"We Were Ourcasts"

Dear Heroes,

The following entry is from Dr. Kurtis Sauder, from the Board of Directors of Grassroots Heroes International.


My travel coffee mug is getting old and leaky so today I ordered this really cool one with a black bear on it for $25. I was pretty excited about my new mug because I live in the mountains and enjoy seeing bears. It seemed like a way to take a piece of the Blue Ridge Mountains with me when I leave home. It’s kind of pricy for a mug but it is heavy duty and I figured it will last a long time and it is still a lot cheaper to make my own coffee and take it with me than to stop and buy a cup on the way to work in the morning.

After surfing for mugs and prior to our Grassroots Heroes board meeting tonight, I was reading reports sent by Vincent Luwizhi about the different projects going on in the Gripps farm community – animal husbandry, tailoring, and adult literacy to name a few. Among the reports of all of these great projects, one paragraph stood out to me and I read it over and over. It was a quote from a woman who is in the adult literacy class. “I appreciate so much for I came empty-minded, but now I know the entire alphabet in saying and writing. I will continue coming until I know how to read. It is my prayer to Tanya, Leland, and Vincent for coming miles and miles to help us here in Grips for we were the outcasts before you people. I shall continue coming to learn and know the Bible. May God have favor upon you with much blessing and a prosperous new year.”

And at the meeting, when we discussed the budget for 2011, a number stood out to me – $25 per month. That is roughly what it costs to send a child to school. For the price of my coffee mug, an orphan living on his own, without hope in a mud house, can go to school, can have hope for the future.

Sometimes it feels like we are spinning our wheels. Things don’t work like they are supposed to, disagreements arise, and I wonder if we are making a difference. We sometimes respond with resignation, “TIA” (this is Africa). But consider the woman who no longer feels like an outcast and the orphan with the opportunity to go to school. There is an impact on these people. No one ever said that helping people out of poverty, despair, and ignorance was easy. But Jesus did say, “Whatever you have done for the least of these my children, you have done for Me.”

Kurtis L. Sauder, MD