Great is Thy Faithfulness

I returned from Taiama on Friday night. It was a quick trip, but I learned so much. Most of all I truly experienced the faithfulness of God. On Friday morning at the Taiama clinic I was there and ready to get to work. I was disappointed that the turn out ended up not being so great. The entire day I only screened about thirty children. Some of the children we enrolled in the malnutrition program, some were returners, and we had two graduates. It was great to see how excited the mothers were when I explained what it meant that their child had graduated from the program! Since the number of children who came to the clinic was low, it gave Christiana and me the opportunity to talk to the mothers one-on-one about why their child was malnourished. We asked them many questions trying to discover the root of the problem. I learned so much about the struggles these women go through daily in order to take care of their family. If I had not had the time to find out, I may not have learned the reason for the low number of mothers that came to the clinic. We discovered that this is the time of year that they are harvesting their crops. If the mothers stop working in the fields to take their child to the clinic, then some of the food needed to be harvested would go bad in the fields. During the time I spent talking with the mothers, I began to realize that there is no education of what foods are healthy and why. Even though the mothers have access and even grow healthy foods that would prevent their children from being malnourished, these are the foods that are valuable to sell. If the mothers were trained to keep some of the foods for their family, then this would be a great way of preventing malnutrition. Another reason for malnourishment among their children is that it is just hard on the mothers to do all that they are doing and be concerned that their children are receiving a varied diet. These mothers are doing the best they can to make sure their children are fed at all. Even though this trip looks as if it was not a success in the amount of children we saw, I think it may benefit more children in the long run. Lately, I have been praying specifically that God reveals His will to me in the direction the Peanut Butter Project needs to go. It is so easy to get my own will or what I see needs to be done confused with what God's will is. Only God's perfect will can bring about the way these children can truly be helped. Pray that I am able to discern God's perception of things from my own. How easy it is to see something that needs to be done and just because it has the appearance of a good thing, I want to go out and do it without patiently waiting on God's response. Great is God's faithfulness for being with us even when we persist on doing things our own way! This trip to Taiama has taught me some important things about community based nutrition that I can implement into the child malnutrition program. I am continuing to pray and think through how this is supposed to work, so I will keep you posted!