We were driving back from the abattoir yesterday and I saw a Kombi that struck me as funny. It had a phrase on the back, like many of them often do. "Train up a child -Proverbs 22:6". That made me laugh, mainly because it strikes me as a very Swazi editing of the verse.
The whole verse is "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it." But from the amount of children around, you would probably believe that the command is just "raise children." I thought that was pretty funny.
Of course, the situation is a bit sadder than that. The ratio of kids to adults is getting to be a problem. So many middle-aged people have died that the amount of orphans has exploded. If my parents both died, my sisters would go live with my grandparents until I got situated and we worked something out. And it really would be a manageable situation. But now imagine that each set of grandparents has to deal with all of their grandchildren. And grandparents aren't always around either, so neighbors and distant family have to step in. Pretty quickly, everyone is taking care of kids.
That quickly became more serious than it was yesterday in the car, but it's definitely a situation that needs prayer.
-Ben
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