There is a group of roughly one hundred women, living in a remote jungle area in northern Uganda known as Apac. Most of these women are widowed.  They’ve lost their husbands to war, disease or AIDS.  Many ended up in a nearby refugee camp when they fled for their lives to avoid a violent rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army.  Most of the women have children in need of food, clothing and shelter.  They have very little opportunity to earn a daily living.  Most live in small mud huts with roofs of thatched grass. And, in addition to these overwhelming challenges, most of the women are HIV-positive.

This group of women is served by Eagle’s Nest Ministries in Uganda. To read more about Eagle’s Nest and/or make a donation, click here.

To see additional Stories of the Month, visit the Bright Hope Channel on YouTube.

When my plane left Haiti in November of 2006 and landed in Florida, the first thing I did was press the knob that gave me all the clean drinking water I would ever desire.  At home, I hugged my wife and wept as I told her about Haiti where children worked on one meal a day with little opportunity for an education, where there were broken wells, and houses made of sticks and mud.  Yet, I had made many dear Haitian friends even with the Creole/ English language barrier.

I had recently retired from teaching high school and it had always been our my wife’s and my desire to find more avenues to use God’s gifts, talents and skills.  When Mike Rutter from Bright Hope asked me to go to Haiti, I was excited about the opportunity.  I had many soul searching questions including whether Bright Hope and individuals could make a difference in what to me seemed a hopeless situation. 

One of the first things we did in the town of Pignon was to help deliver Hope Packs (small gift boxes) to the children.  As a former teacher, I was deeply moved because all I saw were children with pencils and spiral notebooks. In Haiti, there were no textbooks, and the only tool the teacher had was a worn out blackboard and a piece of chalk.   The children laughed with delight at receiving their Hope Packs, which contained school supplies, small toys, a tee shirt and even a Bible.  Later, a rotary club sent a shipment of Creole/English picture dictionaries that thrilled the teachers.

As I toured the village, I met a man who was doing carpentry work and I handed him a donated hand tool.   Delighted with the gift, he invited me into his tiny Haitian home to see some of his work and meet his family.   There is no welfare system in Haiti and the people are looking for opportunities to improve their lives. 

Our team stayed with Pastor Jephthe Lucien, Bright Hope’s Haiti partner.  Pastor Jephthe is well respected in his church and among the villagers.  He gave me the job of building school desks with the Haitian men.  We communicated through pantomiming and laughter. As a result, God knitted our hearts together.

Another time, returning from a walk in the village, I encountered a woman coming back from a spring with a wheelbarrow full of water containers.  I insisted on doing the job for her while she and her friends chattered and laughed to see an American man doing what in Haiti is women’s work. I’m inclined to agree with my wife who said, “Laughter like music is a universal language.”

On the last day I was there, Pastor Jephthe asked me if I would consider working with him to help build a trade school.  I now have a vision that by partnering with Bright Hope, I can make a difference in what I had at first thought was a hopeless situation. 

By: Larry Schuerr, Bright Hope Volunteer and Supporter

Below - Larry Pictured with some of the new friends he is seeking to help.

We shared with you the exciting news about how your generous support reached the people of Haiti following Tropical Storm Hanna. Bright Hope’s Haiti partner was at the Bright Hope headquarters recently and shared his experience with us.

Bright Hope is reaching out to a group of people known as the Mapuche Indians, who live in a rural South American town in Chile.  Over the years, some have unfairly tried to characterize these families as “lazy and without initiative,” but Mark Lennox, Bright Hope’s Latin American Partnership Developer, told us the exact opposite after he visited this area.  He found a community of people (all centered around their local church) with a strong vision and an impressive start to two new job creation initiatives that are impacting over 600 people in the area.  All they lack are a few simple tools and materials to develop and expand their ventures.

The woman pictured here is Marta Cheque Marin.  She is 41 years old and lives in this community. While her husband finds work works wherever he can, Marta gets up every morning, puts on a pair of rubber boots to feed the chickens and pigs, cleans the house, prepares the family meals and works in their vegetable garden. “I work hard so my children have bus fare to go to school every day,” she said.  “Sometimes they need to buy a book, but I cannot help them with that.”

The families have beautiful fruit trees growing on their land.  “The fruit falls from our trees here, but we don’t have what we need to make the jam, so what we don’t eat just goes bad and we have to feed it to the pigs,” Marta said.  “If we had sugar, jam jars and a few other things, we could make and sell the jam.  This would help our children and improve our living conditions,” she concluded. The timing of this funding is very important, because the fruit is ripe for jam production each year in the months of November and December.

The Mapuche men have their own hope for a business enterprise as well:  First and foremost, they want to be able to stay in town with their families, but the need for work often drives them out to surrounding areas.  They are currently helping the women with the start-up jam business, but their vision is to develop a woodworking and furniture making enterprise using available wood in their area.  They have the wood but not enough tools and equipment to grow this enterprise enough so they can work locally and remain in their own homes.

Your gift will help propel this community toward their goal of getting their new enterprises established and strengthened.  These new ventures will strengthen the local church, the families and the entire community.

Click to hear learn more and make donation to this project

For the fifth year in a row, a group of caring children put their own toys up for sale to raise money for poor children in Africa. The children and their mothers presented a check for $5,012.90 to Dotun Modupe of Kenya Africa today, to provide for the education of Somali refugee children living in Kenya.

Dotun oversees this project through Bright Hope International, an international relief organization headquartered in Hoffman Estates, Illinois.

This year’s toy sale, held at St. John’s Lutheran School in Algonquin, Il on August 22nd and 23rd, was sponsored by the Barrington Area Home School Group. Over 50 families donated children’s’ toys, DVDs and videos for sale at the event.

The group presented the check to Dotun at the Bright Hope office on Friday, September 12th, along with a framed photo of all the children at the sale.

“I am very grateful to all the children here who participated in this sale,” he told the children on Friday. “If it weren’t for this gift, many Somali children would not be able to attend school. I’m going to take this photo to share with the children and let them know how much you care about their education, and how important it is. They will be deeply grateful.”

Craig Dyer, Bright Hope President

I met two boys this summer in Nairobi, Kenya and I can’t get them out of my mind. Their names are Vincent, age 16 and his younger brother Kevin, age 10. They also have a 14-year old sister named Unis. When I met them in their makeshift shack of a home in the center of a slum, I learned that they had lost their grandmother — their only living guardian just two weeks prior to our meeting.

Their parents had both died years earlier. The boys were obviously still reeling from this loss, and they were both in shock.

Vincent looks like a strong, able mature young man. I had to remind myself that he is just a frightened, grieving teenage boy. While I was with them, Vincent was just beginning to come to the full realization that now, he was the sole guardian for himself, his brother and his sister.

This family of children now has no income, no means of support and no one to guide them in the everyday decisions of their lives. They were alone, afraid and overwhelmed.

I asked them on that day if they had eaten anything. It was early afternoon, and their answer was “no.” As a matter of fact, I learned that it had been days since they had eaten last, and they were very hungry. When our visit ended, I found myself overcome with their deep sense of loss and the acuteness of their grief. I was also very concerned for their future. Their home is surrounded by violence, criminal activity, drunkenness and despair. And yet, Vincent told me he wants to be a pilot one day. How, I thought, would these children be able to overcome all they now faced and find their way toward a real future?

With your gift to our project in Kenya’s Mathare Valley, you can help boys like Vincent and Kevin right away.

We at Bright Hope are excited to let you know that a group of Chicagoland families (pictured above) are hosting their annual Neighborhood Garage Sale, which has raised money for poor children in Africa since 2004. During this event, kids and families donate and sell their used toys, books games, puzzles and stuffed animals. This year’s event will take place on August 22nd and 23rd, 2008, from 9 am to 4 pm. at St. John’s Lutheran School, 300 Jefferson Street, Algonquin, Illinios. Come by and show your support for the kids and families who so generously give of their time, talent and treasure for the at risk children in Kenya.

Please see attached flier!

Toy Sale Flyer

Dorsilien has four children and one two-year old grandchild.  Their youngest child Jesunie became very sick and the family had to spend most of their money on her medical expenses. 

“The help we are getting now shows me that I really find my family in the church,” he said.  “I was forced out of the community where I was living because gangsters came to my house and beat me in my head.  They stole everything I had.  Our main work is farming, but as you know, depending on farming can cause you to die of hunger as you wait for crops to grow and mature.  With our micro loan money, we bought seeds but as we wait for seed to produce, we have the rice to eat.”

“I call each bag of rice a “savior”, because it is saving our lives and those of our children.”

If you have spent any time on our website in recent months, it is likely that you will have seen our project called, ”Dirt Cookies.”  Because of drastically escalating food prices in Haiti, many of the country’s poor have resorted to eating cookies made of dirt as a way to manage their hunger pains until other food can be found or purchased.  In response to this crisis, Bright Hope started a relief and development project aimed at helping some of the poorest people in Pignon, Haiti.  A micro-loan was provided to 280 families to pay for seeds and gardening tools.  It is our hope that within three months, the gardens will be producing food for consumption.  While families wait for their gardens to grow, they receive bags of rice to sustain and nourish them.   Little did we know how much hope a simple bag of rice could bring to a struggling family.  

Submitted by Annie Farrell,
Bright Hope Team Member

Last week, I took a vacation from the poor.

It’s hard for me to even write that sentence, but it’s the truth.  My husband and I had planned carefully for a full week off to travel to Michigan.  We put it on the staff calendar, socked some money away and packed our bags with excitement.  It had been several years since we had a “real” vacation, and we were looking forward to it. 

We had a beautiful time visiting family, sleeping late, eating out, walking along clean, beautiful beaches and doing a lot of nothing. 

While I did spend a little time on a few family laptops (mostly checking email and downloading photos), I found myself actively avoiding BBC World News and other places that would bring me face to face with what we see every day here at Bright Hope…

The starving children with their wide eyes and raggedy clothes, the refugee families living in cramped, unsanitary camps… the devastation of families living through the cyclone in Myanmar… the earthquake victims in China  …  It’s as if I couldn’t bear to look at them, just for a week…

And even though I knew this, of course, it struck me in a new way, that the poor — the people I get to serve in my job here at Bright Hope, never ever “get a vacation” from the poverty and desperation they live under.  They never have a reprieve from the daily struggle to come up with a few bites of food, or shelter from the rain, wind or sand.  Most of them will never in their lives stroll a clean, safe beach and stop for a cold drink or an ice cream cone.  

Most will never ever wake up in a clean, safe hotel room, take a long hot shower and then saunter downstairs for breakfast.  They’ll never wake up with absolutely nothing pressing on their mind for the day, and the freedom to go where they want, when they want, and how they want. 

I enjoyed my time off.  I do believe it allowed me to refresh my spirit, my soul and my marriage and I thank God and Bright Hope for providing it for me. 

But I came back to my desk here this Monday feeling an incredible sense of “privilege” that I get to be one of the people here who serves the poor, in my own small way.  Our team here starts our day with morning prayer, praying for our partners overseas  — the people in country who are face to face with the unrelenting daily needs of their families, communities and villages.  Then we ask God to show us how to serve them best -  how to raise support, how to develop programs and campaigns to engage people here in our own country, and how to create new and challenging opportunities for more people to partner with us in reaching people who desperately need our help.

I would not want to be any other place than where I am right here, as part of this team.  Before I got here, I knew about the poor. I had been to places like Russia and Cambodia, on short term trips, to “catch the vision” of serving the poor.  And now, I am trying to share that vision with everyone I meet. 

But I’ve changed since I got here.  I can’t forget the poor any more.  They have become part of my mind, my heart, my spirit, my soul.  And I thank God for that.  I wouldn’t want it any other way. 

Today I met with my fellow team members.  We made plans to get help to the people of Myanmar and a few other places in very desperate need.  It’s good to be back.

The following story came in an email from one of our partners in the Mathare Valley, Kenya:

Jane (11yrs) and Benson (9yrs) are orphans and have faced a lot of challenges in their young age; born out of single parenthood their father’s whereabouts is unknown. Jane and Benson have a sister who is just 3 years of age as well as two older brothers. Benson and their youngest sister are HIV positive.

Their mother, who has been ailing for a long time, was diagnosed with HIV about 8 years ago. She had defaulted on ARVs drugs, abused alcohol and was addicted to ‘changaa’ an illicit brew. All these worked to worsen her condition. Her lifestyle and health negatively impacted in the life of her children.

In February 2008, Jane and Benson lost one of their brothers (15yrs). He was beaten by his older brother and suffered injuries that led to his death.

This was a challenge to the already ailing mother and seemingly this affected her health. Around this time she also began to seem psychologically disturbed. After this incidence she did not move from her sick bed, she kept ailing and was not even able to attend the burial ceremony for her child. Not even two months later she gave in to her illness and died.

The woes of these children only grew worse with the death of their mother. The children could be found roaming the neighborhood collecting nails, and selling them for money to buy some food. They dropped out of school and also seemed to be psychologically disturbed. Jane and Benson were later adopted into the outreach community children’s home.

They are still in seed of psycho logical support. Benson in particular is in need of medical support as he is HIV positive, and thus his condition very volatile. At the time of adoption into the home he had also defaulted from the ARVs thus putting his health at a risk.

Please keep our partners in your prayers as they care for Jane, Benson and others in the community who face tragedy and heartache.