Dear Friends Everywhere!!

Yours, and our, prayers have been answered!! After more than a year of seeking the Lord and beseeching the cement company for favor with them in a national shortage crisis...we finally have cement!!!

Today was my 62nd birthday and I was blessed to find that even though we ordered and paid for 600 sacks of cement, we got 727 sacks. Although the US dollar declined, the Zambian Kwacha gained strength, and so we got an extra bonus of 127 sacks!!

We have been thanking God all day, and now the builders will work extra hard to see to it that the House of Martha building project will go ahead with full force so can move the children into their new home.

Thanks for praying and giving! The photo attached is cool...dust covered men unloading a truck full of cement. :-)

Blessing you!
Sandra

Posted by ACE Staff at 8:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Dear Ministry Family,
I never knew four months could pass by so quickly. The Lord has been so good to me, and to the ministry here in Zambia. Knowing that all of you are very busy, even as we are, I at least wanted to highlight some of the wonderful news from this side of the world before traveling home on July 26th. Jennie has been with us since May 22nd (my 61st Birthday). She leaves on July 12th.

Child Rescue

We are working hard to keep up with the numbers of children in our three homes. Each is at capacity. The poor are getting poorer and children are dying in the compounds at a faster rate than in previous years. House of Moses is caring for 21 infants, House of Martha has 17 children and the Bill and Bette Bryant Nursery has 16. Several, especially the older ones, are ready for adoption so pass the word along. We are also continuing to work toward, and pray for, good adoption laws and procedures.

House of Martha will have a new location! The Goad Family, an internationally known evangelistic and singing family (been around as a family since the 1960's) raised the funds to buy a wonderful property just 5 minutes from House of Moses. Much has changed since the Outreach Foundation purchased the House of Martha property in 1998. The roads have deteriorated, the utilities became very unreliable and the area is cholera prone. The Goad's lost their mother many years ago and wanted a place to care for orphans and vulnerable children in her honor and memory. Her name? MARTHA!! The family was in Zambia last week and had several mission outreaches and also did a ribbon cutting and dedication of the new home. We will have to do work on the property before the children are moved, but they were with us for the dedication and everyone was smiling, singing and even climbing the trees in the big front yard. When the children move we will sell the Kanyama property and use the assets to continue to upgrade the new location. We rejoice as God brings many new partners together for children.

Education

Faith Works Schools continue to get better and better each year. There are over 2,500 pupils in Grades 1-7 and 58 in Grade 8 which opened in January. Grades 9 and 10, 11 and 12 also have our children who are now in Government schools with scholarships we are providing. We broke ground for the new Helen DeVos Christian School and the plan is to open in January 2008 for Grades 7, 8, and 9. The school will be one of the first in Zambia to offer a first rate education to orphans and children with no financial means. We are grateful to Helen DeVos for her faith in us and the $428,000 matching grant (we are about 25% along to matching that goal) that she gave Alliance for Children Everywhere which allows us to continue to raise the support needed to provide this kind of an education to eager children with hungry minds.

Empowerment of Guardians and Women

With a grant from a German organization, we have trained 40 guardians of orphans (men and women) in our community projects. We are providing them with a means of supporting themselves and their families. We are using our hammer mill to grind maize (corn) and package it in sealed bags with a consistent 1Kg. weight. Ground maize is eaten by every Zambian. The maize when ground is called mealie meal and this is boiled in water to make the staple food, nshima. The program is called a "Commodity Lending Scheme" This strategy is radically different from the existing way mealie meal is sold. The weights are typically not consistent, the bags are not sealed and the prices are not the same for the weight of the bag. People know they are being cheated, but that is how the market was—until now. We are being deluged by folks wanting to get in on the sales side of Heaven's Blessing Mealie Meal, but we are in a pilot mode and so are limiting ourselves to the first 40. If all goes as planned we may expand the operation to include more of the needy people we are here to serve.

Summer Teams

With 9 visitors left to come to Zambia during this next month, we have had over 30 visitors that have blessed us and been blessed in return. The teams were very well prepared by their respective team leaders, and each person had a chance to teach and to learn at the same time. We are already talking about 2008!

With love and thanks for making the lives of little children matter,
Sandra

Posted by ACE Staff at 9:03 AM | Permalink

We have purchased a large plot with a house that needs work just five minutes from House of Moses on the way into town. The asking price started at 600 million kwacha ($153,000), but the owner agreed to sell it to us for 370,800,000 kwacha. This comes to approximately $95,000, depending on the exchange rate on the day of the bank transfer.

The plot is 33.55 meters by 70.25 meters (larger than the House of Moses property). We will need to do quite a bit of work to the house, but the potential is enormous. The house is on a paved road and sets back from the street with a beautiful area of trees and bushes in front. Behind the house is a yard and then a large block chicken house that, if the foundation is deep enough, we can add rows of block to make it taller and use it for our classrooms for the children in the home. Behind that is a house that is the servant's quarters. To the side is a good sized garden plot. There is room for two more houses on the plot.

Posted by ACE Staff at 8:51 AM | Permalink

We are getting ready to depart for Tucson on Tuesday morning. Sandra and I have been working on different projects and so we have accomplished much in five weeks. We know your prayers have smoothed the way. Thanks to all of you.

At the request of the Minister of Community Development, Frank Block, the director of Love Basket, and I laid out a national policy for international adoption. We have given it to the new CACZ board chair, Barbara who will take it into the Minister next week.

Yesterday we went with the CACZ board to visit some of our projects. Fred Mbango (he is the man who provides our vehicles at a discount) provided a bus, all expenses paid. We first went to the Kanyama school property and the hammer-mill. There was a line of women with corn to grind and the new operator was busy. Fackson has gutted the house which will serve as Grade 8 and he put in new trusses for roof reinforcement. The facility will be ready for 80 students the end of January. There is still a lot of work to be done between now and the opening of school for next year, but we are on target. The men have also dug the trenches for the toilet (ablution) block and the grant from Rotary should be in Zambia in time for the major building activity on that project. Right now we have over 5,000 blocks on site and continue to make ~250 a day.

Then we moved on to the House of Martha. The 13 children sang for us and gave us pictures and cards they had made. The new teacher is wonderful. Nellie shared some of their stories. All of the children are wonderful and the quality care they are receiving shines in their eyes. We were especially moved for one little girl about 12 years old who was found 6 years ago in the bush, alone. Since she was found she had lived in an orphanage, but she still made only guttural sounds and rarely uttered a word. That home was closed recently because of the poor care the children were receiving and this child was sent to us. Yesterday she clearly spoke her name for the first time in front of people and sang confidently with the other children.

Then we headed for Garden Compound where we visited the Garden Hill school and then the Bryant Nursery. We arrived back at House of Moses very hot and very tired. It was well above100 degrees. Over a traditional meal, there was a high level of enthusiasm for the growth and development of CACZ.

Thanks for your continued prayers,
Virginia Woods

Posted by ACE Staff at 10:05 AM | Permalink

Adoptions in Zambia have multiplied since House of Moses and our other two homes opened. Our other two nurseries, the Kanyama House of Martha and the Bill and Bette Bryant home opened in 1999 and 2001 respectively. House of Moses in 2000. The age ranges of our children are from birth to age 10. (We do stretch the rule sometimes and have a few 12 year old children). Our homes are intended to be "safety nets" whereby we have the time to locate and empower extended family, or place children into foster/adoptive homes. There does come a point though where children have had to be moved into an orphanage type home, but we think we can find families for many of them.

As a side note: House of Moses was selected by UNICEF and the United Nations in 2003 as a "Best Practice Model in sub-Saharan Africa" and was presented to the Global Fund as an example of work being done in Africa. (The bad news is that NONE of the money flowed to the program!) Graca Machel Mandela who visited with us at that time said, "I have never before seen anything like House of Moses in Africa."

House of Moses has sparked much interest both domestically and internationally because it is a unique model providing 24/7 nursing care for pre-mature and high risk infants. Before House of Moses came on the scene, infants died for lack of milk and basic care. Most of our babies have lost their mothers, many in childbirth. Some are abandoned in the maternity ward, and others are found in places too gruesome to mention. They are brought to us by the police, the Department of Social Welfare or "Good Samaritans." Some children admitted to the home are under 2 pounds, and although we have no specialized medical equipment, the babies do survive and thrive! Although many of the mothers are HIV+, her infant has a 7 in 10 chance of NOT acquiring the virus. Another 1 in 10 will become infected through breast feeding, but we still have more infants that are HIV negative than HIV positive.

In just the year prior to our opening our first home in Kanyama, there were only two formal adoptions in Zambia for the entire year. Since that time our adoptions have been steadily increasing. In all, 76 of the babies and children in our homes have been placed for adoption, most of them into Zambian families. One went to Namibia, one to Holland, twins to Australia and less than a dozen have come to the USA, but most of the USA adoptions have been just this past year as regulations have been loosened.

Our vision for the future, and as funding permits, is to open homes like House of Moses in other areas of Zambia and possibly in other sub-Saharan African nations. We have had visits from Government representatives from Mozambique and Rwanda who have invited us to come to help them start a similar program. We, for the time being, have had to decline. We know there are many couples who would adopt children from Africa and why stop in Zambia? But in God's time, not our own.

House of Moses has a physical capacity for 40 children, but at the moment funding for only 25 (and that is stretching it!). Older children and children with special needs are also in our homes and we believe there are families waiting for them as well.

We are now seeing some of the other child care facilities in Zambia beginning to look at adoption as an option and ACE is planning to further advocate in that direction from our well recognized platform. UNICEF has said they would be open to having ACE be involved in drafting the national adoption policy which is now in motion and of which UNICEF is integral.

We look forward to seeing what God will do!

Posted by ACE Staff at 11:33 AM | Permalink