A most inspirational woman

Come with me back to the days when teachers wrote on blackboards and students used slate and chalk. It certainly was a step back in time when I visited this rural school in the back blocks of Burkina Faso. But children are children wherever they are. Although a bit overwhelmed by this strange white lady with a camera, once outside they were as fun loving, mischievous and noisy as any children you could meet.
 
I loved their beautiful smiling faces but what impacted me most was the way they were treated with such love, respect and dignity … for many of them that was a first time experience.
 
Each child had a disability of some sort … deaf … blind … or physically disabled, yet unlike most disabled children in their culture, these children were being given an education and training which will enable them to earn a living and live independently.

​I wandered around the large dusty campus, grateful for the scattered palm trees that gave shade from the relentless heat. On one side a clinic, providing physical therapy was throbbing with activity … children being assessed, therapy given and aids produced to enable mobility …  physio assistants coming and going on home visits to those unable to travel to the clinic.
 
Fifteen hundred children are cared for on and off campus. I let the enormity of that truth sink in … 1500 lives transformed … children who would have no other alternative than to beg for the rest of their lives are now being given the skills to live with purpose and dignity.

Francoise with one of the blind students

It all began in 1989 when a French missionary nurse midwife named, Francoise, met a young disabled boy named, Moussa. Francoise was working at a small rural hospital in Mahadaga at the time. She found Moussa a wheelchair and couldn’t believe the difference it made in his life. She nursed him back to health, saw him through an education and he is now a laboratory assistant at the very hospital where they first met.
 
Francoise had a heart for handicapped children in a culture where they are marginalised and often discarded because they are unable to work; a ‘burden’ on the family already struggling in poverty.  She helped a number of them but realised that so much more needed to be done and she couldn’t do it alone. God gave her a vision for a centre where these children could be helped. For more than 20 years this quiet, self-effacing lady has worked tirelessly, with the help of SIM (an international missionary organisation) and other supporters and staff to create this Help for the Handicapped Centre where lives are changing and blossoming every day.

The girls were proud to show me their weaving and tie dying, the boys less keen to display their woodwork. There were dressmaking and tailoring classes for older children and later I had the joy of visiting a tiny tailoring shop which one of the school graduates has set up alongside the main road through the town. He is now training another younger boy who is also totally deaf. 

I wandered home along that same dirt road, oblivious to the passing parade of animals, people, carts and motorbikes. My heart and mind were elsewhere … the joy in a blind girl’s smile, the pride and excitement on the face of the girl behind the loom and the inspiration of this woman who has committed her whole life to transforming the lives of those in greatest need.
 
The love in that place is palpable. I don’t think I have ever experienced the love of Jesus in such a practical and tangible way as I did there. Love lavished on children society rejects. They are taught about a Saviour who loves them and then get to experience his love, not just in words, but in life-changing care.
 
What a reflection of the way Jesus loved ... the marginalised and rejected ... the blind and lame ... loved and valued without reserve. 

A class of sight impaired children with their teacher