January 1994

Dear Saints and Aints.

Peace to you!

My desk again looks again like the world before God uttered His six great fiats: "Let there be …" and set in order the building materials of the world.

In like fashion, though with more limited powers to my fiats, I decided to utter mine to bring order in this chaos and do something with the building blocks of friendship - your letters - with the fiat: "Let there be answers!" and - it was so.

The kids and I are ok. Yohan hang a picture of the Last Supper in the dining hall. It was a mistake! The way some of these kids eat makes me wonder if they take this personal - their last supper ... Not only so, some of them try to sneak out the odd chapatti - so they can have a pre-breakfast snack. Breakfast is at 7.00 a.m.

Our food bill reflects this ferocious appetite - kids' birthright, and the long line of creditors and their frequent phone calls, bear me out. Yohan and others in charge of various departments, greet them with a smile and a shrug: "The money will come soon!” We have a couple of German ladies visiting us. They look with horror at some of the little fellows curled up on a thin blanket on the bare floor. Some with a running nose, some curled up to their friends for warmth - it is winter! It is cold!

The constant remarks I hear is, "Why don't you take less kids and provide more?” I am afraid it doesn't work that way. In 1982/83 with about 15 - 40 kids we had a debt equal to seven times our income. Now in 1993 with about 1150 kids and four homes we have a debt equal to three times our income.

Sometimes I pray: "Lord let somebody send me $20,000 just to pay our food bills." Since God hasn't done this, he must feel it is not important ... Furthermore, most people who come here, never see how many of those kids lived before we took them ... The squalor, the hunger, the deprivation, the utter hopelessness ... They don't face the women who, draped in rags with vacant eyes, drag their wee kids along begging us to keep them. We are not set up to handle little kids.

Many of my staff are themselves kids, some in their late teens and others barely out of them. Yohan turned 22 in October ... And yet, what do you do? Who has the heart to condemn these wee ones to a life of hunger and decease on the side of the road? So we take them ... Some people object to my talking about toilet habits of the kids. But why should you be spared the nitty-gritty of our life here? You pay for it, you pray for it and it is good that you know. Can you imagine what it is like to have 100 plus wee fellows in one hall? But it is really not a culpable offence to be so small and “wee” yourself because you are scared of the dark - without a mother to wake - to help you? Is it a culpable offence to try not to bathe at 5.30 a.m. on a cold winter day (and consequently get scabies), with no mother to heat up some water. And it is not a culpable offence, under these conditions, to have a bunch of teenage boys as surrogate mothers and an almost 60 year old bachelor - as a surrogate grandmother ... And yet ... As I look at the playground from my cozy computer corner and see the kids, so happy, so content and some outright radiant, laughing and playing and jabbering away like a bunch of sparrows kissed awake by the morning sun, I feel like crying for the sheer joy of it. They are my kids.

The other morning I looked out on the garden; it appeared dull in the early morning light. A cloud was obscuring the sun. Suddenly a narrow beam of sunlight sneaked by that grim guardian, touched a rose and transformed it into something beautiful. The dew drops, clinging to it, provided a diadem of such awesome beauty that the queen of England, were she such a person, would have become jealous. And all it took was a beam of light reaching out from a great distance, to light up, to transform a simple flower into a ransom fit for a king. Looking at my kids, I realize that's what happened to them. A touch of love, from a great distance, reached them, removed the spirit of hopelessness, transformed them - made them radiant. Maybe the transformation of rose and grass and kids takes a child's eyes to see, a child's heart to appreciate and a child's mind to understand. And, at heart, I am still a child ... Do you ever wonder what makes children eligible for the kingdom of God? It is certainly not their innocence - from the day they are born they are rascals. It is not because they are cute. Though some of mine could possibly be - if they kept their faces clean long enough for me to notice. It is their helplessness. They have nothing to offer and when they come - they offer that.

It was the same with me when I got saved. I told God, "I am nothing, I have nothing, I can do nothing but - please take me anyhow. After all these years I still wonder at the joy, the peace and a whole gamut of beautiful things His acceptance of my nothing in return has brought me.

For me, think what you may, to be a Christian, to belong to Jesus, is the most wonderful thing. Like God in his love reached out to me - I am reaching out to these kids. And I find that my sharing does not impoverish me but - enriches me; it does not diminish me - but enlarges me. I gained a deeper peace, though I did not look for it; more joy, though I did not pursue it.

People keep telling me, "Take care of yourself!" I am doing it - by taking care of others. If peace and joy are basic to good health then I am holding on to the right prescription. Thank YOU for reaching out to us. Thank you for sharing with us. You couldn't invest it in a better place. We are killing ourselves to keep everybody else alive ... Please continue to let your kindness flow uswards. You are not helping ME - you are helping a hapless, hopeless little waif to a better life and - as far as it lies in our powers - to an eternity with God.

Love from us all …

Frank, Yohan and Kids, kids, kids ...