A haven of light

We left Living Waters Village (LWV) last week on Thursday morning after a stay of just over two weeks.

Our departure was quite emotional. At 4.30am, I heard voices under our window and when I went outside, Beno and Keri were sitting there already. Di told me afterwards that they had probably been up since 4am. They were quite subdued, especially Keri, who did not show his usual beautiful smile for most of the next hour. A bit later, Mondan and Tina also arrived, together with several other children.

The bus arrived late, after 5.30am, so all of us could make the most of our time with the children, cuddling them and taking the final pictures. We also said goodbye to Di and other people (like Bethany, who stayed on for another 5 weeks) and off we went. 

Di told me that saying goodbye to visitors whom the children got attached to, often helps to release traumas and emotions from the past.  She explains to them that friendship is in the heart and that distance doesn’t matter. She also prays with them for themselves and for the visitors who have gone home, which helps them get over their sadness.

This trip has been a rollercoaster of emotions and experiences, which started and ended with what felt like a real rollercoaster, although they called it a bus…  As someone said, maybe the journey has to be so rough to shake us out of our “comfort” zone.

Kalis and another young man called Yacob accompanied us back to Kuching, a journey of 300 miles. The trip was quite eventful again: first a large component fell off from somewhere but the driver just picked it up and continued for another hour before having it fixed at a garage; a bit later he ran completely out of petrol, asked for someone’s motor bike and drove off to get petrol; and later there was another defect in the middle of nowhere, which he managed to fix. After a trip of 11 hours, we arrived at the border, half an hour before it closed. Another hour and a half later we arrived back in Kuching at the house where we had stayed upon our arrival in Malaysia.

Ronny was there to welcome us. We helped to unload some material which had arrived by truck, we helped put the March newsletter in envelopes and had dinner with him, which was lovely.  He talked to us about the children and how a lot of them have loads of emotional baggage, when they arrive at LWV, because they have had very traumatic experiences, due to the occult practices which happen in the villages. The evil forces are very real in the jungle…

But LWV is a strong bastion against that, built on prayer! Praying is as natural to the children as food or drink – they start with a prayer meeting early in the morning (where they always pray for their sponsors, for the ministry, for their families and the people in their villages, so that they would come to the Lord, etc.), they pray before every meal, there’s a prayer before starting work and no doubt there are prayers in school (but the school was closed for the holidays whilst we were there), and before going to bed the children pray with the other children in their bedroom.  Children as young as 11 years lead the prayer meeting in the morning and when there’s prayer, it’s not just general, but the children are encouraged to pray out loud for specific things, e.g. for someone who is ill. There’s a huge map of the world in the Training Center and sometimes they pray for a certain country – one morning Ronny announced that we would all pray for Japan, because the potential for the gospel is huge there at the moment, due to the despair that the tsunami has brought, but apparently not enough missionaries go – the next morning, Ingrid got an email from a missionary whom she knows and who is normally active in Africa, saying that he had decided to go to Japan!...

The whole ministry has been built on prayer, because Ronny started out with no money and the daily costs at present are huge.  God has been so faithful and has always provided.  The dentist who is there now was planning to go after Christmas, but God told her to wait; the week we arrived, God told her it was time to go.  And who was in LWV when she arrived there? A retired dentist from Belgium, Gisella, who was able to help her!

We spent Friday in Kuching.  At 8am, we helped Ronny and his people load a truck full of materials and after they had left, we went to the town for some sightseeing.

The next morning, we got up at 3.30am, left at 4.30am to the airport, flew to Kuala Lumpur at 6am, where we arrived one and a half hours later. We had to spend 6 hours at the airport there, because our plane to London was delayed for 3 and a half hours. Luckily, they had a Starbucks coffee shop! Finally, we arrived at Heathrow after 8pm and got home around 10.30pm, after a journey of 24 hours.

It was lovely to be back home, but my thoughts kept and keep going back to the children whom we left behind at the other side of the world.  They have blessed us much more than I could ever have imagined and I’m so thankful to God for a place like Living Waters Village, a haven of light for all those little ones in the middle of a dark world, from which they are being rescued…

I can definitely recommend everyone to go and spend some time there – it’s a wonderful, faith building, humbling experience, when you see how the people and the children there trust in Tuhan (the Lord)!

Thank you all for your support and your emails.

God bless.

Luc