Another Man's Treasure

Here in Kenya, there is no trash pickup service.  There is no truck that comes by your house to haul away your garbage.  You have to deal with it yourself.

Now wanting to be good stewards of all that God has given us, we try and re-use/recycle as much as we can.  Tracy is great about taking things like paper towel rolls and using them for crafts for Sunday school.  She also takes old boxes, like Kleenex, covers them and uses them for storage.

But inevitably we still end up with some garbage left over.  This we take out to our field for burning. 

She was waiting for me there on the road that passes the back of our property.  A little girl of 5 or 6.  She wore a pink dress of the kind little girls used to wear to birthday parties or Sunday church.  It was some sort of satin material with white frills at the edges.  It was old and worn, but it had obviously been taken care of and repaired many times.  It was perhaps the only dress she owned.  It certainly wasn’t Sunday when our meeting took place.  She was barefoot because she probably didn’t have any shoes.

So there I was at our burn pile and the little girl was looking at our garbage.  She put her little hand through our fence and beckoned me.  I don’t speak Luo and she didn’t speak English so we used the universal language of signing. 

As I dumped the trash and prepared to burn it, one by one she pointed to objects in our trash and signed for me to bring them to her.  A short piece of old string that had been used to tie the box we brought our groceries home in.  Too short to be of use to anyone but she wanted it.  An old case that used to house a DVD, she wanted that too.  A small cardboard box that had contained a vase that Tracy had purchased for a dollar at the grocery store. 

I had no idea why she wanted them, to me they were trash to be burned.  To her young mind they were gifts to be treasured.  Her little face lit up with a dazzling smile which was her way of saying thank you.  I stood there shaking my head as she walked off down the road. 

It’s hard to know what she will do with all of those objects.  Perhaps she will use them at her home.  When you live in a small mud home, just trying to survive from day to day, having a small box to store things in can be useful.  Perhaps her mother will use the string in the home in some way.

It really is true that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.  To that little girl, it must seem like we have so much to be throwing away these valuable items.  I didn’t think we had a lot, until I saw a barefoot, little girl in an old pink dress who had nothing. 

What has the Father blessed you with today?  What do you have sitting around your home that might be of great use to someone else? Simply keep your eyes open to other’s needs, you never know what a blessing you can be to others.  Perhaps we should all take time today to thank God for what He has given us.