this thing called prayer, Hindus bearing peanut butter, and why I hate orphanages

There is a white African woman with gray hair who I see at church, but before today had never exchanged a word with. (By white African, I mean a Caucasian with multi-generational roots in Africa; there are lots of white Africans in this part of Africa.) She always has Swazi children with her, and before today all I knew about her was her name (Robyn) and that she ran a baby home. She’s always struck me as very quiet and plain. Today I had the chance to hear her story, and for three hours, the tears wouldn’t stop running down my face. By the end, I couldn’t imagine how I had ever found this radiant woman to be plain.

I’ll tell you some of the story, but first let me cut to the punch line. The phrase that jumped out at me and seared my heart was a handful of little words early in her tale. “So we started to pray,” Robyn said. And then she told the most incredible stories, always coming back to a couple simple refrains. That God had told her to do such-and-such. That she had done it, sometimes with less than enthusiasm, always wondering who she was to do it. She said, several times, “I’m just a housewife.” (Spoiler alert: she’s far more than a housewife.) She also said, over and over, “But God did it.” I guess her words, “So we started to pray,” pierced my heart because it’s such a simple answer to all my questions over how I can respond to the needs of this country. They started to pray… and then everything happened.

Today Robyn and her husband Gerry run a home for dozens of children called ABC Ministry. They have seen many many dozens pass through, and many be adopted out. I wouldn’t call it an orphanage, as their firm intention is to foster these children until they can be adopted or returned to their birth families. Unfortunately, no adoptions have taken place for a number of years, due to government policies. I’ll explain that later. They are the only home for children in Swaziland which is willing to adopt children out. I won’t try to explain that, because I would probably say uncharitable things about the other orphanages, and probably there's a lot I don't understand about their motivations and decisions. I will add an addendum to this post explaining a little more about orphan issues in Swaziland generally. Let me say that I think any orphan care expert in the world would applaud Robyn and Gerry for how they are doing things. I love how Robyn says that they are “preparing children for adoption” (in spite of the fact that they haven’t been able to adopt any out in years), always with a view towards what is best for the child (which is to not stay in the baby home forever).

But the road that led to ABC Ministry all started over 20 years ago, when Robyn was a housewife with three teenage children, and she and a friend started to notice the plight of children in Swaziland, and they started to pray about what they could do. They lived in a sugar-producing region of the country, in which women with children were working very long days in the sugarcane fields, leaving for work as early as 3 in the morning. These women were far away from their home regions and extended families and didn’t have anyone to watch their children. So children, even babies and very young children, would be left to fend for themselves in locked-up houses for many hours at a time.

So Robyn and her friend decided to start a center that would care for the children and be open 24 hours a day. The sugar company told them that it would never work, that the company had tried it before and it didn’t work. These two women told the company that they hadn’t tried with Jesus. The center became such a success that eventually the sugar company built them a building, and its work continues, long after Robyn moved away.

The next place Robyn lived she seems to have been trying to mind her own business, but there was a squalid squatter’s camp not far away. The kind of place where adults were perpetually drunk, where fathers pimped their daughters, where rape was commonplace, where children lived in filth and were severely neglected. God had told Robyn to employ in her home a young woman who was partially crippled. This woman had actually been completely paralyzed from the neck down for 7 months, during which time she lay in a hospital bed and her mother came to pray at the foot of her bed every night. One day, to the doctor’s shock, this young woman had some feeling in one of her feet. A week or two later she walked out of the hospital, but still did not have the full use of all her limbs. When Robyn hired her, this woman was overcome with gratitude because she had expected that no one would ever want to hire her, as a partial cripple, and that she would always be dependent on her family. Some years later, God healed this woman totally, and today she is fully able bodied and is in a key position at another orphan ministry in Swaziland. I’m telling you, Robyn’s stories were chock-full of these kind of miracles.

Robyn never would have known about the squatter’s camp, except that her young employee told her about it and that there were hungry children there. Robyn really didn’t want to get involved, but God reminded her that she had a bunch of mealies (corn) in her garden, so Robyn and her employee cooked them and took them to the children. A few days later Robyn was still painfully aware that the children in the camp didn’t have food, and God reminded her that she had a jar of peanut butter in the cupboard. So they made peanut butter sandwiches and took them to the children. Before long, they were visiting the camp three times a week to give the children a meal. Robyn says she had never seen such filth, misery, and spiritual darkness. Many people in the camp opposed her work there, although she was not preaching, but only offering practical assistance like food and clothing. (She’d seen too many “revivals” come to the camp, get everyone “saved”, and then never again set foot there, much less do anything practical to help.)

They kept running afoul of an old gogo (grandma) who had been kicked out of her home region and extended family for putting curses on people, and who lived in the squatter camp with nine grandchildren, whom she badly mistreated. One day the gogo exploded in rage, cursing Robyn for giving one of her grandchildren “torn” clothing. Robyn hadn’t noticed that there had been a small rip in a seam of a shirt she had given one of the children. At this point Robyn had been going to the squatter camp three times a week, without a break of any kind, for several years. After being cursed and insulted by this gogo, she told God she was finished and would not go back. God instead told her to put together a packet of food for the gogo, and to go to her and apologize for giving her grandchild a torn garment. Robyn chafed, but did it. The gogo broke down, and told Robyn that no one had ever shown her love like that. After that this gogo was a changed woman, and was a great help to them in the camp.

For eight years, Robyn and other women went to the camp three times a week. They even started a basic school under a tree, after realizing that the kids were not in school and many had never learned basic things, like a 13-year old girl who had never learned her colors. They didn’t really have any kind of a fund-raising strategy, besides emptying their pockets and personal bank accounts. But help came from unexpected places, including Muslims, Hindus, and Freemasons. One day Robyn was completely out of food for the camp, and had no money to buy any. She confesses that she was secretly excited that she would get a day off. (I don’t think she managed to keep the secret from God.) Then there was a knock at her door. When she opened the door, there stood a Hindu couple, bearing 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of peanut butter. They were not from the area, and were just passing through visiting a relative, who had told them about Robyn’s work. They told her they “felt” in their hearts that they should bring her peanut butter. She never even knew their names. But her impression of them saying, in thick Indian accents, “We have brought you peanut butter,” is pretty funny.

Robyn says she learned from this Hindu couple that when you feel in your heart that you should do something, that is God speaking. While this Hindu couple was hearing and responding to the voice of God, Robyn’s church was spending three years “praying” about helping her. (My impression is that they never did much of anything to help.)

During those years, Gerry and Robyn adopted their first child, a baby who had been born to a mentally retarded, crippled, epileptic woman who had been raped. When Robyn first met the baby, he was 4 months old and weighed a little more than 7 pounds. He had been cared for by his desperately poor grandmother, who had many other children to look after and was ill-equipped to care for any of them. She said that this little baby just refused to die. Doctors predicted that he would have severe long-term health effects, but today he is a tall, talented, perfectly healthy young adult.

Robyn and Gerry have always worked very hard to keep children with the extended family if at all possible, to work with mothers and families that were struggling. At times they take in a child for a period of time, and return him or her to the family when the family is again able to provide care. But sometimes a child truly has nowhere to go, especially in cases where a baby has been abandoned (often in a pit latrine or bush) and the family cannot be traced. So through the years she and Gerry have added five more Swazi children to their family, as well as taken many dozens of children into their home.

Robyn had so many stories. I’ll share just one more. At the end of the visit, I asked her what the home most needed. I was thinking along the lines of money or used children’s clothing. She said, “What we most need is for you to pray. Because if you pray, God will put it in your heart to do things that we may not even know we need.” Then she told a story. A number of years ago they got a donation of clothes from Canada. In the donation was a pair of strange tiny leather boots with what looked like braces on them. Robyn and Gerry had no idea what they were for or what to do with them, so they threw them into a cupboard and forgot about them. Over a year later a little girl came to them. She had been severely abused by her mother, to the extent that her back had been broken (and the police had arrested the mother for abuse). In the baby home, she started to heal and recover, and through physical therapy regained some use of her legs. But at the age of almost three, she still couldn’t walk; her feet and ankles seemed to be unable to support her weight. Then Robyn and Jerry remembered the funny boots. They put them on, and immediately this little girl was able to take her first steps. She was eventually adopted by a childless Swazi couple, who had come to the baby home with their minds made up to adopt a boy, but eventually ended up adopting this little girl. Years later, through a “chance” meeting, this family met a South African orthopedic surgeon who was able to operate (free of charge) to fully repair the damage caused to her as an infant. Today this not-so-little girl is running, swimming, and fully healed.

I’ve cried a lot lately over the situation of children in this country. Some weeks ago a baby was born in some of the most tragic circumstances I can imagine, circumstances which mean that he will never be able to live with his biological relatives. He was taken in by an orphanage, a place where he will have clean clothes and plenty of food and good care and people who love him and are hopefully even in his life for a long time. But he will never, ever have a family. We were close enough to this situation to know about it, and I grieved, and I wept. I wanted that child. It’s not that I have an abundance of time, or energy, or patience at this stage in my life. We have quite enough on our plates parenting our own two small kids. I’m not saying that adding another small child would have been a good idea. But none of those rational considerations meant squat when I thought about the prospect of a child spending his entire life in an orphanage, and never ever having a family. I desperately wanted to bring that child to our house, and to give him a family. But there was no way. Even if he hadn’t been taken to an orphanage that doesn’t adopt out, we couldn’t have adopted him. Swaziland completely shut down international adoptions several years ago, and it’s anyone’s guess when the government will finish its review of adoption policies and re-open international adoptions.

When I think about orphan issues and orphans in this country, I have so many strong and mixed emotions. I hate orphanages. Not the people who run orphanages, who are obviously doing wonderful and heroic work to take care of kids who would otherwise be abused or neglected or even die. I hate orphanages as institutions. I hate the fact that an orphanage is a very poor substitution for a family, and that a child who grows up in an orphanage will never have a family. I would beg you, if you have or are considering supporting an orphanage, to make very very sure that the orphanage you support is ONLY taking in children who have no hope of ever living with their birth families, and most of all that it is not creating demand for orphans. By which I mean, desperately poor families who feel that they have very few options may feel that their best option is to send their child to an orphanage, where they will have clothes and shelter and enough to eat. Orphanages all over the world are full of non-orphans, whose families have sent them there for a “better life”. In my mind, this is an unmitigated tragedy. (Google E.J. Graff’s work if you want to know more about the supply and demand dynamics of orphanages and international adoptions.) 

I can’t fault any mother or family for making this choice, but I do absolutely fault, I feel absolutely infuriated by, any orphanage that takes a child away from a family that could care for the child, no matter how meager that family’s resources. I can only imagine (never having done this kind of work myself) how hard it must be to help a struggling mother or family, especially if there are issues of alcohol abuse or mental illness or lack of attachment to the child or whatnot. It’s much easier to clean a child up and put him or her into the controlled environment of an orphanage, and then take cute pictures for a fund-raising brochure, than to engage in the messy work of keeping children in families and communities, which donors are much less excited about and willing to support. But decades of experience in Africa and the West (where we long ago stopped running orphanages, for good reason) has shown that even the best orphanages cannot provide the nurture and attachment and sense of identity that a child needs to receive from a family. In my view, orphanages are no place for children.

Here in Swaziland, families have become so over-extended by the double whammy of the loss of healthy young adults (largely to HIV) and the surge in the number of orphans, that many children have ended up living in child-headed households. Which is also no way for children to grow up. But once children are taken off a family’s land and into an orphanage, they lose the land. I’m not sure I can adequately communicate what this loss of land/heritage/family means in an African context. I just grieve for any African child who at 18 will be cut loose from an orphanage, with no family or home, and essentially without an identity in his or her society.

So. Orphanages are a bad option. But until the government of Swaziland changes policy (they are actually not even currently allowing adoption by Swazis), they are the only option for kids who cannot stay in biological families.

Please pray for the kids of this country. Pray for families that are struggling, that they would be able to find help and make changes so that they could provide loving environments in which children would thrive. Pray that laws would change, so that kids who truly can’t stay with their families would be able to find new families. (I don’t fault the government of Swaziland for being very careful about their adoption policy, as I think international adoptions are a very tricky issue. I do really wish they would hurry up and finish their review.)

If you want to know more about ABC Ministry, visit

https://www.facebook.com/pages/ABC-Ministry/124500517666500. I’m sure they’d love your financial support. I’m even more sure they would love for you to follow their updates and pray for their work and the precious children they are providing safe haven for.