Life's challenges

The two girls on the left were able to find someone who donated money to help them stay
another month.

Well…It seems like more and more things keep happening that keep us depending more and more on GOD. It has been exactly one month since i came back to Lebanon, and a little over three weeks since Suzanne died. In the last week we had our first full week of school (the week before was all introductory stuff. This week we are fully into the school year). In this short period of four days, we have had one family leave to go back to Syria, and four more that have said that they can't cope with all the financial strains here. With two family we were able to find money to help them stay another month, hoping that the men of the family would be able to find another job soon. 

The boy on the left in the red shirt, and the boy in the middle in the
black shirt are both part of families that may not be able to stay much
longer because of not being able to pay rent.

One of the families has a baby about three months old, in two of the other families the mothers are pregnant, and the final one just had all the financial strain of a burial dumped on them, leaving no money with which to pay the rent.

Rent, rent, rent...this is almost always a topic of discussion among the families. This evening I was at the house of our new Arabic teacher (who is also the Aunty of one of our kids). The house consists of one room (maybe 6 x 12 ft) and a tiny kitchen…For this "house," they pay $400 a month. This family is lucky...they have more than one family member working and can cover the cost of both rent and food and other necessities...but not all families have this luxury. One of the other homes I visited this afternoon was one of the last homes I would have thought would be having problems. 

The oldest son was supposed to be attending our english class for teenagers, but he never showed up. When we got to his house we were greeted by the two youngest children who are in the school, and we had a wonderful time visiting with them. While visiting they told us that they were probably not going to be able to stay in Lebanon for much longer, because their Dad had been out of a job for two months without success in finding a new job (there is a lot of prejudices against Syrians here), things were getting soo bad that they had had to borrow money for rent, and now the oldest son (around 15 years old) had found a job and had to quit school in order to earn money to help his family eat. 

When I decided to return to Lebanon for a second year, I knew that things would be different this year. I told my parents and others that I had a feeling that this year would be harder for some reason... Now I am seeing that indeed things have become more challenging. We are all being twisted and squeezed in ways that we never thought we would be, yet GOD has never left us to fend for ourselves, or to make our way alone... Thank you to all of you who have been lifting us up in prayer. Thank you to those who have sent money to help with different projects. 

Now I would like to ask you all to pray and to ask others to pray for the work that GOD is doing here. Pray that GOD will give us the strength to do HIS will, and to be willing to let HIM stretch us and teach us whatever we can learn from the situations life brings. Pray that we will be able to help wherever we can and that GOD will help us to think of others before ourselves. Pray that GOD will send the help we/our families need to get through the tough times ahead. I don't see things getting any better with the war and all the other things going on around us. But pray that GOD will give us all HIS peace during all the turmoil around. And pray that if there is something that anyone of us can do, on top of prayer, that HE will show us what that is.

Click here to see the facebook page of the Center and more about these kids, and more updates about the school.