A Promise of Restoration
Isaiah 4:2
“In that day the Branch of the Lord
will be beautiful and glorious;
the fruit of the land will be the pride and glory
of all who survive in Israel”


The justice that is lacking, the mercy that has not yet come to be, the times of jealousy, anger, pride and arrogance will fall away. The Lion will lie with the lamb.
This is our prayer for these villages. That the branch of the Lord will be beautiful and glorious, that He will reach out his branch and restore what is broken to wholeness.

Meeting with the headmen from the village was eye opening. Not many acknowledge the ill treatment of orphans or even children in their own community. – although we know it exists. The meeting over all was a success – I suppose – the headmen agreed that they had a need for an orphan home, so the social welfare social worker can now God willing, write up her recommendation letter and put us one step closer to getting liscenced. But it left a sour taste in our mouths. It was difficult to get them to acknowledge their need to help the problem of orphans in their own villages. They all kept putting it back on us. Asking “but what are you going to do fo us!?” and we would ask them in return what can you do for them? How can we partner, what are some ways we can help these children get into school through ways they can help in the communities? (gardens, basket making, chicken business etc) and they insisted on bringing up all the issues with these ideas (where do they sell their veggies? Monkeys eat their gardens, marketing their produsts is a problem… yet the head man of Singanga village, where we are located has made a very successful garden business dispite all these problems.
We have adopted the policy of wanting them to show initiative in a project before we assist them. But when it comes to orphans, we want them to see it as their own problem. When a child is orphaned, it them puts more pressure on his or her relatives to care for him. It creates a worse quality of life for everyone involved. Now we have old grannies caring for 5 – 10 children! So we are trying to get them to understand we do not have the answers, if they don’t have ownership of the project, it will fail. But it has been years of having NGO’s and foreigners hand them money and their own solutions instead of empowering them to solve their own community problems.

This is what we face. There seems no easy answer. Creating a childrens home is one small answer, because we believe that investing in a few vulnerable, rasing them up as leaders will in turn affect the country and continent, but this isn’t the answer for most. So our question remains, how can we empower those who will stay in their current situations? How do we do justice? How do we defend the rights of the orphan an widow?

Giving them tools to denfend themselves, with no infrastructure to support their cries seems to defeat the purpose. If a child is being sexually abused, and tells someone, they will then be looked at by the community as ruining the family name, and will not be welcome back most likely. So they must be willing to give up their family (no matter how loose this term is) and home. With the rates of abuse in the rural areas, this it is impossible to support and house them all! So where do we turn!?
Please pray with us. This issue will only get louder, and we need to be educated and trained to meet these growing needs.