Compliments of the New Year from Fountain of Hope team!
Towards the end of 2021 a number of people from our team got infected with COVID and we hope and trust God that Gideon who is currently down with COVID is the last person to go through the suffering that most of us went through. Our hearts and spirits are high even in the midst of these challenges of the pandemic. It has really been a season of learning, adjusting, creative thinking and listening to the people on the ground from different communities as they share their struggles and insights. I am so grateful to God that our team is full of hope, possibilities and have got high expectations of transformation in the communities that we work with.
Due to the pandemic the number of children who come to our transformation centres has increased. Our hearts are happy that we are able to reach out to these children not only with food, clothes, etc. but with the word of God. We are so much persuaded that great women and men who will do mighty exploits in these villages will emerge out of these young people. The parents of some of these children in our transformation centres either lost their employment or their source of income due to COVID.
Our team is so grateful to Bright Hope World for all the support that you are rendering to us, without which we could not have achieved what we have achieved so far. Some of these children came all the way from South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, and Namibia where their parents were working. To make the situation worse there has been xenophobic threats in South Africa and this has led many parents again to lose their jobs and come back to Zimbabwe where unemployment is very high.
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Mthombothemba is a wonderful community that is not far away from Bulawayo town and back long ago many people used to ride bicycles from this community to town to work on a daily basis. Some people would also come from far places and near areas to seek employment in Bulawayo town and some of them would end up trying to get accommodation from this community resulting in the formation of an illegal settlement. When the wind of unemployment swept through this country towards the end of the 20th century many people lost their jobs and were left without homes, skills to do farming, and literally with no sources of income. HIV/AIDS pandemic also played a very negative role in bringing this community to its knees and it is to this backdrop that Fountain of Hope has been committed to bring redemption, healing and development to this community. Please find below some of the stories of what the Lord has been doing in this community:
We are so grateful to Bright Hope World for all the support that you have been rendering to the orphans and vulnerable children of this community. We are so persuaded that education is one of the tools to fight out poverty amongst the poor young people of this community. We are .jpg)
doing our best to ensure that children who cannot pay school fees and buy school uniforms remain in school. Please see the story of one of the girls herein:
My father lost employment in 2002 when I was still very young and this eventually led to my parents divorcing. My father disappeared and up to this day we sadly do not know his whereabouts and we do not know whether he is alive or not. My mother, myself and my young brother were left with no home, no income, no clothes, and no money to go to school. We moved into an illegal settlement and thank God that the members of Fountain of Hope started to minister to us through their transformation centre program. We were counselled and were taken back to school. I have just finished my high school and am looking forward to going to University to study Law. Thank you so much Fountain of Hope for taking us from a position of being nothing to a better position in society.
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This is one of the programs that is changing the lives of children socially, intellectually, physically, and spiritually. We have seen an increase in the number of children who are coming to be served at our transformation centre on a daily basis. We started with 60 children but now this transformation centre has got 120 registered children who are ministered to by our dedicated staff members.
We have established a bridging school at this transformation centre to cater for children who never have been in school or who dropped out of school. We endeavour to ensure that each child receives an education despite where he comes from or how he was born. Apart from education, many children were helped to acquire identity documents, were provided a psycho-social support program, school fees were paid up for them, as well as attending community based spiritual camps.
We are looking forward to continuing to minister to these children and many more who are coming from South Africa and other neighbouring countries as their families come back home.
This was the first community that we trained people to practice Farming God’s Way and we are so proud of this community by the way they grasped the concept and are now teaching one another in the whole community to practice this kind of farming. The landscape is not all that good, but they are doing their best to grow crops in the rocky ground. We pray that they will continue with the spirit of training up one another and our desire is to see other communities doing the same as well.
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We are working alongside the government in welcoming parentless children from neighbouring countries who are known to be Zimbabweans and Peniel Centre has been recognised as receiving such children and eventually following their history and taking them through our child escort to their places of origin.
We continue to provide a home, family, hope and a future to orphans and vulnerable children at our Peniel centre. We are so grateful to Bright Hope World for partnering with us in improving the quality of life of such wonderful and glorious children. Some of them would like to be doctors, lawyers, businesspeople etc. Thank you for giving hope to such children.
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This is one of the best skills training projects that we came up with for out of school Peniel children and those from the communities that we work with. We thank God that our trained tutor has really been an amazing person teaching them not only carpentry but also how to do tiling as well as painting. Many of them are now really good at this. We started this program last year, so it is still in infant stages but it has proved worthwhile for it creates opportunities for the vulnerable young people.
The program started with 21 participants but unfortunately we could not have tools for everyone, so we had to trim the class to 17 young people. They are currently on their first attachment program in Victoria Falls and will come back at the end of the month. Most of them are overexcited about what the Lord is doing in their lives. After graduation some of them will remain working with us in training the next group of young people and we believe that is the way of multiplying this program. Please see below the photos of the work they have been doing in Victoria Falls.
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Transformation CentreThis transformational centre had a target of reaching out to 230 children and the number has already gone over the anticipated number of children to be ministered to. We are grateful to our agriculture officer that he is coming alongside this transformational centre and teaching young people to understand and practice sustainable agriculture. To empower young women and girls, our team is helping young girls to remain in school by paying school fees for them, training them to respect themselves and to have a focus in life. Thank you so much Bright Hope World for bringing hope to hopeless communities.
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Makamure is a very big community of 37 villages and this season we are focusing on six villages from this community. The people are very excited about farming in this community and are looking forward to a bumper harvest if the rains will come well. Just like the communities of Nemauzhe and Chikofa, the rain pattern has not been very good this season in this community, and we continue to pray for all things to go well. 80 people altogether were empowered with farming inputs and have already done very well in their fields. One of the old men from the community who actually followed the principles of doing things on time, at standard, with joy and without wastage, has got very good maize that is only waiting for good rains to ripe.
Our Foundations for Farming program remains one of the pillars of what we are doing in communities to increase food security in poor, remote and unreachable communities. We thank God that this program did very well last year such that we had several field days training which were attended by chiefs and members of the government. Most of the places that were declared hunger areas like Mtshazo managed to harvest maize, sorghum and groundnuts for the first time in their lives. 2021 was a very busy year for our agriculture officer and it is only COVID that made him have the time to rest in December. We thank God that he got sick at the right time when we already had his assistant.
The Assistant Agriculture Officer is Maxwell Ncube who worked for many years in Botswana in the field of Agriculture. He was one of the farm managers at one of the biggest farms in Botswana and now he has come to join us with the myriad of experience he acquired over all the years that he has been working. He already is proving to be a great asset to the ministry and we believe that through his involvement this program will touch so many families and villages. Our desire is to reach out to the unreachable through this wonderful program of sustainable agriculture.
The community is from Matabeleland South Province of Zimbabwe and is in natural region 5 of Zimbabwe meaning that they receive below normal rainfall annually. They are known for hunger and starvation. We are proud that our program last season in 2021 did very well and actually the people of the last village whom we trained still have got food in their homes. Slowly and surely, we are fighting out hunger and starvation from the homes of the people who used to struggle to get food.
This season our focus is Dube village where training is ongoing, and the community is empowered to understand different varieties of crops that they need to grow. 50 people are being trained and 20 were assisted with farming inputs. We thank God that our agricultural officers are actually on the ground right now running training on growing cow peas. The amazing thing that happened this season 2021-2022 is that this area used to be one of the last areas to receive rain but this year they were the first to get the rains and we really praise God for that.
A pre-school was established at this transformational centre where young people receive food assistance on a daily basis. This community is not far away from South Africa, so many men from such communities have been working in the neighbouring countries and now due to COVID, most of these men lost their employment and are now back at home doing nothing. This transformation centre exists to bring hope and create a better future for orphans and vulnerable children from Mtshazo community of Matabeleland South Province of Zimbabwe. We are not only giving food to children who come to the pre-school but are also helping the youth with skills training on Sustainable Agriculture which is done by our agriculture officers.
Nemauzhe is a dry community with loose sandy soils that normally produce nothing. We believe that with God all things are possible hence we have introduced Farming God’s Way in this community. It may look like nothing really will come out of the community but we believe that God is able to change such a community to become a very productive community. We are slowly walking with the people of this community towards the dream that their community becomes a productive and a history making community.
They already made history when a borehole was drilled at a school in Chipunza village in 2021, a dry area which never had a borehole before managed to have a very wet hole and this became one part of the history that the community is making: water in a dry land.
This season's 2021-2022 rain in this community did not come as expected, they received very little rainfall at the beginning of the season and ever since that time the community has gone for almost two months with no rainfall. The crops which they grew are beginning to lose moisture due to the scorching sun of Chivi. Temperatures have been very high and still with no rain coming. We are praying for the community to have meaningful rain showers as soon as possible. The people of this community believes so much in farming God’s way and are looking to do well in their fields if the rains would come down well.
The team has already sited the place where the borehole will be drilled and once finances are available for this project, then the borehole will be drilled.
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This is our new community which is in Chivi District of Masvingo province of Zimbabwe. It is one community which is very underdeveloped, many people in this community share water with animals in the riverbed. It is in region 5 of Zimbabwe, therefore it is too hot in this community and many people in this area's source of income was mining. Therefore some of the people from this community are origins of Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique. Unfortunately, the main mine which was there in the community stopped to function some 20 years ago leaving almost 2,000 families with no employment.
Our team decided to start with training a few people of this community to practice Farming God’s Way and the team is committed to walk slowly but surely with this community in the development stages. We are confident that God is really doing a new thing in this once forgotten community, He is making rivers to flow in a dry land, trees to grow in the desert etc. 30 farmers are going through an ongoing training program of Farming God’s Way, and we trust God that they will do better to pave way for more from the community to be trained.