Tonight my husband brought home a little cartoon about a claymation penguin called “Pingu.”  He was excited to watch it with our kids and he explained that when he was a little boy living in the slum he would religiously go to his neighbor’s house every evening at 5 p.m. to watch it on their black and white TV.  He told me the neighbors never let him sit on the couch because his level of poverty made him unworthy of such a privilege so he had to sit on the dirt floor.  But he didn’t mind, as long as they would let him in to watch his beloved cartoon.

I couldn’t get that thought out of my head.  I sat there watching him with our kids, sitting on our comfy couches with a rug under their feet, watching our color TV as my daughter giggled incessantly at the little penguin’s gibberish.  I thought about how our kids know their worth and that they are so precious that Jesus would come from His throne in Heaven to willingly die in their place, not to mention the fact that it wouldn’t even cross their mind to wonder if they had the right to flop down on any couch in the world!  And I thought about my husband whom I love, as a little boy being made to believe the lie that he is about as valuable as a dog, not even deserving to sit on a scraggly old couch in a mud house in the middle of a slum.

And of course that got me thinking about the value system in general in Kenya.  How children completely unvalued - considered about as important as the livestock. They’re generally invisible in society…if they’re lucky.  If they draw too much unwanted attention they should expect a hearty smack upside the head from any direction – at home, at school, on the bus, at play, and even in church.  And yet, if a woman “fails” to produce children in her childbearing years, she is cursed and cast out of society herself.  What an insanely tragic irony.  And I guess it says a lot about the value of women as well, who are not much higher on the totem pole than children in the African value system.  Of course I am speaking generally and very broadly, perhaps even stereotypically, but the fact remains that I see these horrible realities lived out every day.  And every day a sweet, amazing little boy, like my husband once was, is being told in word and in action that his place in this world is on the dirt floor.

So what can be done, because surely something must be!  Several months ago an American woman who oversees a clinic in Tanzania was asking for advice and resources on how to teach her staff concerning the “cultural misunderstandings” surrounding birth practices, particularly when it comes to the common belief that a mother must be slapped, verbally assaulted, and handled roughly in every sense in order to get her to deliver the baby alive.  I told her I don't think culture has as much to do with it as it might seem.  It's mostly just an excuse.  Rather than approach it as a cultural issue I like to teach and SHOW mothers and midwives what birth can and was created to be. I teach the way the body, mind, heart, and spirit work in labor and the immediate and lifelong physical and emotional effects of the way a woman is treated in labor.  Facts are facts regardless of the culture you're in.  It's basically starting from scratch.

And I think that may be the best way to approach the “cultural misunderstandings”, i.e.: lies from the enemy, concerning the value of women and children in Africa.  I think it begins by combating the lies with basic truths, and even more than that, by living it.  By loving on and valuing even the most belittled of women and children, maybe they will start to believe they really are as precious as they really are.  And maybe others in society will sit back and wonder, rethink things, and start to believe it too.  I’ve seen it happen.

I think about Jesus.  What did HE say about women and children?  How did HE respond to them?  He drew them near.  He defended women who were shunned by society and allowed them to get close and intimate with Him in the most beautiful, pure, and life changing of ways.  He was gentle, kind, compassionate, and life-giving.  He saw the invisible and He warned that those who messed with them would be better off having a millstone tied around their neck and thrown in the sea than to face the consequences He would have for them.  And his very own disciples despised the little children Jesus stopped and took the time to call, to look at them, hold them, and bless them all one by one.

Every precious baby I have ever had the privilege of ushering into the world, I have held in my hands and prayed fervently over their life.  Because the reality is, I often do see those babies born into seemingly un-survivable circumstances, and little boys playing in filth with hopeless futures, and I think of my husband and how God literally did the impossible in his life.  So I pray for every one of those sweet babies, that somehow, some day, God will do the same for them.  That He will lift them out of the pit of abject poverty and see that all the purposes He has for their lives come to pass.  That He will deliver them.

“But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.  And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption…” – 1 Corinthians 1:27-30