Joy In The Journey
by Janice Combs
"I don´t know where it is…I don´t know how to spell it…I don´t know how
to pronounce it. Now, Lord, why do I want to go there?" This is my attitude upon finding myself at a planning meeting for a mission trip to Central Asia.
After much prayer by many and amazing "coincidences", I knew I was to go to this distant land. But, "Why?" I asked
repeatedly. An email came from someone unknown to us at the time and it was requested that I bring my testing equipment to check the hearing
of children in the orphanages. Now, I knew "Why" and my heart sang!
"I can hear! I can hear!" shouted the children with fingers pointing toward their ears greeted our workers after our visit there. Confirmation and beginning of a most amazing work not planned by man. With cooperation of a foundation who would provide hearing aid kits for contributions of $100 each, we had arrived at the orphanage in the foot hills of the Tien Shim Mountains on a cold and dreary day with 27 hearing aids. The team had checked the hearing of more than 500 children in two other orphanages.
"I can hear them singing!" exclaimed fourteen year old Emmie in South Africa in 2003. Nine year old Bongacuzzi was mesmerized by his own voice as he sang to himself all afternoon after being fitted with hearing aids. Both children attended a small private school, a haven of safety and love, outside a squalid squatters camp that stretched as far as the eye could see; and both had severe to profound hearing loss. "We would never have checked their hearing", we were told.
Strange guttural sounds emit from astonished faces and eyes become alive with excitement as children in a deaf school in yet another part of
Central Asia discover their own voices. This journey necessitated my going without a team into a valley reputed to be volatile; and indeed, it
was. It erupted in violence with the deaths of many soon after my visit there. This confirms God´s timing as I realize that, if I had not gone
just at that time, I would never have been able to take 84 hearing aids to this particular deaf school and deliver many from their silent world.
Working feverishly to test as many as possible and hearing the noise of the crowded waiting room at the clinic, I was prompted to pause and look
up from the paperwork in front of me. Four sets of vacant eyes were transfixed on me. These children, all from the same family, had been
transported from a distant village by the clinic traveling the serpentine roads in their dilapidated vehicle. "They are all deaf" I had been told.
Indeed, as I placed the headphones on the ears of the sixteen year old holding a fussy infant, there was no response and I knew she had never
heard the cry of her baby. The same results came for the fourteen and nine year old sisters. I then gently placed the headphones on the six
year old boy clinging fearfully to the skirt of his sister. Again, no 
results. "Lord," I cry silently within, "what do I do for these expectant
faces?" He reminds me of the experiences in the deaf schools in Central Asia and I fit them all with hearing aids. They leave the clinic with
huge smiles on their faces. "Nueva vida!" was the shout from the ancient weathered man who leaped from his chair where he had sat silently the
entire day waiting as we took care of the children first.
Language or culture does not exist when we journey at the invitation of our Heavenly Father. We do not create the journeys; but, He, in His kindness, gently whispers, "I am going…..would you like to go with me?"Through the generous hearts in Southside Baptist Church, we have journeyed many times to Central Asia, Venezuela and South Africa. We have taken almost five hundred hearing aids, donated testing equipment and needed supplies and batteries to communities, orphanages and deaf schools so that all may hear and be touched by the loving hand of our Father.