Regina is the senior gal her at the orphanage. She, like her brother Lazaru, has been here for a looong time. Everybody, guys and girls alike, they look up to her, seek out her advice and will generally just hang around her if not much is going on. For me, she’s usually the one I go to when I need a good dose of neighborhood gossip because she always seems to know everything that’s going on. A couple months ago I got the story of how a guy that lives down the hill from us that paid the witchdoctor to bless him and make sure he’d remain wealthy as long as he lived. As rumor has it the witchdoctor told him that as long as he wore pants with holes in them he’d remain rich. The man wore pants with holes in them and remained rich until the he died, a full 6 days later.
She, like her brother Lazaru, has been here longer than anybody else and everybody knows it. You may have heard me mention in the last post that she is 21, and I know a lot of you wondered why the heck do you have somebody living in an orphanage when they’re 21 and can fend for themselves.
Well, the reason we just don’t dump a kid back on the streets or in the jungle when they turn 18 has to do with what our goal is here. I’m sure there’s some fancy mission statement lying around the stack of papers I have here, but the goal is this: to transform lives. Sometimes we go out and find kids, while other times they are brought to us. Their lives already destroyed and headed for death until we step in, ransoming them, and literally pull them from their old life and giving them a new one. Along the way we teach them, instruct them, correct them, sometimes often discipline them, and provide them with the chance to have a future full of opportunity and joy. Spiritually, we do the exact same thing. Or, rather, Jesus does it. When their entire life’s journey is a mirror of the Gospel, it becomes easy for them to see why they need Jesus.
But just as the spiritual journey is sometimes always full of bumps in the road, the journey in life is also. All of the kids here are aware of that fact, and so is Regina. Aside from the normal everyday pressures for our girls to get married young (we’re talking 15, 16 years old over here) or to hurry up and find a man before you’re undesirable (20, 21 yrs), there’s the normal everyday pressure to be cheating in school, sleeping around, or doing “favors” for teachers to get good grades.
But Regina has a very good head on her shoulders, and God has remained faithful to transform her future. The first big piece of that transformation took place a little over a year ago and she found out she got into the Teacher’s Training college after finishing 10th grade with exceptionally high marks. As I’ve mentioned before, grade ten is kind of the benchmark around here for having higher-ed opportunity. This last year she went to Teacher’s college in the morning, and continued with 11th grade in the evening. This earned her the nickname “The Professor”.
This December she completed teacher’s training so the staff, her brother Lazaru (pictured below), and a couple of her close friends here at the orphanage went out to dinner at the Millenium Hotel, the best restaurant in the city (it’s really good, but the bar is set pretty low around here). It was an occasion they’ll never forget.
If Regina has a flaw, it’s that she has a heart like The Grinch (three sizes too big). That’s why its been hard to see her go through the last month. Teaching college is supposed to come with a guaranteed job teaching in the province you trained in after you graduate. This was amazing for her, since jobs here are harder to come by than dinosaur bones at the Creationist Museum. Unfortunately, after graduation, the ominous announcement came from the Education Ministry that teacher jobs were being trimmed in January. In their words it was not that big of a deal because average class sizes were only going to rise by 6% from 66 children per class to 70. And no, that is not a typo.
Regina was supposed to find out on January 6th where she’d be teaching this year. That day came and went. It wasn’t until a full week later that she found out that they didn’t have a job for her this year. She was obviously depressed,us too, but took it knowing that it is because God has something better planned for her. Then, about a week ago she got word that she’d gotten a position teaching in Zambezia Province to the south in the district of Molocue. This was great news because it meant a job, and it was in a rural district which is where Regina wanted to be, AND it was only about an hour away from her hometown Murrupula, where Regina has lots of extended family.
On Monday she packed her bags and headed out of town in the morning on a bus out to Molocue. She was headed there with about 4 of her classmates, one of which is a member of our church who all the kids know and love. She said her goodbyes and it was another happy/sad moment all wrapped up in one of those awkward Mozambican goodbyes I’m still not used to. Regina went off to make a life for herself.
That’s why I was a little more than stunned to return home from my errands Wednesday morning to find Regina sitting on the porch of the girls house, bags in hand. She told me that when she arrived in the district the school administrator told her that enrollment for the year was down and they eliminated the school she was going to teach at. If I could describe the look on her face, I would, but it was just to full of anguish and mourning. For all the grace that God has given to have gotten her through everything to get to this point, and the blessing that was teacher’s college, it looked like the recent roadblocks were finally starting to get to her.
Regina’s story is far from over, and I’ll be sure to update you guys on anything that happens. In the meanwhile, here’s how you can pray for Regina with us:
- Regina got back and has continued with school has just started 12th grade (school year here starts in Jan). If she ends up staying in school the remainder of the year pray that she would not become weary of her studies and finish strong.
- Obviously all of us here believe wholeheartedly that Jesus has something great in store for Regina, but all of us want that thing to be a teaching job right now. Pray that if God has a teaching position right now that doors would be open. I feel like Regina has better faith and patience than the rest of us on this issue, and pray that she holds fast to her faith.
- With potentially another year here in the orphanage and going to school will come increased pressure from friends and family to go and get married or at the very least “just go and get pregnant already”. Pray that Regina will remain strong in her convictions and continue to set an example for the rest of the girls in the orphanage. Regina has been an incredible witness to the girls that you can indeed make it to 21 without two kids from two different guys, a goal which a lot of their friends outside the orphanage fail to reach.
[UPDATE] As of posting, Regina returned to Zambezia Tuesday morning after being told that another school had opened up positions. Pray that if this indeed true is true AND it where God wants her that she would be able to get set up there. She'll need to find a house close to school and then furnish it, get food, utilities (if they're available) and be living out on her own. If anyone is capable of doing these things it is certainly Regina. And she'll be doing all of this with our financial and moral support. If she gets a job she won't get paid till after three months. Teachers are paid after every three months presumable so that if they want to quit they'll have to wait longer for a paycheck to come around before walking away from the job.
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