Night Hunt

I just got home from wandering around the city for about 4 hours, looking for street kids. Me, Amanda, Cara, and two of the uncles (David and Laurence) wanted to find kids who are not in our programs. The easiest way to know if a child is a street kid is to see him on the streets sleeping. To do that, you need to wait until they are settled in for the night. We started our looking for boys around 8pm, but the city was still to active for the boys to lay down. These kids are beaten or arrested if they are "in the way" of anyone, so they have to wait until everyone else is asleep before they can go to bed. That means that they wait until all the people selling things on the streets are in bed (and they were still selling in some places at 10pm) and the boys also need to leave before people start selling in the morning (so very early). The boys sleep on sacks, and we saw many with bags on their heads to keep warm. Right after we started, we found one of the kids from our program sleeping. We woke him up, and asked if he was okay- he was, except I think he was mad we woke him up. Pretty soon after, we found a new boy named Alex who was 11. Alex decided to lead us all over, looking for other boys to come to the programs. We found a good number of boys, although not as many as we hoped (a bunch of them had been arrested the night before, so they were afraid to be seen). We ended up seeing a few boys from our programs too, which is always nice. We gave all the kids we met chapatis and mandazies (I don't know how to spell that, but they are tortillas and doughnut-like bread). After, we prayed over all the boys we had met, and the ones still on the streets. I am so excited to see which ones show up, and I hope they tell their friends! Although this job is hard at times, I am so lucky to get to do what I do. It always encourages me to know that Jesus knows each of these boys by name, and He loves them before we ever meet them. We do not serve a God who is absent; Jesus cares, and each night He covers them with His love, and He does not forget His children.
On another note, we had SO much fun looking for the kids! I find myself laughing at the ridiculous things that happen to us here, and am so lucky to have friends to laugh with me. Tonight, I fell in a sewage hole, and had to buy water bottles to clean my foot. At one point Amanda asked me to go buy caveras (little bags to hold things in) from "that woman". Not knowing what woman she was talking about, I asked a respectable businesswoman for a cavera, because I didn't see the little stand just behind us that was selling them (the woman I asked was so confused!). Other highlights included Cara grabbing Amanda's arm and dragging her into deadly traffic, claiming "you've got to cross sometime", Cara almost getting urinated on by a man who just whipped it out without looking and started peeing on the street, and me yelling "chi, chi???" (basically "what are you looking at?") at strangers who were staring at our kids because there were white people around (it was super rude of me, but these people act like we are in the zoo sometimes, I swear). I know I am forgetting so much, and I know people at home reading this won't understand why these things are SO funny, but I promise that when they are happening, they are hysterical. Life here is full of surprises, and although there is so much heartbreak, there is also so much joy- TIA :)