Sometimes the sad stories can be almost overwhelming. I heard one this week that broke my heart. Fortunately it doesn’t have a tragic ending – at least not yet.
This week a 19-year-old girl showed up at one of our after-school programs in Red Hill. I had met this young woman once before, but otherwise had never seen her, so I asked a local pastor what her story was.
He said she was recently dumped by a boyfriend and had attempted to end her life with a drug overdose. She comes from a broken home, so a family in Red Hill has taken her in and is caring for her as if she were their own daughter. (A remarkable story in itself, considering that most people in Red Hill are so poor they can barely feed their own families.)
Sadly, this girl is not alone in her pursuit of fruitless relationships. Ingrained in the culture here is a system in which men, using what little money they have, provide food and clothing to young ladies (and older ones, too) in exchange for sex. The consequences are predictable, yet still shocking. Besides the emotional train wrecks, there are devastating physical effects. Because these guys often have multiple partners, and any one of them could have HIV, the disease spreads like wildfire. And there are many unplanned pregnancies that result in children who have no chance of growing up with a responsible father.
Working in such a culture always feels like an uphill battle, so I have to break it down into a mentality of “one day, one step, at a time,” praying and trusting that God will have His way and bring transformation to people’s hearts and ultimately the entire community.
And I do see Him at work. On Tuesday at our weekly “Teen Club” – where we teach that fulfillment is found not in boyfriends and girlfriends, but only in the living God who loves us with an everlasting love – we had a solid turnout of nearly 20 kids. Some days they’re less attentive than others, but on this day they were tuned in to our guest speaker, 23-year-old Morgan Eddington from LowCountry Community Church. Morgan shared a brutally honest message about his life before and after he met Jesus as his savior, and how he and his fiancé have pledged abstinence until they are married in two years. The room was quiet and the kids were clearly affected by the seriousness of the subject matter.
Morgan has been a huge asset to the LCC team all week, but even if God brought him to Cape Town only to share this one message, he did his job and he did it well.
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