Hope for our children

Hope for our children’s future – I think that is just about all we fundamentally ask for our children. And yet what heartache it is for parents to endure the slow-motion nightmare of watching helplessly as that hope steadily slips away. Venus Soko lives in the beautiful country of Zambia, but hunger and disease and destitution mar the landscape of her life so thoroughly that is hard for someone like me to relate to her. But there is one thing about Venus I can understand, and that’s her love for her children.

Venus has been trying to provide for her children on her own ever since disease swept her husband away. Together they had operated a couple of small stalls selling food and other items at the market, and they managed to bring her home food and dignity to the children.
But now with her husband gone Venus is just another vulnerable widow who has had her property and her business stolen from her by a bully in the community.  The bully has allowed her to keep nothing. For herself, she is down to a single garment, which she has worn for months.  There are no more coals for the fire and no food in the pots. Now she watches with desperation each day as her son literally grows crippled from malnutrition.

Venus would do anything – but finds she can’t do anything on her own, only watch as her son’s legs slowly wither and bow into uselessness. She needs some help. She doesn’t need someone to take care of her children; she just needs help getting her property back so she can take care of her children.

Gratefully, Christians can bring rescue. Indeed, Colonel Clement Mudenda, a director with International Justice Mission in Zambia, was yet another sympathetic father who was also a lawyer with a court order. As he did for hundreds of other widows and orphans, he and his staff were able to restore Venus’s property and help her reestablish her business. Venus’s little café is now prospering. She is feeding her children and plowing profits back into the business and can afford rudimentary therapy to help restore the strength of her son’s limbs. She does not have to watch her children wither and die as she once did because of thieves in her community.

As parents, it turns out we don’t need much; we just need a fighting chance for our children – and that’s what compassionate Christian provide to parents like Venus. May be we’ve all been in that scary place where a friend or a neighbor or a doctor had to come to the rescue for one of our own. And if you can remember that trembling sense of gratitude that came in waves over you when you tried to say thank you, then you know something of how Venus greets Colonel Mudenda when he visits her and her children.  No one should ever have to be that grateful, but sometimes we are, because we all need help.