Recipes

Ok, those of you know me well, know that I have been domestically challenged in my past. I say "been" because God is showing me I can grow in all areas. Back home I had a few simple recipes I loved to make. For example:

Frozen Yougurt Pie

Buy a graham cracker crust, a cool whip small tub and a small yougart from the store.

Mix with spoon the cool whip & yougart.

Pour into premade graham cracker crust and freeze. Delicious!!!

Swaziland variation:

Buy Tennis biscuits (graham cracker like cookie), butter, whipping cream, sugar, yougart.

Put tennis biscuits in blender and pulverize or take a hammer to the package but make sure it's a clean hammer and a place to catch the pieces that come out of the package.

Mix crumbs and butter (about 1/4 cup melted) and press with fork into sides of pie plate or whatever container you can find to use.
Put whipping cream (that has been refrigerated--milk come in cartons that can sit on the shelf until opened--not so with whipping cream which I found out by it going bad on my shelf!) and 1/4 cup sugar in bowl and use electric beaters for 3 to 4 minutes until you have whipped cream (another new experience for me!).
Mix whipped cream with yougart (alot thinner and more liquidy here).

Cool part is it's easy to add banana or fresh mango to mixture in Swaziland.
Pour into crust a freeze.

It takes longer but it is still great.

Tues, I wanted to make a quiche for bible study, Wed. morning. Back in the states it would have gone like this;

Buy Pilsbury crust & eggs, cheese, meat & spinach.

Roll out crust in pie plate.

Scramble eggs and other ingredients with a little milk, salt & pepper.

Bake in oven at about 350 degrees until crust is golden and egg center is firm.

Now sometimes you can find a puff pastry at the store whick is the same but a touch different.

Not this time. So I got to make a pie crust from scratch which I do not believe I have ever done except maybe as a small child with my grandmother. Many of you are laughing especially if you are related to me. I have included pictures to prove it. It was a little chewy but no one was treated for stomach issues after bible study.

So, never say "I can't", "I've always been that way" or "that is not how God made me". Don't lose the battle in your mind because if God is for you, nothing is impossible!! If God calls you to do something, He WILL enable you. I can't say God "called me" to make the quiche but He did use it to convict me of some of my "I can't" thought patterns and show me that it's never to late to break a habitual way of thinking and grow.

It's a Girl!!

God has been growing me a lot lately and so my blogs tend to reflect a more serious tone lately but I realize that there are fun things of living in Swaziland that I should also share; thus this blog about Victoria.
Victoria is our chicken, or should I say Patrick’s chicken. For those unaware, there are two houses on our lot. I now share mine with Natalie and 2 interns from the states Jessica and Hannah who are here for a month. The other is Patrick’s whom he now shares with Jordan and 2 Swazi interns Lelo (Lay-low) and Daniel. One day last month Patrick and his friend Rick who was visiting from the states came home with a live chicken!! Did either of them know anything about chickens? (They did bring home a bag of poultry feed.)
The next time I talked to my mom (who had been on a farm before) she said if we had a box with straw the chicken would make a nest and lay eggs. I told the guys but they never did anything about it. One day I was in the yard and started visiting with the chicken. Before you start calling me Dr. Dolittle or just crazy, I tend to talk to the birds in my tree and the monkeys next door when they come by but I will honestly say that I haven’t understood any of their responses. :)Anyway I decided she needed a name and for some bizarre reason Victoria is the one that popped in my head. It stuck although the guys still tend to call her “the chicken”.Now never having lived on a farm, I started questioning the red crown on the top of her head and wondering if that meant she was a he? I don’t know, I thought only roosters had crowns or whatever they are called on top of their head. Last week I went looking for where Victoria (or Vic) bedded down at night. I found it and low and behold I also found 11 eggs! So this blog is to praise Victoria for all her hard work and for the contribution she has made to our home!!

Reality Check

It is all such a shock when reality that you are in a 3rd world country hits you square in the face. So many things we as Americans take for granted, central air and heat and insulated houses (our house is freezing at night this week and it isn’t even winter here yet -- we are in a house not a shanty like so many that go to our CarePoints). We have food 3 times a day, shoes for our feet when it rains and we rarely have to walk or hitch a ride when we have to go someplace.
Yesterday the level of medical care here hit harder than ever. I was at Mangwaneni, Mbabane (there is a Mangwaneni in Manzini as well) for the medical clinic for the CarePoints I oversee. We are able to do what sometimes seems so little; treating for worms, colds, diarrhea and respiratory infection. Teresa is able to catch and refer some children and adults with TB or possible HIV to other facilities to start treatment. Many of these children would go untreated until they had to be admitted into the hospital. So it is something.
As we were leaving last night, we had said our goodbyes to each other and were getting into our separate vehicles, when Teresa witnessed a child dart out from the sidewalk across the street as a kumbi (minivan type bus service) came by and struck him. She said she heard the thud as the child was hit and thrown to the opposite side of the road. A doctor visiting from the states was with Teresa. I was walking up the hill in the opposite direction when I heard the commotion. As I came on the scene I found one sandal on one side of the kumbi and one on the side near where the child lay. I picked them up and went to assist. Teresa said later that she had been expecting the worst after hearing the loudness of the impact. The boy was about 7 if I had to guess. He does not attend our CarePoint according to our teachers who were also there helping tend to the child. His head was scraped and bleeding but other than that he miraculously seemed to have no broken bones, internal injuries or collapsed lung. We worked to calm him as he wanted to jump up and run away. The doctor had us keep him still and try not to move in case of a neck or back injury (normal procedure in the states after an accident). The friend who had been with the child ran to the homestead to find a parent but they were not home yet. Teresa had called the ambulance. Reality started to sink in. If we hadn’t been there he might have tried to run home and collapse there or someone could have jerked him up and put him in a vehicle and taken him to the hospital with no regard for his neck. But we were there, the doctor insisted on waiting for the ambulance. We kept checking that the little boy knew his name, stayed alert and that he had no other pain elsewhere. We prayed for and over him. We kept him still and did not let him move. Then the ambulance came. What a relief . . . or so we thought. They pulled out the stretcher and attempted to just “plop” the child on it with no regard to keeping the neck & back straight. They put him fighting to get up into the ambulance. As I looked inside, the ambulance was a shell with stretchers in it. Nothing like the ambulances that roll up in America – no backboards, no oxygen, no medications or IVs or anything!!! This is the reality!! This is the lack that is dealt with daily by the residents. It is so hard to comprehend!!! One of the teachers went with the child in the ambulance, no medical personnel. After we left the scene I ran into a co-worker who hugged me and let me share what had happened and then went on to share that the ER would not be much better than the ambulance at attending to this child. The x-ray machine wasn’t probably working and they would treat his head lacerations and probably send him home as long as he was alert and not complaining anything else hurt. It pains me to think what could have happened, but it didn’t. God was merciful and we pray the child will be fine. The faces of the children on this blog our children from that CarePoint but not the child hit the child who was struck. But it could have been. Tragedy could easily be around the corner from any of these children. Please keep them in your prayers and pray for divine protection for each of them. Hug your own child or even your doctor this week and tell them how much you appreciate them.

(Note: The pictures in this blog are of children from the Mangwaneni CarePoint but are not the child in the accident.)

Along came Mike!

There is a young man, Mike, who felt called and came to stay with Children’s Cup for two weeks. He is HIV positive. He just left last Friday. He came to share his testimony to a community where HIV is a scary reality. We respect privacy but in Swaziland like so many places there is also a huge sense of fear of letting anyone know you have AIDS. Mike shared his testimony for the first time @ Fonteyn CarePoint at the cooks/teacher devotional just a couple of weeks ago. Was there anything eloquent about Mike’s words that day –no! Just a sincerity to share how God loved him so much despite his past and his desire that others know how great God is. God’s Spirit moved upon the group. At first there was silence and lack of eye contact. I asked,
How long have you been a Christian?
Since I was 6. But I’m the prodigal son.
We then reviewed how the story of the prodigal son and how he had taken his inheritance from his father, ran off and spent it on sinful things and then begged to come home and be as the servants. But that the father had welcomed him with open arms. Mike said
God welcomed me back.
How long have you known you were HIV positive?
6 years (the eyes of the group got wide, I don’t think anyone of them has known anyone who has been positive for that long and is still alive)
A cook asked. Have you been in the hospital?
No, not except when I first got diagnosed. I take my meds daily, I mean every day and that’s what I want to tell people. You can LIVE with HIV but you need to find out if you have it and then take steps to stay healthy. Learn about it, take your meds, share your fears with a trusted friend and give it over to God.
Another person asked. How did you get it?
A homosexual lifestyle. It’s not something I am proud of but it’s part of my story.
One cook said how proud she was of Mike to be bold and share his story. She said that makes her want to be bolder.
Then, something that is just not done, a cook who had been yawning and squirming and who appeared to be bored with the whole thing, said
In 2004 I started having a lot of headaches. I went in to be tested and found out I was HIV positive. I’m afraid now whenever I get a headache.
Oh, my heart leaped! This was a HUGE moment! For someone to feel safe enough to share one of the most private secrets in front of others was amazing. Mike was able to counsel her some about taking her meds and sharing her fears. He shared that God would always be with her no matter what (this was also a cook who had gone forward the previous Thursday at the cooks luncheon). God is amazing! He is taking away Satan’s strongholds of fear! Fear of death, fear of rejection, fear of isolation!

We found out Friday that a Babe (Bah-bay=Mr. in a respectful manner) of one of our CarePoint communities who had been a integral part of Children's Cup being able to get the land to start that CarePoint had died. We had heard he had been in the hospital and had visited him last month. Earlier last week he had checked himself out of the hospital and know one knew where he had gone. It was said he had gone to the witchdoctors. Would he have died if he was in the hospital? Quite possibly. But the wake up call is that Swaziland calls itself a Christian nation and there are many churches here, but as Daran (the Swaziland Children's Cup director) pointed out in our weekly office devotion, how much of it is merely faith without substance. When one's faith is shaken you either have faith like Shadrach, Meshach & Abednego who said "If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God whom we serve is able to save us. He will rescue us from your power, Your Majesty. But even if he doesn't, Your Majesty can be sure that we will never serve your gods or worship the gold statue you have set up." Daniel 3:17-18 or you run in your lack of faith back to what you came from -- in this case, the deception of witch doctors.

Why did I share these stories? To illustrate that we have victories that are awesome and fantastic but we also must be diligent to disciple and help each other grow in our walk with the Lord. I ask you to pray. Pray for faith in Swaziland and the U.S. that is a deep everlasting faith. So many say we have faith in God and in Christ but we fail to develop that personal relationship of talking with Him daily. A relationship that grows the inner peace and knowledge that no matter what happens

God loves me

God is always with me

God is who He says He is

God can do what He says He can do

I will trust Him in whatever He does or does not do because

God loves me

God is always with me.

Shalom!

I Believe in Miracles!!

I know I’ve been busy and blogs aren’t coming as regularly but don’t think that God isn’t at work. He showed up in miraculous ways while the women's team was here. The ladies worked hard and prayed fervently and as stated in the previous blog, the Spirit of God moved and celebrated as 22 cooks accepted Christ as their personal Savior. Later that day, the doctor on the team, Doris, was with our nurse, Teresa, at a medical clinic when a cook brought in a listless baby who was reported to have had several seizures earilier. Teresa said the child’s eyes had rolled back and the breathing was extremely shallow. Her neck was extremely stiff and the doctor feared meningitis. They decided rushing the child in the kumbi to the local hospital was needed but before they left, Doris, the doctor, anointed the small child with oil and prayed for God to heal her. Teresa reported the child then aroused and became more alert. They rushed her to the hospital where she was treated. Teresa saw her later and reported she was out of the hospital, that it had been some type of poisoning. This week Teresa saw her at the CarePoint and she was running and playing. Praise God!!
On Friday, during the medical clinic in Maphiveni, a mother brought her 8 month old baby in. The baby could not hold up her head on her own, sit up or roll over like other children her age. We urged the mother to take the baby to the city hospital and try to get physical therapy. She said she had taken the baby to the doctors before but they had said they didn’t know what was wrong. A group of the ladies from the women’s team prayed over the baby and her mother. How often have I overlooked the power of prayer? A little while later, Mandy, one of the team members who had felt a special connection with this child brought the baby back into the clinic showing how the baby was now holding up her own head!! God is so awesome!!
These miracles were powerful and happened fairly instantaneously but God is also moving mountains in more gradual ways. In my CarePoints in Mbabane (Oasis @ Swaziland) there has been an undercurrent of discord between the political and government agencies in conjunction with Children’s Cup. Apathy and lack of unity have been prevalent. But God has been working in the hearts of the community. I was at Fonteyn last week with the medical clinic and Teresa commented that the atmosphere was different. It was true. Not all the problems are solved but God has been knocking down a lot of the walls and a sense of peace and joy were present. Thank all who continually pray for Fonteyn and Mangwaneni, Mbabane (Oasis @ Swaziland). Your prayers are being answered.