This blog is dedicated to my sweet friend. Noma. Many of you remember reading or hearing me speak of Noma. She is a dear friend of mine who lives in the township close to where we stay. She is a faithful follower of Christ and I have no doubt that she has and will continue to impact Jeffrey’s Bay for eternity. I met Noma my first week in Jeffrey’s. We visited her with a lady named Auntie Matilda who does regular house visitng ministires in her own community. Auntie Matilda wanted us to meet Noma so that we could pray for her. We walked into Noma’s brick home and we found her little body sitting in a chair. Noma isn’t small in stature but she is HIV positive and her body was giving up the struggle. There wasn’t a 100 lbs on her nearly 6 ft frame. She was dying and her 11-year-old daughter’s face proved that no one ever gets use to what this wicked disease is capable of doing.
We spent time sitting in her house as Auntie Matilda and Noma spoke (in Afrikkans) to each other. We swept her floor and then we were asked to pray for her. I honestly don’t remember what I prayed for her that day but I was really touched by her gracious spirit and kind heart. It was her eyes that showed she was a fighter but her body was quickly wasting away.
Over the next few months, my ministry team and I would visit Noma weekly. We began to fight for her. At first we decided we were going to pray that Noma would be healed of her advancing AIDS (she soon discovered she had TB which means that her HIV has advanced to AIDS). Although I have great faith that the Lord can do as He so choses, I felt that God did not give me permission to pray for her AIDS to be healed. I don’t always understand, but I knew what God had told me. So my ministry team and I decided would should start with small things in our prayers. Noma’s feet were so swollen that she couldn’t walk. So we started there and began to pray for the swelling to go down. And it did! After the swelling we prayed that she would gain weight. She was a skeleton. She was so sick (check my picture) and she was not able to keep any weight on her. At this time, it was closing in on Christmas and I left for America. I brought Noma groceries right before I left and I remember wondering if that was the last time I was going to see her. I kept up with Noma over the break through one of my team mates. I learned that Noma was in the hospital and she was very very sick. I was very worried but I had had time to prepare myself. Then I also was sick and returned later than expected to South Africa in January. I was eager to see Noma and my team informed me that she was better and back at home. We walked into her house in January and it was as if she was never sick at all. Through out the whole time we had been visiting her, she was unable to do much of anything, but when I returned a month later she was busy sewing and selling treats to the children after school. More than that, she had gained 8 kilos!!! That’s almost 20 lbs! God had answered our prayers again!
Since that time, we have visited Noma every week and watched her regain her strength and her vitality. She began to return to her normal life. She attended her Biblestudies and looked after her family and continued to work at her sewing. She was pulling in some much needed money for her family. We were so thrilled. To this day, Noma has gained almost 20 kilos and her feet only swell on occasion!
This is when the story gets amazing… (if you didn’t think it already was…)
Noma is a very unique and special lady. She is a warrior for her community. She has a very big heart and she is one sharp lady. Recently I told her how I really would love to see my 7th grade Bible class be more involved in her community (they are rich white kids and she lives amongst poor black people). I told her a few ideas and she quickly told me of some needs she knew of in the community. We started planning but there were several hold ups. We had to scratch our original idea of meeting the need and look at things differently. That’s when she told me about her daughter Kyisa.
Kyisa came home from school one day and told Noma about some children who were hungry. They came to school everyday without getting breakfast and with no food for lunch. Noma was upset by this and gave Kyisa extra food to share with the children. Soon she learned the children’s story. They came to Jeffrey’s from a small country North of Jeffrey’s called Lesotho. It’s a very impoverished country and the kids were taken from their mother’s home after a neighbor contacted the oldest brother (who is living in Jeffrey’s) and told of the children’s hunger. They were five children living in horrible conditions and the mother did not take care of them. There ages are 12 years all the way to 4 years of age. The brother came and brought the children here to Jeffrey’s but was not able to give them all that they needed. It’s sad to think that their living conditions here are so much better than before because they are some of the poorest children I have seen so far in Jeffrey’s Bay. After Noma told me about these children and how she wanted to help them, I felt that I saw the big picture.
Although I know that the Lord is working in the tavern and with all those associated with it, I had hit a wall as to what to do. So many gracious people had sacrificially given me money to purchase the tavern, but Peela was not ready to sell it for a decent amount of money. Through some prayer and wise counsel, I felt that this money should be used for these hungry children. Noma and I put our heads together (for several days and hours at a time) and decided to begin feeding the children twice a week! And in addition to the five children from Lesotho, there were five others in the same situation. I got my numbers all together and started crunching them and tried to overcome my desire to run from the logistics and came up with a budget for feeding these children.
On Monday, April 14th at 7 am (it hurt to be up that early) we began feeding the hungry children. It was a little awkward at first but over the last few weeks it’s grown on all of us. At first only five of the ten kids were coming because the mother of the other five children would not wake her kids up in enough time to come and eat before school. But as of our last one we had nine of the ten! They are very sweet but painfully shy, mainly due to the fact that they are just learning the language here and their English is also not very good.
They come and go between 7 am and 7:45 and eat their breakfast and take a lunch with them as they head off to school. I am still learning their names, but just last week as I was walking home from ministry, I saw a group of hands waving at me. I looked up and there were several of those kids and they were all smiling. I have to admit, it made me feel pretty good.
There are some cool things in the working for this feeding. Today I spoke with a lady who owns what I would call a trailor type of container. It actually sits directly across from Noma’s house. It’s used in these type of communities as a feeding station (hmm…how ironic, right?). Noma approached me about using the container to feed the children. We had hoped to use the tavern but every turn is a dead end. She told me that she really wanted to have that container to fed the kids from and she could also use it for other ministry things such as biblestudies and teaching others how to sow. I love Noma and I know her heart and I knew I should look into it. I crunched the numbers again and realized that we could possibly buy this container. With the cost of feeding the kids and the container, we would have a little less than $50 to spare. Again, I prayed about it and sought wise counsel and I hope to have purchased the container by the end of this week!
I told Noma the good news over the phone and I could tell be her voice that she was so excited. I think she may have been crying. This is her dream. This is her ministry. I feel like God placed us together because He knew that we needed one another. She had a vision, I had the means to meet that vision. I feel very alive to think back on this journey with Noma. From praying for her health to watching life enter back into her both physically and spiritually. It’s quite beautiful really. This is what the body of Christ should look like. This is what discipleship is all about.
So, if you think this story is pretty amazing, then will you pray for us? Pray for Noma and all her hard work. Pray for these kids and for the ones to come. Pray that God will provide more money for the more hungry mouths that are yet to come. Pray for wisdom and insight as I try to wrap up all the loose ends. And if you think this story is really amazing and would like to be apart, please click on the “talk to me” link to the left and let me know how you would like to be apart. I’ll be honest, we don’t have enough money. But it will come. Let me know if you want to help.
HE Provides,
Amber
