Mission on the dumps

The dumpsite in Maputo, Mozambique, is a stinking, blackened mountain of refuse. Unlike the ones in South Africa, their refuse isn’t dealt with efficiently. Instead it sits there fermenting and decaying in the heat until someone comes along to salvage it. They either try to sell it to recycling companies, play with it, or end up eating it.

I remember the shacks well, the children, all those flies. There are families who live there; their children grow up playing with trash and hoping to find something valuable to sell. There are so many smiling children, who are filthy and hungry for both food and love, who run to us with their hands raised. So we pick them up and they eagerly cling to us. When I go into the airless, hot church, they clamour to sit on my lap and hold my hand with their sticky little ones. Their moms come in and we all sing together and worship God… even there in the midst of the trash and the smell and the ooze. Then we hand out bread. Loaves of Portuguese bread from a bag and I wonder if it’s going to be enough. Miraculously it is and I know I just witnessed a miracle, I’m sure God multiplied it!

We walk a bit on the dumpsite. Gagging and trying not to decipher the things strewn on the top-most layer. I wonder how many years of muck are layered there. We meet some people and chat with them. They look embarrassed, almost unwanted. I feel like hugging each one, and giving them my shoes, my sunhat, anything.

We leave in the missions vehicle and I feel like I haven’t showered in two months. I’m rattled to the core and completely messed up by what I saw. As I shower, I weep and wonder if I might be called to be a full-time missionary to those people living in sickness and misery and filth on the mountain of muck.

Do you know that Jesus walks there among them? Yes, He told me. He hears their prayers, and their worship moves Him. He is with them…even there. I felt Him walk there.

I return to South Africa and realise just how much we have. I’m forever scarred, challenged and undone by that mission on the dumps. I don’t think I’ll ever forget, or want to forget. I can still smell it in my memories and see the faces of those kids.

Missions are amazing. It’s an opportunity to love on the unlovable, to touch the untouchable. But the way it changes you is beyond incredible.

But we all with unveiled faces, beholding as in a mirror the Glory of God, are being transformed into that same image. From one degree of glory to another. 2 Cor 2:18