As usual, the summer holiday time of our Northern Partners brought a full house of visitors to many Hands at Work projects. It is incredible to see old friends return year after year and new teams arrive from entirely new places for the first time. The orphan camps in Zambia have become an annual highlight and destination for many; other teams worked with our construction crew putting up roofs for our community schools; some trained our teachers; and still others continued the amazing work of visiting our patients in their homes.
The dream of true servants traveling to Africa is actually happening! More and more people join us for longer periods, and Footprints (our Year-of-Your-Life program) is becoming a key vehicle of capacity building work for our projects. Mozambique, Zambia and the DRC have already been impacted greatly by Footprinters.
Speaking of Footprints, our building team continues to sweat out ten-hour days in the exciting task of preparing the Footprints Village for the February intake! We are so grateful to you friends and partners who continue to support us—some with dirty hands stacking bricks, and some financially—in completing this vision of a village.
Finally, I want to thank everyone who so generously supported the feeding programs for our orphans in Masoyi over the past months as we faced financial challenges. Schools, businesses and Churches came together in support. Now, with the end of a difficult time in sight, it is amazing to look back and see how much people stretched out of their usual routines to become part of a new solution. Thank you. When our volunteers in the field see such sacrificial giving from all over the world they become incredibly encouraged to continue.
For me, this is preaching Jesus! As Mother Theresa once said, “one can give without loving, but you can’t love without giving.”