Imagine that you are a child. It shouldn’t be hard, you were one once.
Imagine yourself in a dusty little village without electricity or running water. Your bare feet pad well-worn paths down to the water. You fill your plastic bucket along the muddy river-bank and your little arms tremble as you heave it onto your head. You struggle to balance the full bucket as you trudge back up the path. Carefully you lower the heavy bucket, trying not spill any as you place it at the door of your mud house so that your mother can prepare breakfast for you and your siblings over the small fire that she is lighting. She puts your baby brother in your arms and you understand the expectation. You hoist his chubby body onto your slight hip and carry him to the grass mat under the tree and sit with him watching the chickens peck at the ants in the dirt. You’ve never seen a picture book let alone a cartoon on television. You’ve never owned a toy. You’ve never even owned a piece of new clothing. You’ve never flown on a swing or down a slide or been to a park of any kind. You’ve never even ridden inside a vehicle. But you are a child just like every child who has ever lived. You have an imagination that wants to be freed and you have energy that wants to be turned into fun.
This summer an EastARM team made up of two Canadian churches will come together to build a playground in Kipo village. A place deep in the Rufiji where our Dinner Club program seeks to meet the physical and spiritual needs of hundreds of children. These watoto of Kipo have never seen anything like what will happen this summer. To their eyes it will be a miracle.
I suppose that someone might ask questions like: Does a playground work towards EastARM’s goals to reach the unreached? Is there spiritual significance to such a thing? Is it a good use of resources? The answer is Yes.
Of course I could tell you that there is strategy involved. A playground is a type of permanent structure that solidifies our presence on our property in the village. It is proof of investment to the village leaders. It will further attract the kids to the Dinner Club site and allow us to connect with them more regularly. But it’s not really about the strategy. It is about serving and loving the children in the Rufiji as we love ourselves. It is about loving them as if they were our own children. It is about fighting to preserve the innocence and imagination of childhood as vigorously as we fight back darkness in all of its forms.
Childhood is not a societal construct, it is real. It is essential. In biological terms, it is the time of life when neural pathways are being rapidly formed. In scriptural terms, it is the time when a person is being set on their “way”. No matter how much work is done later in life, one can never completely undo or overcome the way that childhood has moulded them. For better or worse.
“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6
There is an amount of freedom and fun that is crucial to childhood, especially early childhood. Of course, as children develop the balance must be adjusted, responsibilities and expectations increased so that by the time a child has become an adolescent and then an adult, he is prepared to be useful to his Creator. But resilient and capable adults were once happy, secure children. Even psychological studies show this to be the case (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31259588/). But we don’t need studies to tell us what we can observe with our eyes and what God Himself tells us about the nature of Joy.
In Nehemiah 8:10 we learn that “the Joy of the Lord is your strength…” Our Father is so kind that His recipe for strength is JOY; and, as our Father knows how to give us good gifts, so we learn to give good gifts to our children and the children that He gives us to care for.
The Rufiji children need this Joy in their little lives. They were created for it and we reflect the heart of God when we protect it and facilitate it.
