I am currently on Month 2 in Malawi, one of the poorest countries in Africa.

I continue to see some of the saddest situations I have ever seen, and the Lord continues to wreck my world for his sake. Wrecked, also known as destroyed, devastated, shattered. Sounds pretty accurate.

Last week was a hard one for me. I saw so many situations that absolutely broke my heart.

My team goes to an after-school program every day where we teach and feed the students bread and juice before sending them home for the day. One day that I went, I was grading papers, and I quickly realized that I couldn’t even figure out how to do this math. I asked the teacher, and he explained it to me, and I still didn’t understand. These children were being taught math in a way that didn’t even make sense to me.

As I was grading, I noticed that out of 30 children, none of them were getting answers right. I was trying to help them, but I think I was only confusing them even more. I started to ask the children simple addition questions, but they couldn’t answer me. These children were 9 and 10 years old and couldn’t answer 7+1.

That same afternoon, we were passing out bread, and we ran out of bread very quickly. We didn’t have enough bread for the rest of the children, and the look on their faces was something that will never escape my mind. Knowing that some of those children went home without food until the next day broke my heart.

My team and I are also doing construction daily. Each day, I go and visit James, the foreman of the construction project. When I was talking to him, we started to talk about how much these guys make. He went on to tell me that they make the equivalent of about $2 per day.

These men work so hard each and every day, and it wrecked my world to learn this. Some of the men come to work and wrap bags around their feet because they don’t have the proper shoes to work in.

My team and I felt that there were so many needs for us to meet, so we decided to take them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and juice each day. The first day that we did this, the men ran. They ran to us to get sandwiches from us.

The Lord has completely wrecked my world this month. Malawi is such a beautiful country, but I have seen some of the saddest things I have ever seen here. I am learning how to see the Lord through everything that I see, even though in some situations, it seems nearly impossible.

Lord, I am thankful. I am so blessed. I have so much gratitude for the life you have so graciously given me.

Keia Blair is a Seymour native who attends Cincinnati Christian University. During her nine-month mission trip around the world, she is submitting a series of blogs that will appear in The Tribune. Send comments to [email protected].