I smell your fragrance Lord

But I need to hear you speak

I know there is so much more

As I lay here at your feet

I am a willing captive

To your heart and to your plans

Even that which I don’t understand

I surrender into your hands

My heart it yearns for you Lord

For your fullness and your depth

In what is called a leap of faith

I have already leapt

From the precipice of security

And all my best laid plans

Into the depths of possibility

Beyond which I can comprehend

I gladly give my life again

To take this holy free-fall

From control and mans understanding

So that in you I may have all

Release your secrets to me

As treasures in my heart so deep

For all that I am and ever will be

May you alone possess the key

-Laura Jean Eubanks - After a teaching on “The Altar” by Lesley Anne Leighton for the Holy Given School, in the dirt, under the tent, in Pemba, Mozambique. 10-24-2007

  One of the little idiosyncrasies here is the lack of proper function of many things that are taken for granted back in the US, such as the plumbing. In the bathroom that I share with another long term missionary and the visitors one of the shower heads leaks badly. We try to keep a bucket under it and swap it out when it is full because water is so precious here. (It actually comes in handy when the water is not running to have those buckets of water there to use for showering and pouring down the toilets to flush them.) So today as many other times I went in there and discovered the bucket full and the thought “my bucket runneth over” popped into my mind. It is a play on words from one of the best known Psalms - Psalm 23:5 which I think in KJV may say “my cup runneth over” but my NIV says “my cup overflows”. In the bathroom there is the temptation to focus on the extra work involved in keeping up with the changing of buckets and the muddy mess that is produced by the combination of the overspray that misses the bucket and runs from the back of the bathroom to the front and the dirt that inevitably is tracked in by our shoes. Instead I choose to more properly focus on the truth that if “my bucket runneth over” I am blessed to have not only water but running water and I along with David can say;

Ah … Saturday morning … my ‘day off’- but that really does not happen here when I live in the midst of the people that I serve. I was just finishing my breakfast when I heard crying. From the sound I knew it was the cry of a little child. This in itself is not unusual when I live up the hill from the toddler house and overall in the vicinity of 175 children plus village kids. I looked out my window and saw one of our youngest boys, Benedito, standing behind the wall of his dorm with his pants off, which also is not totally uncommon here - the pants part. J Usually the crying lasts for a short time and then stops. This time it continued and got stronger. I looked out again and I just knew I needed to go check on him. The thought came “This could be messy!” Past this initial thought, knowing I needed to go, everything just kicked into gear. I grabbed gloves and baby wipes (a precious commodity here) and a bag for trash and ran out to him. There stood this chunky little guy with tears streaming down his face, shorts in his hands and a pile where he had diarrhea below him. Such a love for him sprang forth. I had no feelings of being sickened or queasy or disgusted by the task. (Actualy this is very much what mother’s of young children do all the time) The entrance to his home was just a short walk away but it was as if he was paralyzed by the trauma of the moment. I comforted his heart and then stepped him away from that spot and wiped him clean. I was about to walk him back to his dorm to get clean pants when I noticed that he had also stepped in feces … his own or others - I don’t know. The fact was - it was stuck to his foot and needed to be cleaned. Thankfully I noticed this just as I was about to pull my gloves off and was able to get it all clean too. I then walked him to his dorm, was able to tell someone what had happened and got him clean shorts. So there you go - a window into the not so uncommon parts of my world. It exposes some of the challenges here such as why are the children are urinating and defecating outside rather than using the facilities in their dorms and the plethora of problems and diseases this opens us all up to. But, those are side issues.I walked back to my room with this bag full of dirty wipes I had used to clean him. (I can’t just throw it in a trash can anywhere. Here when you take your trash out, you literally have people follow you, wanting to go through it. It is not just children but adult workers as well. We have to burn our trash, all of it, but it is especially important with the bathroom trash … including the toilet paper because it cannot be flushed …even when we do have running water. J We must burn it so they do not rummage through it and become sick and contaminated and spread that contamination. There have been times where I have seen children playing with tampon applicators, even having them in their mouths because this was not done. It is one of the very heart wrenching parts of life here. It also makes you very aware of what you throw away and if anything may possibly be of use to somebody. But this too is a side issue and not what is on my heart to write about, yet it seemed necessary to explain why I am carrying this bag of waste home with me.)

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