40 Days of Prayer
Hands at Work
Meet Mwete

Raising a large family isn’t easy but Mama Safi isn’t alone in caring for Mwete. He has a bigger family of support at the Care Point, with the Care Workers and the other children.

Meet Mwete

Hands at Work in Africa

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Colourless Dreams (SA)

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Jackie, 17, and her sister Laura, 11, live in a dilapidated one-room shack in the village of Welverdiend, within Bushbuckridge. Their mother died in 2006, leaving the girls in the care of their grandmother and father. In 2004 the girls suffered yet another loss at the death of their grandmother. To make matters worse, later that same year their father, their only provider, was involved in a road accident that left him paralyzed and permanently hospitalized.

Jackie and Laura face daily challenges, such as, hauling water from the community water tap which is two kilometers from their home and rationing the food they receive to make it last. They comfort one another as they spend each night alone and vulnerable in their rickety room.

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The spirit of a champion (Zam)

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Osborne Mwape is 11 years old and lives with his grandmother, Bana Kulu, in a community in Kabwe Zambia. His parents were HIV positive until they passed away in 2003. His mother died from Tuberculosis. She was not a believer but did give her life to the Lord on her death bed. The suffering and hardships Osborne endures are great. The hut that he and his granny share, burned down recently, and they had to use plastic and grass as a means of shelter during the cold and rainy winter season. Food is also scarce and Osborne sometimes misses school to look after the house while his grandmother goes out to look for a job or food.

Hands at Work representative Floyd Mwila, a home based care manager in Kabwe oversees, New Life Christian community school which Osborne attends. The establishment of the school was partly due to a request by Osborne whose wish was to get some education to prepare him for the future. The school not only provides education but also helps to support and encourage Osborne, giving hope for his young dreams to be realized.

Osborne has the spirit of a champion; even at school, he is known as an encourager of the other young boys. His energy and willingness to participate, far surpasses his small size, be it in sport, school clean-up chores or any other school activities. Osborne is in grade 4 and is achieving good marks; he is positive and his little spirit is on fire!

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Denial (Moz)

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Hannah Chung from Welspring Church California, been volunteering with Hands at Work since August 2008, volunteering in Mozambique.

Last Friday was my first experience in encountering something so real but so… sad.

Tuesdays and Fridays, I go on home-based care in a community called Nhambia. The people in this community live relatively far from each other and grow their own maize in their mashambas (fields). If a bicycle or money to catch a shapa (local taxi) isn’t available, people must walk tens of kilometers to visit a market to obtain anything else.

A home-based care visit in Nhambia with a volunteer named Marcelino led us to the home of a thin and gaunt middle-aged lady. She greeted us, bringing us a mat to sit down on. She talked a little, but didn't say much; it was apparent that she was very sick. Every word was interrupted by what seemed like a chronic cough.

"Is she positive?" I asked.

“We don't know,” Marcelino said. “She didn't get tested.”

"Did you go to the hospital?" Marcelino asked her.

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Breaking New Ground: Entering Malawi

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Levy Mwenda is a nurse from Zambia who has worked with Hands for many years. Residing in South Africa, Levy has assumed many roles with Hands in several countries, including Mozambique, Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, and Nigeria.

Levy’s first trip to Malawi is a ten-day undertaking to map out the community of Ngwele in Dedza. Knowing no one but a contact through a South African church, Levy goes to find out if this is a community in which Hands should work. Pastor Roy, the contact, is the headmaster of a school in Dedza. The two-room school holds 120 children in one room and 95 in the other, and Roy is the only teacher. He runs between the rooms throughout the day to teach both groups of children, who are packed tightly into the relatively small space. Roy has dreams of starting his own school, Levy discovers. Though the school he teaches in is extremely overcrowded, there are still many children who can’t afford the fees to attend. Roy wants to start a school that doesn’t require any fees and serves the most vulnerable children, those who have nothing.

Before doing anything else, Levy must receive clearance from the community leaders, including chiefs and tribal authorities. This step is important, as these leaders have the power to either enable or disable the work to begin. Levy seeks approval and partnership by sharing the heart of Hands at Work: to see the local church effectively caring for the dying, orphans and widows.

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Ensuring Care in Zambia

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Funding to care for 50 orphaned and vulnerable children by providing food security, access to education and healthcare for 14 months was received in March 2009 by Breakthrough Care Group, a community based organization operating in the Zambian village of Mulenga.  The money was raised by the members of Lakeview Free Methodist Church in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.  

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Hungry Season in Mozambique

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Hungry season.  In Mozambique, food is scarce between October and April every year.  This year’s hungry season, October 2008 to April 2009, was particularly devastating.  Dry weather caused brush fires in September 2008, fires which burned numerous homes and crops, killing some and leaving many homeless and hungry. 

Late rain further exacerbated the problem.  People bought seed to grow maize in their mashambas (gardens) and planted them expecting rain to come at the normal time, usually in October or November, but it didn't.  The seeds died, and the people bought more seed.  Again, they planted them expecting rain to come, but it didn't

Waiting for Hope (SA)

In a one room house in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, three orphans wake themselves as the sun rises. They carefully fold their blanket and roll up their mat. Sleep is still on their faces. With no clothes to change into but the ones already on their backs, the two little boys, Clarence, 8, and Remember, 9, go outside. They sit in the sun amid chatting ladies and chickens. They wait.

Their sister Lorraine, 14, changes into her only other skirt, her school uniform, and carefully cleans herself for school. The boys use their fingers to write the alphabet in the dirt.

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We Are Together

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“We are together!”  This phrase rang constantly through the weeks of March 18th-29th, when Hands at Work in Africa hosted its 2009 Africa and International Conferences.  Representatives journeyed from seven of the African countries that Hands currently works in to gather together for their only annual meeting as a family.  Representatives from the international offices partnered with Hands and many other donors, church partners, friends and volunteers were also present.

 Because the entire Hands family can only gather together once a year, the conferences are an important time for the organization—to bring everyone up to speed on the inner and outer workings of Hands, to remind everyone of the standards and goals we are working for, but mostly to remind those who have devoted their lives to serving others in their African communities that they are not alone in their efforts.

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Enduring Hardships at a Young Age (MOZ)

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Maseo is ten years old. She lives with four siblings in Nhembia, Mozambique; the eldest is her sixteen-year-old brother. Maseo watched her parents die: her father in 2005 and her mother in 2006, after suffering long illnesses. This was too much for the young girl to handle and, shortly after their deaths, Maseo ran away from school and home to a neighboring town, selling sugar in the market.

Volunteers from Rubatano Home-Based Care, Hands at Work’s partner in Mozambique, had been helping the young children care for their sick parents. When the parents died, no relatives were available to live with the children, so they lived alone, and Rubatano’s home-based care volunteers watched over them. When Maseo ran away, the home-based care volunteers went to Beira to bring her home. The young girl, unable to cope with life without her parents, ran away a second time. Again the volunteers went to find her and this time she stayed in Nhembia.

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A Chain of Giving (ZAM)

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Fifty-two-year-old Lorraine began volunteering in the Shalom community organisation of Kabwe, Zambia in 2003. The divorced woman’s children were grown and moved out of her home when she became a volunteer and she showered all of her motherly love and care onto the patients and vulnerable children she dedicated herself to visiting.

In 2007, Lorraine became ill and tests revealed that she was HIV positive. This former volunteer of the home-based care suddenly became a patient, who with the help of her fellow volunteers began taking medication that would keep her alive. Today, Lorraine continues to battle her illness, but her active devotion as a volunteer has not ceased. Though unable to visit children and patients like she used to, Lorraine has taken two orphaned children into her own home to provide them a place to live safely and be cared for lovingly.

Lorraine’s story is one of a chain of giving: Lorraine receives as a patient of the HBC, but also continues to give, sewing into the lives of two young children.

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When Hope Comes (ZIM)

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In Mutare, Zimbabwe, there is much need for hope. But in a country where the money has become valueless and schools and hospitals are closing daily, it is hard to imagine an avenue by which hope might enter.

A partially blind sixty-five-year old grandmother stays in her one-room house in Sakubva, the poorest area in Mutare, with fourteen orphaned children. Most of these are the children of her five children who have passed away, unable to receive medical treatment in the ever-diminishing healthcare system. Though the children have found refuge and a roof over their heads with the grandmother, finding food is a daily battle

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A New Level of Love and Devotion (DRC)

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An orphaned child isn’t an easy child to care for. Extended family members seldom expect the challenges that accompany the arrival of such a child. When Grace’s parents died before she even began school, she and her twin brother were taken in by their aunt and uncle, who struggled to care for the children and needed support.

Esperance Home-Based Care sent local volunteers to help care for the children, inviting them to attend the free community school and providing them with a meal each day. Then 6-year-old Grace became a patient in the home-based care when she suffered a serious burn on her leg. For three weeks, the volunteers paid special attention to Grace to ensure that her injury was treated and healed properly. Her uncle and aunt, still struggling to know how to care for these new children, were overwhelmed by the commitment of the volunteers and the attention they paid to this one tiny girl.

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Literacy School Expansion (NIG)

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Construction of a literacy school to benefit vulnerable women and children began in Kano, Nigeria in early November. Since 2007 local volunteers in Kano have operated literacy training out of a two-classroom building, but the need has outgrown the current space, requiring the construction of a new facility.

Women from the rural agricultural community of Nariya in Kano marry young and know little of life other than working the land alongside their husbands. The volunteers host groups of these women for three month stints in the farming off-season, teaching them the foundations of reading and writing in their single-building facility. The ability to read and write is a skill set to which these women have never been exposed. It is a skill set that opens them up to the world in a myriad of ways and an ability that, to lack, is isolating.

Better Learning in Zambia

The 277 students of Shekinah Glory community school are enjoying a new roof and toilet thanks to funding from Visionledd in Canada. Shekinah Glory is one of 12 community schools operating in Kabwe, Zambia. The school has been running without a roof for many years. Funding was secured to construct a new roof in mid-2008, but shortly after it was completed a big storm blew it off. The recent repairs funded by Visionledd provide a classroom setting that is conducive to better learning and, so, aid the children.

Food Security in Swaziland

    

Orphans have food security for six months in Kaphunga, Swaziland due to a successful maize crop grown at the homesteads of the volunteers. With the blessings of seed and fertilizer donated by WOW, ample rainfall and timely planting, the Asondle Sive Bomake volunteers were able to harvest 100% of the maize crop they planted at their homesteads.

To tell the story of this successful crop is not only to highlight an excellent planting year. It is a benchmark in the story of a group of volunteers, mobilized by one volunteer, a woman, Nomsa Lukhele. To know Nomsa, the founder and head of Asondle Sive Bomake Home-Based Care, is to know a woman after God’s own heart.

Thuthukani (SA)

Louise Carroll, a 25-year-old teacher from Saskatoon in Saskatchewan, Canada, arrived in South Africa in mid-January 2009 to assist in education programs for six months. She attends Lakeview Free Methodist Church in Saskatoon.

After just two days in South Africa, still jet legged and groggy, I made my first venture into the communities surrounding the picturesque Mount Legogote. Meighan, another recently arrived Canadian volunteer, snapped pictures furiously as our heavily laden vehicle made its way through the winding dirt roads of rural Mpumalanga. Huts and people sprang up unexpectedly between lush mango trees sagging under the burden of their ripening fruit; every person and plant asserting her place in the majestic scene.

Upon entering the community of Daantjie, we encountered a sea of uniform clad children returning home from school. Somehow Kristal, a long-term volunteer, avoided hitting any of them while simultaneously weaving her way up hills, each one more treacherous and impassible than the last. Finally we rounded a corner and discovered the Home-Based Care center Mandlesive – which Vusi, the logistics coordinator for Hands at Work, translated for me to mean The Power of the Nation. Here we found a large group of community volunteers who cheerfully greeted us and helped unload the food parcels that would be distributed to the children coming later that afternoon.I had the privilege of trying out my 3 words of SiSwati which inspired uproarious laughter. At least if they did not serve their intended purpose: to greet, I still got good mileage out of them.

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Watch us online this week! (SA) (MOZ)

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The TV broadcast Living Truth recorded stories of the work that we are doing in South Africa and aired it across Canada and the States this past Sunday. If you were unable to watch it you can view it online for this week only. Click here to watch stories from South Africa, Mozambique and Malawi of hope and need and learn more about Hands at Work along the way.