Two weeks ago...

Two weeks ago we visited the village Sculeni with an outreach team. There we organized a camp for the children of the village and below is a little story about some boys that I met:

Already in the first day of the camp, Jenea (8 years) and his older brother Andrei (11 years) caught my attention. Both boys didn’t respect any rules or anything that was said by the leaders in the camp. During the games, bible lessons or handcraft time, they would get non-stop in trouble and were fighting with other children. Their speech was very dirty and I observed that the other children tried to avoid these two boys. Nearly every day when they came to the camp, they had dirty faces and hands, bear food and they were wearing clothes with holes in them. But even if they were the ideal children to have at the camp, there was one thing that made me look different at them.

Every day by the time that the children program was about to end, the boys got more quite. And when it was time for the children to receive a meal, Jenea and Andrei would be the first two to sit down and be quite in order to receive food. In less than 3 minutes they would eat all their food and it was very obvious that they were hungry every day and that they did not receive enough food or that somebody looked after them. (In the picture, Andrei is the boy in the middle).

Later in the week I visited the boy’s parents at their house. When we arrived father was drunken and mother was not home because she had gone to help a friend, father said. And although it sounded that mother was gone for a decent motive, I knew that this meant that mother had gone to drink. Both of the parents didn’t have work and this means also no income. In the last weeks several days the parents had gone to work as a day worker on the fields. For one day of cutting weeds in the burning sun, they earned 100 Lei each (total around 15$). 

Seeing the poverty and hearing how the parents are struggling to survive for themselves, I felt deeply sorry for Jenea and Andrei. They need to look after themselves. They are crying out for love and attention. They need somebody in their lives who will tell them that they are good boys, somebody who will invest in them, educate them and believes in them. Thinking about their future I only can pray and hope that God will bring change in their possibilities. I was thankful that for 4 days the boys got some good decent food but I was thinking about the question: what will Jenea and Andrei eat next week?