Nana

It was already very dark when we met Nana on tuesday night at around 7 o'clock on the street in front of Nyawera. Nana is 6 years old. She was alone.

My brother Dejoie and I realised she was following us, while we were trying to cross the main street at Nyawera, a market in the center of Bukavu. As most African markets, Nyawera is crowded with all different kinds of people, there are cars, motortaxis, buses everywhere and everyone is on the move trying to push its way through. It is indeed not a safe place for a 6 year old girl to be alone - especially not at this time of the night. 

Both Dejoie and I felt reminded of our younger sister Diane, who was raped at the age of seven. Concerned about the danger this precious young girl could face alone at night, we felt compelled to talk to her and find out what she was doing all alone. We wanted to know where she was going so that we could accompany on her way home.

As we started talking to her, she couldn't look into our eyes nor could she explain where her parents were or where she was staying. With nowhere to go, my brother and I knew we couldn't just leave the girl all by herself. We offered her to stay with my family for the night where she will be given food and a safe shelter to sleep. Without even asking she agreed to come with us and we continued our walk together towards my parent's home.

On the way to our house she started to guide us in another direction and we figured she might have recognised a familiar place and recaptured where she was staying. To our surprise she took us to a military camp, where we found her mother sitting in a corner, hopeless and weak. 

What is a young girl and her mother doing at a military camp? We were quite shocked.

The joy of mother and daughter being reunited didn't last very long as the mother started telling us the story of how they got here.

Nana and her mother are not from Bukavu but from a village in another region. They have just gotten to town few days ago, when Nana's father and the husband of Nana's mother was sent to prison - she didn't tell us the reason why. As prisoners don't get food to eat while being in custody, they followed her husband and father to provide him with food while in prison. 

With nowhere to go Nana and her mother found "refuge" in a military camp where they were offered a place to spend the nights at. She didn't want to give us any more details as to who invited them to stay there and under what conditions they could rest there.

Without no money to buy food for the father nor themselves, yesterday afternoon Nana decided to go and look for food in the city herself. As it got darker and the city is a completely unfamiliar place to her, she got completely lost and her mother didn't know where her daughter had gone.

Other then giving them some money to buy food for the next day, there was nothing else my brother and I could have possibly done for Nana and her mother. We were told to leave the military camp and as it had already gotten late, it was also time for us to get our feet on safer ground and back towards the city center. We said good bye and told them we would like to visit them again in few days. 

Yes, Nana and her mother were finally reunited. Yet the place we had to drop her was not a safe place for a young mother and her child to be alone. It didn't feel good. All in all it felt wrong and our hearts were more than broken for this young girl and her mother.

It was one of these moments where God was telling me: You are here for a purpose that I have given you. This is part of a bigger picture that I am going to reveal to you. And again, as I was laying in bed pondering about what had happened, God was speaking to me though the daily bible verse of the Herrnhut Brüdergemeinde:  ' "Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit", says the Lord of hosts.' Zechariah 3:4. 

It is not by my might, it is not all in my responsibility, the burden is too much to carry myself. God is never asking more of me than what I am capable of. It is where my strength ends and boundaries are, that I can give everything into the hands of my Father and He can come with His Spirit and His sovereignty to reign in order to save and restore. What a great God we serve!

Unfortunately my phone was not able to get a clear picture of Nana and her mother during the night, but at least you can now imagine their faces to the story. We commit Nana and her mother into the hands of our Father who as a Shepherd will take care of His sheep.