One Mom Making a Difference in Swaziland: My Interview with Elysa MacLellan
March 17, 2009 by Marya
I’ve known Elysa MacLellan from an online homeschooling community for a number of years. She has served in Swaziland as a missionary, is a wife and homeschooling mom of 7 kids, maintains a hobby farm and has a blog here.
You have such a full life between your family, homeschooling, farm and church activities. Many people would find contentment with that. You are reaching beyond that, though. What happened?
A couple of years ago, God started doing a work in our lives. He started shaking up our world and preparing our hearts for a new work. For several years, He had let us rest. We had been thru some rough times. He gave us time to heal up and establish a good foundation. But then thru several things, including the movie Amazing Grace, Lisa Samson’s Quaker Summer, and Shane Claiborne’s Irresistable Revolution, He has woken us up out of our peaceful holding pattern and let us know that it’s time to get in the fight again.
What began to stir your heart toward Swaziland again?
My love for Swaziland has never dimmed. People who know me know that Africa is one topic they don’t want me to get started on unless they’ve got a lot of time to listen. Over the years I’ve shared about my life in Africa thru stories and songs with various community groups including libraries and churches. I pray for Swaziland and still have dreams about Africa. I still keep in touch with some of my friends from Africa and have always hoped I could return one day.
It breaks my heart to think of my beloved nation dying and I’m not there to simply hold a baby, sing songs with a child, help feed a home full of orphans, or pray with a grieving widow. I mourn over what that country is becoming. Because for me, the HIV/AIDS rate is not just a set of numbers, but it’s the neighbors I saw daily, the preschoolers I read stories to, the teenage girls I discipled, and the friends and shopkeepers I’ve never forgotten.
What did you see on your recent trip to Swaziland?
I found that as reported by so many missions and humanitarian organizations, Swaziland has changed also in horrible ways. The HIV/AIDS rate among adults is nearly 50%. A huge percentage of the children are now orphaned. Abuse and abandonment of children are on the increase. More and more elderly gogos (grandmothers) are left to raise large numbers of orphaned grandchildren. Parents die and leave siblings barely in their teens to raise younger sisters and brothers…or the orphans are split up among relatives, often becoming virtual slaves in their new homes.
The sick and handicapped are often left alone to fend for themselves as their relatives, spouses, or parents travel great distances looking for employment. Schooling has become a luxury that many can not afford and so they stay trapped in the vicious circle of poverty…often turning to prostitution or crime in a desperate attempt to survive.
How are you working to raise awareness of the tragedy of the people of Swaziland?
I visited Swaziland with my teenage daughters on a vision trip with Tom Davis and Children’s HopeChest in January. We’re working to raise money for missions work among the children in Swaziland, raise awareness of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and done whatever else we could from this side of the pond to advocate on behalf of the Swazi nation.
My dream is that God will one day move our entire family over there to help raise up the generation of children who will be left behind to lead their nation in rebirth one day. In the meantime, we pray, sacrifice financially, stir up those around us, and weep over what we see occuring there.
What are we going to do? With a little sacrifice we all can made a difference in Africa.
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