Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: PRESENT (07/16/20)
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TITLE: Oroma Grace: My Covid-19 Gift | Previous Challenge Entry
By Linda Lawrence
07/22/20 -
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Our church was sponsoring needy children at our sister church in Kampala, paying for school fees. I requested a teenage girl because I was discipling a couple of girls who were willing to be involved also. I hoped we’d develop a personal relationship with Grace through letters.
It was 2013 and Grace was 15. Her letters were sweet and loving, but they never contained answers to questions we asked—probably because so much time passed between our snail mail letters. We had hoped to email when she was in high school, but she didn’t have computer access. We wrote our last letters in 2017. Never receiving a reply, we lost contact.
To my surprise, in March 2020 I received an email from Grace. I was astounded she had a smartphone and had persevered to obtain my email address.
Grace, now 22, was visiting a school friend in rural Kenya when Covid-19 shut down the country and she was trapped, far from home. With nothing to her name but her phone, she went looking for me.
I am eager to know her as an adult-- to know her heart, her hurts, her hopes. I re-asked all the questions that had never been answered. And although writing long emails is not easy on a tiny phone screen, Grace told me her story.
Born in Northern Uganda in 1998, her family fled the terror imposed by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army and took refuge in an Internally Displaced People (IDP) camp. When Grace was two, her mother died in childbirth. Two years later, her father was killed in a car accident. She, and a brother and sister, then lived with her grandmother who also cared for other orphaned relatives.
The church in Kampala created a Uganda Jesus Village for orphans. When Grace was eight, the orphanage became her home and she was thrilled to attend school, eating three meals a day, sleeping on a mattress--all for the first time.
Grace shared her feelings about what it meant to her, receiving my introductory letters of sponsorship seven years ago. I choked up reading this: “Wow! When I read your letter, my heart was filled with joy and love because l have got a mother of whom I had never thought I would ever get. Each time before I got to bed l had to read that letter which erased the memory that I had of being an orphan. Thanks Mummy for being a mother to me. Am so grateful!!!!!”
Now, the implications unnerve me. The stretching is just beginning. God is opening my eyes to see I hadn’t loved Grace. She was only my project. But she thought I made her family. I should have read between the lines. I gave her financial support. She gave me her heart. I wrongly interpreted the gaps in our communication.
The orphanage closed, Grace moved back with her grandmother but finished high school. She then started a medical records course but had to drop out for lack of money. That’s why she is in Kenya, hoping her former schoolmate, who graduated from the course, can help her keep learning.
I gave up on her because of lack of correspondence, but now she writes almost every day. I’m feeling overwhelmed. “I'm thankful to God for the gift of a mother in my life. Many orphans out there are yearning for parental guidance but they can't find it. So l say I'm blessed. Thank you mummy for being there for me.”
Grace looks to me as her Mummy, thankful someone knows where she is and prays for her. But I’m uncomfortable. This is more than I signed up for. She wants to meet me—and my family.
When Covid-19 spread across our world, lockdown was not hard for me. I love solitude and I have all the necessities I need for comfort. But my spirit was uncomfortable with my comfort. I knew I needed to share my blessings.
Grace found me and is eager to be blessed. But her intense longing for me is stretching me way out of my comfort zone. Her expressive love exposes the shallowness of my love. Am I willing to give more of myself?
Jesus gave His all. I know I’m holding back. . .
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