BRIGHT HOPE WORLD NEWSLETTER: WINTER 2013
Visiting Uganda
Matt and Judy O’Byrne have recently joined the Bright Hope World team as Partnership Facilitators for Uganda. They first became interested in BHW after spending three months working in Samfya, Zambia in 2009. They then travelled with Kevin and Helen Honore to Kenya and Uganda the following year. Matt and Judy are passionate about BHW's partnership model and have a particular interest in income generation and micro-lending.
I am sitting on the floor in our hotel room in Entebbe on our last night in Uganda, thinking of some snapshots of the daily things which happen and which I have observed. Judy and I love travelling. We have even become used to long bus rides. Today we left our little hotel in Lira and caught a ‘boda-boda’ (motorcycle taxi) at 6 am with our packs and gear to the local bus station. The buses here are really, really old and ours decided not to go all the way to Kampala so we spent the last hour in a Hi-ace mini bus with 20 people plus luggage!
Yesterday we spent time with our partners at Hope Restoration Centre in Lira. Some of it was quite emotionally challenging, like spending time with Alan who is a troubled teenager. Alan also has HIV/AIDS and is not growing quickly. Sometimes we think we have problems! We also spent time with two young widows, both really godly women, who have to face the stigma of HIV as well as the health problems. When their husbands died they and their children were kicked out of their houses by the husband's family. Because of the ongoing stigma they are also being kicked out of their current homes. It seems so unjust.
Coming down here today by bus I reflected on how poor this country seems. Out of the cities most people live in traditional thatched roof huts or, if they have a bit of money, tin roofs. Most people cook over charcoal. A lot of the details of daily life here make us very conscious of our own wealth back in New Zealand. I think though that I have realised that cultures are different. There are challenges in New Zealand and challenges in Uganda and they are different. It would also be wrong to think that we in the West have the answers. We don't. Judy and I have been reading some great books - When Helping Hurts and Toxic Charity - which start to unpack some of the issues and the cultural arrogance which can creep in to efforts to alleviate poverty in the developing world.
While we have been here the days have been very long but we have spent a lot of time with BHW’s partners getting to know them at a deeper level. It has been a real privilege!
Matt (and Judy) O’Byrne
Partnership Facilitators – Uganda
Judy and Anna Ocen
Ugandan Children
New Partnership – Heirs of Grace (PER10a)
Heirs of Grace is a ministry initially established by Antonia Yalta, a Segadores missionary, to help forgotten (or neglected) children in tribal communities in Peru. Antonia joined Segadores in 1996 and through her cross-cultural experiences, she felt God’s call to enter a ministry of sharing God’s love to children of exploited and forgotten tribal villages of the jungle.
Heirs of Grace now works among three different groups of children:
- Children of the Segadores Missionaries: Heirs of Grace (HoG) seeks to pastor and encourage the children of Segadores missionaries. Godparents are sought who will pray for the children, contact them when their parent leaves for ministry, and give them a gift on their birthday and at Christmas. HoG also supports the children with schooling costs and new clothes.
- Native jungle children – particularly the Aoti tribal people: HoG desire that these jungle children will come to know God through the help they give them. HoG is involved in teaching the Word of God in schools and in the native church. They provide nutritional breakfasts every Sunday to the children who attend the church, give vitamin supplements to the primary school children and to the malnourished children that are found in extreme poverty (Pampa Mercado Town), and provide breakfast for the school children.
- Poor children of Lima: In Lima HoG runs Bible classes every Saturday at the Missions Centre for those children who come from needy situations. Lunch is provided for them because many of them come without breakfast as their parents are working.
Antonia has a deep love and vision for ministering to the needs of missionary children in Segadores and also to the children in the Amazon jungles of Peru and in Lima. This has changed lives and been a real blessing to the children she shows God’s love to.
For more information - click here
Aoti Children
New Partnership – Adult Literacy Classes Faisalabad (PAK05a)
One of BHW’s partners in Pakistan, Azam and Barbara Gill, come from a village near to the city of Faisalabad and travel back there from time to time to deal with family matters. In mid 2012 Azam and Barbara returned to their village for a funeral and while there discovered that most of the people in the churches in that area could not read. This was having widespread consequences in these rural communities, especially for the young people as the older people did not encourage them to become educated. They are therefore not equipped to gain employment and are then left in the villages with little incentive and few skills to become self-sustaining.
Azam and Barbara decided they wanted to do something about this and so have commenced adult literacy classes in three villages adjacent to the city of Faisalabad. They will just be focusing on teaching reading in Urdu as there is little need for English in the villages. The project will be aimed at Christians first as initially they want to empower them, and then to the wider Moslem community.
For more information - click here
Class participants, Pakistan
Prayer and Praise Points
- Praise for health and safety for all our team who were travelling throughout July and August
- Praise for the great results Jerry and Hayley saw in Zambia following the Foundations for Farming training done there
- Praise for the explosion of the church planting movement in Thailand, for the many new Christians in Thailand, and for this group of 70 leaders who have planted 400 churches
- Pray for Antonia and the many children she is impacting in Peru
- Pray for Azam and Barbara and the new adult literacy classes they have started in Faisalabad
Foundations for Farming, Zambia (ZAM28)
Jerry and Hayley Field returned to Zambia in July to follow up on the Foundations for Farming training they have done amongst our partners there:
We have seen some awesome things happening in Zambia: in Kaishe (ZAM14) a guy got 8 tonnes of maize per hectare (an 800% increase); at Patience orphans (ZAM17) the small plots of 12m x 12m produced great yields for about half the people, the equivalent of around 7 tonnes per hectare (a 700% increase) and this after Doris told me they had failed! At Kaishe the cassava program has spread to an uncountable number of people in the region with yields triple and above, and in Chaba (ZAM16) there are 55 people growing maize and rice and doing very well.
The Chaba community gave Hayley and me a bag of maize and a bag of rice to say thanks for helping develop the community and remove hunger in the area - unfortunately they didn't fit in the boat!
Zambian Farmer
Church Planting Movement, Thailand (THA08)
John and Nok (see THA08) have recently been away up-country training their church-planters. The training they undertook went well - they had about 70 leaders there - and they received some amazing reports of what has been happening since the last training event. This group has planted 400 churches in the past couple of years in un-churched villages not only in Thailand but also in Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam and China, and they have only just started! Here is a photo of Nok with a “woman of peace” who has led eight families to Christ and started a church in her home.
Their vision is huge and there are some amazing testimonies. One lady had surgery to lance an abscess in her lower stomach. After a few days in hospital she was sent home with the wound still packed with gauze and told to go to the hospital every day to dress the surgery site. The first night she had intense pain and she prayed that God would take the pain away. She immediately fell asleep and when she woke up, all the gauze had come out and the wound was completely closed over, with only a tiny, very clean scar remaining. She went back to the hospital and told the doctor what happened, when he saw the scar he said it is a miracle, he has never seen anything like that.
A boy told of being bitten by a deadly poisonous snake and suffering no ill effects at all. His father was with him but could not protect him from being bitten. However, he killed the snake, and being a new believer, he prayed in the name of Jesus, and took the boy to the hospital. He was suffering no ill effects at all, and when the technicians took a blood sample, there was no poison.
One of the leaders told how he prayed for a Buddhist monk who had died of AIDS – God raised him from the dead, and he has now left the monastery and planted a thriving church in north Thailand. But the most wonderful thing was seeing the joy on the faces of these new believers; they really love Jesus!
Nok and the 'woman of peace'
BHW Promotional Video
Check out the new – and slightly different - BHW promotional video at https://www.brighthopeworld.com/media-videos.asp. It’s about surfing! Check out our other videos while you’re there.
2012/13 Annual Report
Our 2012/13 Annual Report is now available either online at https://www.brighthopeworld.com/who-annual.asp or upon request.
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