"was blind but now I see"

It's World AIDS day today so I thought I'd share a blog post that I wrote after my first week living at an orphanage in South Africa for children living with HIV. If you'd like to know more about Rehoboth visit their site: www.rehoboth.org.za. For the rest of my blog posts about my time in South Africa, check out my old blog: www.isaiah4817-southafrica.blogspot.com.

May 22, 2010

Just finished my first real week in SA! God is good. I can hardly wait to tell you all about it... we'll see how much I can cram in to my time at the internet cafe!

I've sung "amazing grace" a million times. Last week, I think I understood it for the first time. One afternoon I was out playing with a bunch of the kids on the jungle gym when Aphiwe toddled up crying because he was lost from the group of kids. Five-year-old Aphiwe is an orphan with HIV who is also blind. He had never met me so whenever I grabbed his hand he immediately started touching my arms, hands and face and smelling me all over. He asked for my name and hasn't forgotten it yet. He climbed up into my lap and then started singing "Amazing Grace." How awesome to hear those words coming from his mouth:
"Amazing grace! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found. Was blind but now, I see."

Hope, joy and love are all very alive here.

Kids are funny. You can tell that all 52 of the kids are drilled in the Gospel. I was out on the jungle gym when group of pre-schoolers came up with a dead frog "crucified" to a cross made out of sticks and a broken balloon. Can't help but laugh. :) The kids love playing with my curly hair and keep asking me why my hair looks like that. Yesterday the girls gave me a new hair-do using sticks and sandbox shovels as brushes and combs. Yikes!

Kids are survivors. Most of the kids here are not just living with HIV. Most come from dark pasts including malnutrition, sexual abuse, domestic abuse and so on. One little boy came to Rehoboth barely alive weighing 2.2kg at SIX months!! He's a year old now and is quite chubby but is very developmentally behind. Some were raped as babies, left in toilets or hospitals to die, some relatives don't even know the child's name. Please pray for these kids.

I have learned so much about HIV/AIDS, Africa and myself and it's only been a week. Here's are a couple of lists for you:

You know you are in Africa when (roadside edition)...
1. You smell sugar cane and chicken farms from the road instead of feed-lots.
2. You see zebras, ostridges (sp?), and monkies from the car window.
3. People are taking a nap literally ON the highway. Like on the actual road where cars are driving!!
4. A Zulu woman is walking with a matress on her head, a baby strapped to her back and bags in both hands while her no-good-lazy-non-gentleman husband is walking ahead with NOTHING in his hands.
5. Three-year-olds are walking on the side of the highway with no supervision.
6. The speed limit is 60 kilometers/hour but the taxis are driving at least 120 kph.

Each day last week I had some sort of training. Here are some of the things I learned on the "HIV/AIDS training day" and other cultural lessons.
1. Three million people die each year from AIDS (that's the population of Chicago)
2. 8000 people day per DAY from AIDS.
3. 50% of people living with AIDS in America do not know.
4. 14,000 people contract HIV each day.
5. The going rate for sex here in Kwa-Zulu Natal is about $5.

With all that said, life is so good here. I'm continually reminded of God's majesty from the children and the beautiful rolling hills outside my window. The other night I sat outside and starred at the stars. I've never seen so many in my life. Psalm 8 pretty much sums it up for me:

"Oh LORD, our Lord. How majestic is your name in all the earth. You have set your glory above the heavens. From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all the flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the sea.

Oh LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth."

-Brigid

a new creation

Well again, I find myself putting months in between my blog posts but so be it! Strangely enough my last post on Mother's day flows well to this one four months later... because now I'm starting my own journey into motherhood! :) Chris and I will become parents to a little screaming, pooping, sleep-sucking miracle in April! 

If you knew me as a little kid, you probably knew of my obsession with becoming a mother. When I was eighteen-months-old my mom tells a story of how I threw a full-blown tantrum in Toys R Us over a baby with a "real" heart-beat. From that point on, I carried my babies with me wherever I went-- all vacations, shopping trips, family walks around the park... My baby dolls even had perfect church attendance for a number of years. One of the best days of my childhood was one Ash Wednesday when the minister not only put the cross of ashes on my forehead but on my baby's little plastic forehead, too. Finally, an adult recognized that my baby was real!! 

Alas, my baby dolls eventually became socially inappropriate and I transitioned into babysitting-- my favorite middle-school Friday night. Many hours have I spent pretending to be mom to other people's kids. (And a few of them I will always count as my own.) 


And now it's finally my turn!! 

Being pregnant is the most out-of-body experience anyone could imagine. The day those (much anticipated) blue lines appeared on my pregnancy test, I knew my body had been invaded by a little alien. My appetite has been stolen and replaced by a fat, 18-year-old college boy's. (Yes, I have eaten pancakes in bed past midnight. Yes, I eat dinner at least twice a night.. usually three times.) My emotional stability has been stollen by a melodramatic teenage girl and my youthful energy has been replaced with my 94-year-old grandma's need for an early bedtime. 

Of course while you all will soon see the obvious changes to my silhouette (bye double zero jeans...), inside of me, invisible to all of us, is the most incredible creation. When my baby was only the size of a single poppy seed, his/her little heart had already started to beat. And only a month later my blueberry-sized baby was growing arms and legs! And as I type this, that little plum-sized booger is doing somersaults! 

Meanwhile I have gone to work, watched movies, baked cookies, wasted time on Facebook and painted my toenails. Not once did I concentrate on creating a tiny set of lungs for my baby. Never willed my baby's eyeballs into existence. God is making this new creation in me. I am quite literally just a vessel. 

Many years ago, God made me into a new creation by His Son's death and resurrection and made me an ambassador for Christ. "So whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come... So we are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us..." - 2 Corinthians 5:17; 20

What a miracle life is! What a miracle life in Christ is!

-Brigid  

Happy (belated) mother's day to all of you mommas out there! 

When I was a kid, I knew my mom definitely read the best stories, made the best lemonade and was obviously the best PTA mom that Belmar Elementary had ever seen. When I went off to college, my mom became my favorite phone call, my encourager in all things and a dear friend. I became more thankful for the nutritious family meals that my mom prepared for us every single evening, more grateful for the hundreds of concerts/recitals/games/tournaments that she endured for me and my brother, thankful for the hours that she spent quizzing us on our spelling words and even more hours teaching us how to be decent people. 

This mother's day I am even more grateful for my mom now that I am a wife and special-ed teacher of sorts, myself. These are a few things that she's taught me along the way (and why she wins the best mom award each year.)

1. I never knew how great Mom was at being a wife until I became a wife myself. I am still learning how to be servant-hearted to Chris when there is a pile of dishes in the sink or when ESPN is on. (I guess Mom does have a few decades of wifehood on me.) But now I can see the millions of times that she served me and my brother by serving my dad first. 

2. If you go to St. Thomas Catholic Church in Amarillo, TX, you know that my mom could be its patron saint. I feel sure that she has volunteered for every committee and has headed up quite a few of them.  In about 30 seconds I came up with this list of involvement: sunday school teacher, bible study leader, funeral dinner committee chair, youth choir fundraiser, Eucharistic minister, parish council member, Alter Guide president, women's retreat chair, gift-shop person, adoration participant, RCIA sponsor, godparent, not-to-mention all of the other untitled things she has done for our church. I remember as a kid waiting for mom to finally finish gabbing with so-and-so or running to grab the key to sell something in the gift shop, or selling raffle tickets for the next youth fundraiser. My dad used to joke that the "rapture" had happened and that mom was the only one taken.. me, my brother and dad were left behind. ;) All that to say, her example has really stuck with me. I hope that I will become an active member of my parish, a servant to my brothers and sisters in Christ.

3. My mom went back to work as a special-ed teacher when I was a 7th grader. I knew she was a good teacher then but now that I am a working woman myself, I appreciate her dedication even more. Her example inspires me to work harder for my clients and to expect to work diligently each day. I am grateful that I have had her example of how to be a working mother.

So as motherhood draws closer for me I hold her example closer so that one day I may pass on her legacy of motherhood to my children. I often think of the song "gentle woman" when I think about my mom; it's no coincidence that she is named after Jesus' mother, Mary.

Gentle woman, quiet light.
Morning star so strong and bright.
Gentle mother, peaceful dove:
Teach us wisdom, teach us love.

Autism Awareness- God's provision

So when I started this blog I thought I'd keep up with it weekly, but here I am finally starting my second post seven months after my first. About every two months I start a blog post and then never finish. (In fact, I started this post in February..) So, you all missed my unpublished posts about surviving Hurricane Sandy, hosting my in-laws for Thanksgiving, learning how to celebrate Christmas without Christmas decorations and how to love being super poor newly-weds.

And that brings us to April-- autism awareness month. Four years ago I was completely unaware of autism, people with autism or families affected by autism. This is the story of how God has directed my path towards people with autism, autism intervention and a path closer to Him.

Photo by Lauren Guy Summersett 

The spring of 2009 I was a sophomore linguistics major at Baylor without any career ideas. I was just as confused as my first-grade self that had aspirations of being a "nun and a mom." I was in the middle of final papers when I ran into an acquaintance (now friend) at Common Grounds who was writing a paper for "Child Language Acquisition" about a little boy she worked with who had autism. She told me a little about her job doing in-home ABA therapy and I asked if her client needed more therapists because I was desperate to stay in Waco over the summer. Long story short, I was hired less than a week later.

Photo by Lauren Guy Summersett

Photo by Lauren Guy Summersett

I expected to enjoy my new job, but I was surprised at how quickly silent little Adam became my friend, my secret keeper and my teacher as well as my student. It only took a few months for me to realize that I wanted to become a "Board Certified Behavior Analyst" to continue working with children with autism as my career, my passion and my ministry. By the next spring Baylor's educational psychology department started a specialization in ABA and opened the Baylor Autism Resource Center. I graduated a part of the second cohort.

Chris deferred from Princeton so I could finish my masters degree but I knew that once we got married we'd be moving up to New Jersey for Chris' graduate school. We had no connections up here but I figured that with 1 in 88 kids diagnosed with autism in the US, I'd be able to find some work. Little did I know that I was moving to the state with the highest autism rate in the country and that my apartment would be 15 minutes away from one of the oldest and most renowned clinics/schools in the world for people with autism.

Although I applied to dozens of clinics/schools months before our move, I moved up here unemployed. Chris' tuition bills were coming in quickly and my student loan debt was not going to pay itself, so I began applying for every nannying job on the Princeton job board, hoping to buy myself some time to make more connections in the autism world and begin my career. Unbelievably, the first family to call me back was a Christian family with 4-year-old triplets... two of the kiddos have autism and both go to Princeton Child Development Institute (PCDI), my ultimate dream job. Not only did I get to nanny for the family but I also was involved with the kids' home-programming and got training from their PCDI behavior analysts. 

In January a temporary position opened up at one of PCDI's group homes. The hours were a little weird, but I thought that perhaps I could get my foot in the door for a full-time position the following school year. So I applied to PCDI for the third time. This time I got an interview and got a job-- but not the temporary job that I originally interviewed for. Instead I was hired as a full-time behavior analyst/trainer in the adult life skills program at the school!! 

I love my job. Love PCDI. Love my coworkers. Love my clients. Love the top-notch training that I am receiving. I even love my cubicle. (I also love having a salary and benefits... it's way easier to pay off loans with one of those.)

I used to be worried that I would never figure out "what I wanted to be when I grew up," but God answered that question through an iced Cowboy Coffee and a final paper. I used to have no idea where to get the training I needed to work in behavior analysis, but God answered that question by beginning an ABA program literally in my backyard. I used to worry that I would fill my time during Chris' graduate school with "filler" jobs, delaying my career. Instead God brought us to the best place in the world for my career without me even knowing it. I used to worry that I'd never get the chance to work at PCDI and that I'd be stuck looking from the outside in, but instead my job position enables me to shadow and learn from one of the best behavior analysts in the country!! God is so faithful. 

I'm a super-planner, type A, control freak. I have always struggled giving up control and listening to God's direction. I am grateful that He continues to guide my path even when I'm looking the other way or am too busy "figuring it out" by myself to listen. I cannot wait to see what God has to come for me and all of my friends with autism.

-Brigid