This is a talk I gave to the 4-12 year-olds at Grandview Christian Church, who are doing an awesome project: collecting money to buy insecticide-treated bed nets.
Miss Anna told me about this awesome project that you were doing to collect money to buy bed nets for poor children in Africa, and I was so excited that I asked her for the opportunity to talk about one of my worst enemies…
-Which do you think is the most dangerous animal in Africa?
-The answer is…the mosquito. He looks scary here, but this little guy is almost microscopic; you’ve heard him, buzzing in your ears on a summer night, leaving those tiny welps on your exposed arms or legs. The mosquito, fairly harmless and annoying to us, but in much of the world it holds this even tinier, truly microscopic killer: malaria. The malaria parasite invades your own red blood cells, just like it’s doing here, and keeps them from doing their job of carrying oxygen and nutrients to your body’s cells. 
-Malaria kills about one million people per year, which averages out to about 2 people per minute. Most of the people who die from malaria are kids under 5 years old, and it is the leading infectious cause of death. In Kenya, where we’re moving, almost 1 in 10 children die before their 5th birthday, in Sierra Leone, it’s 1 in 5. Josiah turned 5 years old today, and we celebrated.
-So what can we do about this?
-That brings us to this campaign: this girl Esther is a Maasai girl living in the Rift Valley, an area in Kenya where there is a lot of malaria. She lives in a hut next to a slow-moving river. They need the water to survive, but having stagnant water standing in the rainy season is a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, and subsequently for epidemic malaria. Having this bed net that she’s peeking out from under gives her a much higher chance of surviving to adulthood, and to living without malaria. 
-Another extremely high-risk group is pregnant women. This woman: Mma Makutsi is protecting from that same village, and she is protecting herself, her current children, and her future children from malaria. Pregnant women get sicker, and even get more mosquito bites than other adults. And protecting them protects the baby, and gives the baby its best chance to be healthy.
-So, why should the church do something about malaria? Here are two maps of the world. On the top map in red are the places in the world where there is malaria. The green places in the world have no malaria transmission. On the blue map at the bottom, the darker blue places are the places in the world where there are the most Christians. You can see that there is a lot of overlap between these red areas and dark blue areas. These are our brothers and sisters in Christ who suffer from this deadly disease. They need our help. Also, if you look at Asia, and where the red area of malaria covers, it’s the area of the world where there is almost no Christians. This is the unreached mission field of the church. And because God has been so good to us, we can be good to others.
-And when we are being good to others in need, it’s as though we are being good to Jesus himself. Here’s how he tells the story:
No comments:
Post a Comment