A few days ago, I found myself sitting with several of our My Story Matters books in my lap, flipping through the pages our kids had filled out after our first few sessions.
If you haven't heard me talk about My Story Matters yet, it's a new curriculum our Spiritual Life team developed to help our older children begin processing and understanding their own stories. As they get older and learn more about where they came from and the circumstances that brought them to Project Canaan, we want to give them a safe place to ask questions, process emotions, and begin to understand their story in the context of God's much bigger story.
I have spent so many hours over the past several months thinking about these pages. Our team has prayed over the words, rewritten questions, talked through what our children need, and tried to create something that would give them a safe place to process some of the biggest parts of their stories.
But creating it and watching a child actually write in it are two very different things.
On one page, a student had written, “They tell us that we are not a mistake because God knows us completely and has a purpose for our lives.” At the bottom of the page were these words: “My story matters because I matter to God. God knew me before I was born.”
I just sat there for a minute.
This is exactly what we have been praying for.
The last two weeks have been some of the most meaningful weeks I've had since moving to Eswatini. We have launched two projects that our Spiritual Life team has spent months preparing for, and for the first time, we are getting to watch the things we've worked so hard to create begin to take root in the lives of our kids.
We started with Safe and Strong, a safety and protection training designed specifically for our older children. We talked openly about what it means to be safe, how to recognize safe and unsafe behavior, what healthy boundaries look like, and the fact that every child is allowed to say no when a boundary is being crossed. We talked about trusted adults, secrets, grooming, peer-to-peer safety, and how to be an empowered ally when they see something happening to someone else. Most importantly, we reminded them again and again that their voice matters and that if something doesn't feel right, they should tell until someone helps.
These aren't always easy conversations, but they are incredibly important ones. We want our children to grow up knowing that they are valuable, their bodies and boundaries matter, and there are safe adults around them who will listen, believe them, and help them.
And then we launched My Story Matters.
We've now completed our first three sessions, and I don't know that I was prepared for how emotional it would be to see the kids begin filling these books with their own words.
One child finished the sentence about what they had learned about God with simply, “That He loves me so much.” When asked what they wanted to thank God for, they wrote, “That I am alive.”
Another prayed, “Help me go through my life and help me understand why you created me. And your plans for me are good.”
Those words may look simple written in a child's handwriting on a piece of paper, but knowing the stories of our children, they carry so much weight.
Every child at Project Canaan came here before the age of two. Many don't remember anything about their lives before coming here, but as they get older, the questions naturally begin. Where did I come from? Who are my biological parents? Why am I here? Do I have brothers and sisters? Why did this happen to me?
Those questions are real, and this week I saw them written on paper.
One of our older students wrote about wanting to know more about her biological father. She had never heard much about him and described him as a “missing piece” of her story. She had questions about his name, where he is, whether she has other relatives, and even questions about her own name and the circumstances surrounding her birth.
That's when My Story Matters stopped feeling like a curriculum to me.
These aren't hypothetical questions we imagined children might someday ask. These are their questions. These are pieces of their lives they are trying to understand.
Our hope isn't to erase the difficult parts of their stories or pretend that every question has an easy answer. We want to give them a safe place to ask, to feel, to process, and ultimately to begin understanding that the hardest parts of their story do not get the final word about who they are.
God does.
One of our students wrote it better than I ever could:
“We are not a mistake.”
That's what I want every child here to know.
You are not a mistake. You are known. You are loved. You were created with purpose. Your story matters because you matter to God.
There have been so many moments over the past two weeks when I've looked around the room and thought, I cannot believe I get to do this.
I get to watch kids learn that they can use their voice and ask for help. I get to sit with them as they begin asking hard questions about where they came from. I get to watch our counselors and Spiritual Life team create safe spaces for conversations that may take years to fully process. And I get to watch a child put pencil to paper and write something about themselves that I pray they will believe for the rest of their life.
As I flipped through the books, I also found my name written in a few places I wasn't expecting. One of the questions asks, “Someone who makes me feel loved is…” and more than once, I saw “Auntie Hannah.”
That one got me.
Eleven years ago, I could never have imagined what God was building when I first started coming to Eswatini. I certainly couldn't have imagined that one day I would live here, help develop something like My Story Matters, or have the privilege of being one of the people a child identifies as someone who makes them feel loved.
There are days when ministry feels big and exciting, and there are days when it simply looks like showing up. Sitting beside someone. Listening. Answering a question. Reminding a child for the hundredth time that they are loved.
These last two weeks have reminded me why all of it matters.
And I want you to know that you are part of this too. Your prayers, encouragement, and generosity allow Preston and me to be here, to keep showing up, and to invest our lives in these children and the people who care for them every day. When you support us, you're helping make room for conversations like these.
Thank you for believing in what God is doing here. Thank you for believing in these kids. And thank you for helping us remind them, over and over again, that their stories matter.