  One of them was mine, my first big game kill.  I had my bead on a young buck, aiming just behind his right ear.  That would kill him instantly.  Suddenly he had turned and appeared to put one big, brown eye directly against mine through the scope. I gulped and jerked the rifle just a tad to the left and knocked the still breathing buck to the ground. I wished I had missed.


I drove the 150-yards to the hyperventilating buck who sat motionless regarding me with two huge, round eyes.  “I’m sorry that I shot you, but I will eat you,” I whispered as I fired another round behind his right ear.  After field dressing my buck, I loaded him in the truck with the others bagged that day in the sage perfumed plains of Wyoming, just outside of Lander and headed for the ranch near Granby, Colorado.


As the truck wound its way though the heavy forest of pines, I cranked up the music on the radio, still pumped with lingering “dear fever.”  The words of the next song crept into my consciousness as the familiar tune tapped on my head.  “…Bless the beasts and the children; Give them shelter from the storm; keep them safe; keep them warm.”  The song continued in Karen Carpenter’s lilting voice and dulcet tones.  The image of somebody’s buck filled the rear-view mirror.  I apologized to my buck repeatedly as I drove deflated to the ranch.  I looked into my buck’s eyes as I hoisted his carcass into the outside shed where the animals would await their trip to the processor.  I apologized once more. I ate a good part of the animal, my first and only hunt.


Now two decades after that, I started raising laying hens in Africa to nurture moms too malnourished themselves to nurse their babies.  Last week a hen died from a broken shell in her oviduct.  The African vet said nothing could be done as she suffered.  Shortly after that she died.  About the same time, another hen somehow injured a leg.  We could not find any injury or broken bone.  She could only eat and drink.  


Here you don’t spend more than a chicken cost to heal it.  After spending a few days watching her eat, drink, and hobble a little, I decided to give her to one of our guards who never seems to have enough to eat.  Knowing her looming fate that night, I recalled the advice of a farmer friend—you don’t name animals you’re going to butcher.  I should have remembered that when we bought the flock with “Baby.”


I was six-years old again.

IN THIS CORNER

The past few years here in Burkina Faso have been emotionally schizophrenic. With many the same symptoms, we struggle with the competing emotions of fear of  jihadist violence and love for the people whom we live among.  We revel in the joy of too skinny babies becoming plump and jolly bundles squirming on their mothers’ backs and the grief and anxiety of reading near daily body counts from the latest attacks in the countryside.  

We grasp for balance as we ride the see-saw of emotions between seeing the transformative love of Jesus change despair to hope and then encounter the reality of the countless thousands of men, women, and children fleeing the swarming insurgents. We have one foot resting securely in the grace and mercy of God and the other in the bloodied shadows of indiscriminate evil.


We find ourselves alternately staring at opposing horizons.  On one we are lifted up by the brightening rays of rising dreams of expanding the Oasis of Hope; feeding more of the countless babies and orphans who have no options left, sharing the gift of literacy for whom it is not even a distant hope, and opening eyes, hearts, and minds to the Scriptures where one finds real purpose and meaning. On the other side, we can see the endless number of refugees, families and individuals who wander to and fro in the fading sun-stained dust of dreamless despair among the poorest of all people. We experience the pendulum swing between joy for the living and sorrow for the perishing.


We covet your prayers for those we live among and those whom we will never know.  We seek prayers not only for all of the Burkinabé, but for the jihadi themselves that their hearts and minds may be opened to the Holy Spirt to hear Christ knocking at their hearts.  

We seek prayers as well for all the unprayed for throughout the world, those who have yet to find an eternity with Almighty God through His son Jesus and who have not even one person to lift them in prayer.

DON'T WASTE (THE REST OF) YOUR LIFE.

During my late tens, my twenties, and my early thirties, I thought myself to be a reasonably good person.  I knew that I wasn’t a saint, but I could rattle off the names of a dozen Hitleresque persons worse than I.  Then I became a man and (mostly) gave up childish ways.  Faced with a nagging desire to know the true Truth, I realized that I was not really all that good. Not nearly.


I got married, bought our first home, climbed the career ladder, and made good money.  I allowed the last two items of the preceding list to become my raisons d’etre—my reasons for being.  Big mistake.  As a then nominal Christian, I stumbled into a wiry, Reformed Baptist preacher who gob smacked me with the possibility of actually wasting one’s life.  The concept left me stunned to my shoes. He disillusioned me of the idea of buying a boat, retiring to Punta Gorda, Florida, playing softball and collecting seashells.


I listened to dozens of his sermons while pedaling my stationary bike.  I started to become annoyed with his insistence that “life” as I knew it was not life at all, that what we often mistake for life is rather a system of unimportant diversions.
  

Note that I wrote “unimportant,” not “inconsequential.”  A lot of unimportant things have consequences.  Passive decisions can have monumental and eternal consequences.  Without warning, life can become a system of passive decisions.  The American dream is such a system of passive decisions.  Almost without the slightest thought, we may embrace the idea that life consists of building a career, making a home, buying stuff, and chasing postcard vacations, like going to Punta Gorda. 


There is nothing wrong with the American Dream if it does not become the primary objective of one’s life.  Food is good, gluttony is not.  Money has a function, but it is a false objective.  Vacations are restorative, but they are an escape.  In fact, everything about the American Dream is an escape made up of unimportant (but consequential) diversions.  Realize it or not, the American Dream is the scenery that flies by as you ride the rails to your final destination.


The sermons I Youtubed while working out became the existential icing on the materializing realization that it is difficult to discover the meaning of “good” while living a life of unimportant diversions.  The American Dream can leave us confused about the main point of our lives and wholly unprepared for what comes after.


I am now in my seventh decade and I am again stunned to my shoes when I consider how close I came to wasting my life.  If not for the love of a relentless God and the people he purposely sprinkled into my life, I would have persisted in the haze that I was a reasonably good person pursuing my slice of the American Dream. I am now able to look back on decades of self-delusion and see clearly the sins for which I now fall weeping at the feet of Jesus. My eyes have been opened to how close I have come to riding the remainder of my life until it flew off the rails and tumbled into the pit of perfected irrelevance and unspeakable aguish.


What we call “life” is a prelude, a dress rehearsal if you will, for eternity.  We pass through a deluge of unimportant diversions.  Some of us are swept away by the current while others find solid footing in a loving God.  In the process, we discover that the American Dream has the potential to become a final, eternal nightmare.  We also discover that while we are capable of conceiving of “my truth” and “your truth,” that there is in the end only one Truth.  While we can also convince ourselves that we are reasonably good, there is really only one good—God.  When our goodness is measured against His goodness, there is no discernable difference between us and the meanest, most horrible person we can imagine.


In the end or nearing the end, I once again see how I have been rescued by a relentless God.  Rather than see my retirement as the opportunity to enjoy life and to find recreation with fewer concerns or responsibilities or to chase after postcards and collecting shells in Punta Gorda, my age is a vantage point from which I can squint eternity as the American Dream and my puny concepts of “truth” and “good” fade into vapors.  It is only in God through His son Jesus Christ where we finally find the real good, the real truth, and that which is consummately more real than any dream.


Don’t waste (the rest of) your life.

MY CRAZY MOTHER

My sister and I were sure our widowed mother wasn’t crazy, but I think that there were times she wanted us to think so.  She couldn’t resist keeping us wondering.


My mom was left with a nine-year-old daughter who had been pummeled by a one-two of spina bifida and polio and who required a ridiculous number of surgeries even before graduating from high school.  A two-year-old rambunctious and strong-willed son balanced the other end of her yoke.  Maybe that’s why she always a seemed a bit “different.’


Besides the usual “clean up your room” and “please don’t start fires in the house,” mom always did the excruciatingly unexpected.  When I was about four or five, mom dropped the hammer on me for dropping toys on the floor.  One day she sat me down with “that look” on her face that said I may not be sitting down again for a while.


“Look, I work all day to put food on the table and to keep a roof over our heads,” said Mom.  “Your Nana keeps an eye on you and your sister every day to make sure that you both eat and that you don’t burn the house down.”  (Oh, oh, she found the burned spot on the floor beneath the hassock.)  I don’t have the time or energy to always pick up after you.  If you don’t put your toys away, we’ll figure out a better solution.”


A few weeks later, with toys still on the floor, one of our neighbor’s husband carried in an old wood army footlocker and put it my room. I liked army stuff and thought this to be pretty cool.  Mom came in and sat me down on the footlocker.  She snapped a small padlock on the hasp.  She looked me in the eye and said,

 “Every toy that you leave on the floor goes into the footlocker and remains there ensconced for two weeks.  If it winds up on the floor again, it will stay in the footlocker until just before Christmas.  We will take the footlocker to the Ottilie Orphan Home and you will give one toy to each orphan until all of your toys have been given away.”

I knew that Mom could be stern, but not THAT crazy.  I remained a recidivist. The memory of an unlearned lesson quickly vaporized.
  

A couple of weeks before Christmas Mom and I drove up to the Ottilie Orphan Home in “Becky,” our pea green 1939 Dodge sedan with a footlocker sticking out of the trunk.  Even then, I held out hope that this was just some drama meant to teach me a lesson.  It was not.  In all-too-few minutes I was raining tears as I clutched each toy before hesitantly handing it to a child who clasped the toy to his or her chest and said a very appreciative “Thank you!”


The next day, Mom helped me to write a letter to Santa.  I asked for a small, rideable delivery truck, a panda bear, and a wind-up roller coaster.  Mom walked me to the post office to mail the letter.  A few days before Christmas, a big box with a North Pole return address was delivered to our house.  Inside were wrapped packages addressed to my sister and me. They remained unopened until Christmas Day.


Sixty-plus years later, inside a yellowing photo album in our basement is a picture of a very smiley five-year-old riding a small truck and clutching a very fat panda bear.  Mom always stuck to her story that she had nothing to do with the package that came by truck.  She said that she was struggling to make a Christmas for my sister and me.  Money was tight and she was working two jobs.  There was little left for presents.  On Christmas day, she was a lot more surprised than I was when we opened those gifts plus a letter from Santa wising us all a very, merry Christmas.

When I went to my room that night to go to sleep, the footlocker was gone and I was clutching my new bear.  I still wonder about Mom to this day.

Roping Toilets

I have shared before that it is customary that just before we leave the US for Burkina, after we arrive, or before we leave Burkina for the US, or just after we arrive things fall apart. In my case it has most often been something with a toilet.

I have become so adept at quickly repairing toilets that I am reminded of a calf roper launching after a calf released from its chute only to be wrestled to the ground with its hooves bound by a rope in what the wrangler hopes is record time. I even raise both hands in victory as I flush the repaired toilet for the first time. I brought a wrangler’s hat with us to Burkina this time so I can more closely resemble my missional avatar.

This time it was an electrical connection in the main circuit breaker adjacent to the meter—it smoked and cut off the current last evening. I was not inclined to work on the problem in the dark, so we ran the generator until midnight. I “pre-cooled” the bedroom as much as possible before we hopped into bed and tried to fall asleep before the room heated to ambient. It worked, almost. When the room temperature rose above 85-degrees I awoke as if a large metal platter had fallen onto a concrete floor. I spent the remainder of the night repeating my prayers until the sun laser-beamed through a slit in the curtains screaming that the night was over.

The circuit breaker reset this morning, although I measured its temperature to be over 160-degrees with my IR thermometer. I have a call into Daouda, our very friendly and capable Burkinabé electrician. We are using as little electricity in hopes of keeping our electrical load as low as possible. While I wait for Daouda, I can see if the voltage regulator for the refrigerator can be repaired and then find the source of the short circuit in the living room lights. Later I can replace the burned-out spotlight and exterior light fixtures. Once I get the two dead batteries in the trucks recharged.

The toilets, so far, are okay.

Daouda has arrived. It will be a good day.

The Oasis of Hope Women’s Sewing Project Update

Their smiles say it all.  The joy of new-found hope and the love of Jesus in the faces of our most recent women’s sewing project graduates.

It seems like a small thing--learning to sew clothes, shoulder bags, small, stuffed animals, and more.  Bringing hope and the love of Jesus to women marginalized by widowhood, divorce, or abandonment are the products of small steps.  The first step is when a woman so painfully shy that she can only look at the ground arrives and tentatively knocks on the Oasis door.

Greeted by smiling faces and encouraging voices she soon feels the affection of women who just weeks or months before were in the very same place as she.  People listen to her heart and her story.  She shares her hurt and hopelessness and someone listens.  The soft touch of another who has shared similar pain assures her that she has found a place of hope.  The love of Jesus begins to bathe her in the light of expectation where the shadows of despair begin to fade.

Soon her smile and sparkle begin to show as helpful hands show her how to sew a straight line or to make a hem.  Hope takes root.  Fellowship, prayer, Scripture, and song fill the air and her heart as she begins to raise her eyes and take hold of hope that will last.

It is now her turn to open the door for a woman who can only look at the ground. 

Small steps.

Into Africa

I am sitting at a makeshift desk in 100-degree heat in a town whose name I could not pronounce a few years ago.  I have a tablet pc, a smartphone, and a power pack to keep them both charged. 



It is a scene that reminds me of one in a lot of films about Africa.  Usually such a scene occurs on a safari with someone in a pith helmet pecking away at an old Underwood.  In this case, I am sitting in an oasis, the Oasis of Hope in Lorem Ipsum. Instead of being surrounded by lions, and tigers, and hyenas, I am surrounded by babies and small children and their mothers.  A couple of men are finishing the new chicken coop.  It’s all so stereotypically African with a twist.  And it’s hot and getting hotter but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.



The chicken coop has been long in coming.  It was supposed to be full of hens laying eggs by Christmas.  It’s now almost Easter and the chickens may be here before May.  Their eggs will feed the mothers who come to the Oasis for baby formula because they cannot nurse or to family members when the mother or both parents are missing.  A malnourished woman can’t nurse properly.  The added nutrition from a few eggs per month can make the difference.  Leaves from the nutritious Moringa trees raised here add even more nutrients to mom’s diet.  Babies feed better, gain weight, and grow better, and may even make it past their fifth birthday.



I’m drinking a Coke, it’s warm.  So is everything else.  Besides money, food, health care and honest government, one thing in short supply here in Africa is shade.  The sun has moved to my workspace and I can feel the heat rising from the desk.  Soon my tablet with give me a red box warning that it is shutting down because it is too hot.  I need to find more shade.

Feeding wizened babies and their nearly as skinny mothers is good and it makes many good feelings.  So does distributing small bags of rice and beans or small plastic sacs of drinking water to the many in need.  Taking desperately ill babies and adults to local clinics, pediatric hospitals, or radiology specialists is also good for a serotonin uptake. Holding a cooing baby once the size of a rolled pair of socks is an even bigger rush.  But, as the song goes, it’s all just “dust in the wind.”



If sending well-fed babies to Hell was the best I could hope for, I’d go live someplace a good deal cooler and find something much more amusing to do.  But there is more I can hope for and do.



Unlike postmodern Europe and North America, Africa hasn’t tired of faith in God.  In fact, I have found much hunger for who God is.  Here where peoples’ continued existence can depend on the next rain, God has a more welcome and visible hand.  Here, most people are not “too smart” to still believe in the Eternal God of the universe.  Here is a growing population who know that they need Jesus and seek him with all of their hearts.  They know God is the one who brings the next rain. 



I’m getting older and already past retirement age.  Dragging around 25-kilo sacks of rice or beans, hauling 20-kilo containers of water, and experiencing sun so intense that you really can cook on a car hood is not the object of my life.  What gets me out of bed in the morning is the hope and experience of sharing, sometimes just a little of the love of Jesus Christ with someone who is living on the razor’s edge of existence and who is taking each day a foot, a morsel, or a minute at a time now and for the innumerable tomorrow’s to come.



The heat, dust, and mosquitos fade into non-existence on even the faintest hope that one day a simple seed that God has allowed me to plant will become that slightly familiar smiling face who greets me with an outstretched hand and a small sack of drinking water in the life to come.

NOT A MIRAGE

The word “oasis” draws a picture of someone crawling over the scorched sand towards shade and cool water quivering in the distance.  That image is repeated daily at the Oasis of Hope mission.  Trees and vegetation planted during the rainy season have exploded, spreading a swath of green on the baked, ruddy soil of West Africa.

Women bearing bundled babies arrive as yellow beams pierce the dust of the morning air.  They each gladly give their charges into the hands of people who weigh, measure, and assess their child’s health and nutrition.  Babies once on the brink are brought back by good food and caring hands at the “Oasis.”

Women marginalized by culture or circumstance learn to make soap to sell or practice sewing straight seams to avoid a life of begging, or worse.  They drink cool water in shaded breezes as they chat and laugh as is central to the African culture.  They rest in the sound of a bubbling fountain at the Oasis.

We thank God for gracing us with Becky Schroeder from St. Louis who with a heart as big as the sunrise lives to rescue and embrace frail children in need of advanced care.  We celebrate the welcome arrival of Jacqueline van Ingen from Holland who is returning to her roots as a previous “missionary kid” to translate, partner with local churches, plan devotionals, and to simply share the love of Jesus.

The “Oasis” is not a mirage. It is the cool, living water of Jesus.

Mission 2.0

After more than seven months for three surgeries in the US to repair my back, we’re packing up to return to a much changed country on an equally changing mission.  At this moment, we are feeding more babies and orphans than we had planned (25) and spending more money on formula than we had budgeted.  When you’re the last resort and maybe the only safety net, turning any severely malnourished baby away when there is no other hope is not an option.



Blandine and sewing

Blandine, our single, windowed mom who loves teaching other women   to sew and to make soap is sharing her heart for Jesus with a growing circle of widows and other marginalized women. These women are learning to support themselves and their families.  Our nutritious Moringa trees once barely up to my knees are now higher than any of the buildings in the Oasis and seem to pierce the sky.  The office, classrooms, and formula storage shed are waiting to be painted and for furniture and shelving.  Soon after we arrive the sign reading, “L’Oasis d’Espoir” (The Oasis of Hope) will go up and the doors will open.




Soap

Soon there will be hens cackling and laying in our poultry pen and soap and sewn items will be for sale in our on-site boutique. Women arriving to pick up their twice monthly supply of baby formula will attend various training classes in infant feeding and care, maternal nutrition, sanitation and other subjects all wrapped in the Gospel.



Moringa trees at 2 months.

The biggest change will be our efforts to raise up and nurture the Burkina staff who will replace Janet and me and make the “Oasis” a local and sustainable operation.  It will be a larger application of the “if you give a man a fish” principle.  Soon, our mission must become a Burkinabe effort where the local people will learn skills to make it their center and make it even more of what they need it to be.  Even after we turn over the keys, we will continue to mentor and encourage the staff as they teach others the skills they themselves have learned.

Moringa trees at 7 months.

As much as Janet and enjoy holding and looking into the smiling eyes of hungrily feeding babies who once were close to breathing their last, there is more joy to be found in teaching the people among and with whom we work to “fish for themselves.”  Introducing someone to a new tool or skill is as rewarding as and even more lasting than playing with an infant once on the edge of starvation.

One of our sets of twins.

We have looked past the smile and into the heart of a kitchen cook who once could not even turn a computer on and now watch him compose and print menus, sign-up sheets for daily meals, and design announcements for special functions.  He uses emails to communicate with guests and plan budgets.  He is Janet’s and my Facebook friend and even “Tweets.”  Helping Bukinabé to do what they had once only dreamed and to do things that help their community and nation to grow is helping even more people to fish.



The triplets.

Our mission and ministries will grow as God wills and they must become local efforts.  Just as a seeding must grow into a tree, and a toddler grow tall and strong, our mission and our ministries must also develop roots with a solid grip on the earth to grow into a sustainable effort of Burkinabé workers and American encouragers.  

We hope to be around long enough to see some of our first babies, boys and girls graduate from high school and even university as their compatriots steer L’Oasis to whatever it becomes as Mission 3.0.  We hope that you will walk along with us on this new adventure to share the love of Jesus with those who need and Him so very much.

Don and Janet Guizzetti

"You guide me with your counsel,

    and afterward you will receive me to glory.
 Whom have I in heaven but you?
    And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.
 My flesh and my heart may fail,
    but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever."

Psalm 73:24-26 English Standard Version

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with a note "For the Guizzetti's."  
and mail to:
Sheltering Wings, 5104 Old 66, Leasburg, MO  65535. 
(314) 635-6316.