Today has been another long but productive day. We started out by going with our good frien Felix Mwetha to the weekly morning prayer meeting of some of the regional church leaders. Jon and Candace Redden shared very powerful testimonies and we were thankful to spend some time with their group for morning devotional service. We then headed over to the Huruma Orphanage. We were thrilled to see several fundis there already putting in the posts for the fencing and doing some of the hard work we cannot do by ourselves. Our group focused on painting the outside of the building and finished a good portion of it today.
While they were working, Debbie Wolcott (Jon's cousin who has been a missionary in Africa for 30+ years) and I had the privilege of visiting with the Director (Godriver) and hearing her story of how she came to open the Orphanage. Debbie went through the list of reasons as to why they had been shut down, item by item, and helped her develop a business plan for the future. She felt called by God through a dream in 1999 to come to God and to bring a purple cloth to Him to carry the children He wanted her to care for. She did not understand the dream because her children were already grown and she had no idea what children He meant. She had the same dream 7 nights in a row. By the way, this is not uncommon in Africa for God to speak to individuals through dreams. After having this same dream over and over, she spoke with her pastor about it and explained she had no idea what children she was supposed to be caring for. Within that week church members brought 2 different orphan girls that they knew of to her and she took them into her home. In the next few months, as people hea d she was taking in children with nowhere else to go, she found herself with 16 children. In 2002, an American donor gave her $4500 to buy a piece of property so she could build a proper home. When she found a piece of government land to buy, the government decided they wanted to keep that particular small plot of land because of location and gave her a property much larger ( around 7 acres) for the price of the smaller plot.
Another group from the Netherlands learned about her through a church and paid to build the first building on her property. An entirely different group from the Netherlands came a few years later to build the second building.
As I mentioned yesterday, most of the items she needs in order to reopen are very simple to fix. She needs a posted code of Conduct for her staff, signs designating which bathrooms are for children and which are for staff, another sink in the bathrooms, and fencing. One building needs to be painted inside and out. She needs to hire official workers to be a chef and caregiver. ( Her current main caregiver is not properly trained and needs to attend a year long course.) Many of these things we can help with while our group is here. Some of the things she had already accomplished without our help.
Please continue to pray for this Orphanage and the children who call it home who want to return. We felt called to help here, but wanted to be sure we made wise decisions and had enough accountability before we invested our time and resources here. We do still feel this is what the Lord is calling us to, so we are happy to help and excited to see what the future holds.
After spending the morning at the Orphanage, we had a late lunch and headed to the church for our third day of VBS. We estimated over 150 in attendance, since we had that many copies of our craft and ran out. Candace Redden has done a fabulous job getting the kids engaged in learning about God and our students have been fabulous with the skits, songs, games and crafts. Tomorrow will be our last day of VBS so pray that the Lord will use this ministry to teach these kids about His love and salvation.
I've been trying to post pictures but am running behind because it takes so long for them to load. Thank you so much for partnering with us in this ministry!
Sincerely,
Jenni Millet
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