The Peniel Centre remains a safety net for abused, abandoned and homeless orphans and vulnerable children from in and around Bulawayo. It is the last resort for taking care of parentless children. Other avenues for the caring of children that we have been running are Transformation Centres which are proving to be a great tool in raising up orphaned children. Peniel Centre takes children from difficult circumstances who have no other place to go to. The aim of Peniel Centre is to provide a home, family, hope and a future to homeless orphans and vulnerable children.
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The centre has got 25 children altogether, all who come from different difficult circumstances. Thank you so much Bright Hope World for giving these children another chance to live in a family setting otherwise they could be living on the streets of Bulawayo. These children are not only given shelter but are sent to school and are also trained in different skills while they are at Peniel Centre so that they will be able to live an independent life after they leave the centre.
Most of these children are doing very well at school except a few who are struggling with their education because of the abuse that they went through when they were very young. This is the reason why we run psycho-social support programs for these children because most of them went through a lot before they came to Peniel Centre.
Thank you so much Bright Hope World for making it possible for us to be able to get identity documents for these children, there are only four who have remained who still do not have their identity documents. One of the boys recently got his identity document and is now going to sit for a public exam at the end of the year; your support is going a long way in unlocking potential in these young people.
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Through your support we managed to start a broiler chicken project which is doing very well even during this hard difficult season that we are going through as a nation. We have however scaled down our project from raising 1,500 broilers to 500 on a monthly basis due to the instability of the economy as the prices of chicks and feed keeps on fluctuating. This project is helping some of the children to learn how to raise up chickens for productive purposes and we are quite sure that they are going to use the skills that they are getting when they leave Peniel Centre one day.
Apart from the chicken project, the garden where we are practicing Foundations for Farming is also going a long way in helping the centre to produce its own food. The children are also getting farming God‘s way skills from this garden. We are working on extending the garden so that we get to a point of producing much for the kitchen as well as for the market. We thank God that we bought school uniforms for the children this year with the money that was realized from the garden. Our prayer after expanding the garden is to get a drip irrigation kit for the garden.
We are currently working on establishing a bio-gas digester so that we use the manure that we have to generate gas for cooking and heating. This will go a long way in helping us to stop cutting down trees for fire wood and will really enable us to set an example to communities where we are teaching people to stop cutting down trees. Once we have mastered how to build the digester, our plans are to go to communities that we work in and teach them how to build digesters at their homes so that they reduce the number of trees that are cut down on a daily basis. Our children are also going to learn on how to build a digester.
• Peniel Centre garden and chicken projects have got good opportunities of getting to a market as the nearest mine is only 7 km away
• The centre has also got opportunities of attracting qualified teachers because there is accommodation for teachers who can provide extra lessons to the children, the only challenge would be money to pay the teacher.
• Due to the vast land that the centre has much can be done at Peniel Centre in terms of productivity and also in terms of outdoor games for children to provide psycho-social support programs.
The biggest challenge that we have at Peniel Centre is electricity and we desire to completely change the whole system to a solar powered centre. We like solar because once it has been established we would not keep on losing money on buying electricity.
Schools are not close to Peniel Centre so this takes a lot of money in trying to send the children to school by bus on a daily basis.
The new school syllabus requires all students to have electronic gadgets in order for them to be able to research things on the internet and these gadgets are expensive to buy.
The other challenge that we have especially in a year like this one where the rains were very scarce, is the drying up of the boreholes. There is nowhere we can get water once our boreholes have dried up.