I have a ring on my finger. (Relax, Melody. It's on my pinkie.) It's a bead ring - little black and white beads circled up on a bit of string. It happened like this. Tuesday morning, our team did an impromptu VBS at Pastor Noel's orphanage. It was great fun. We started out doing this dancing chant/echo thing with a dozen or so girls and ended singing "Jesus Loves Me" in Creole with almost 100 children. As we were leaving, a little girl pushed her way through the crowd, grabbed hold of my hand, and jammed a little black and white circlet on my pinkie. I know the little girl. Every time I go to the orphanage, she dashes up and gives me a hug. She always sits with me during church, and she hits and kicks the other children who try to hold my hand. Her name is Nunu.
Nunu is one of 22 girls at Pastor Noel's orphanage. She is five years old. She likes to play with jewelry, dance, and get in trouble. She bites when she's upset with you. When Nunu was very young, her mother died. Her father struggled to provide for her, but ultimately came to the conclusion that it was impossible. Not enough money, not enough food, not enough anything. He would have to kill her. So, he took his 3-year old daughter, boarded a tap-tap, and set a destination. If no one intervened between now and where he was going, his daughter would die. He was almost there when a Christian lady climbed into the tap-tap. When she learned what the father was planning to do, she immediately begged to rescue the girl and take her to Pastor Noel's orphanage. This is Nunu's heritage.
Two years later, this little girl whose mother is dead and whose father abandoned her is giving away her favorite homemade jewelry to a foreign white lady who's only known her for a month.
I look at the ring on my pinkie, and I see fingers intertwining. Nunu's and mine, Haitian and American, black and white. I see light in the midst of dark, hope in despair, life in death. I see the power of Jesus to rescue a condemned life and build up hope, faith, joy, and love. I see a rainbow where there was only a storm, stars where there used to be only black sky, a rose where there ought to be ashes. I look at this ring, and I see Nunu.
