Fountain of Hope January Update

Warmest greetings from the wonderful nation of Zimbabwe. We are glad to let you know that we started the year running. Our agricultural officers are already meeting with our farmers and encouraging them to not lose hope since some of the areas where we do ministry did not receive enough rainfall to make crops grow well. The children in our transformation centres and from Peniel centre have just started going to school this week and we trust God that they will do well in school.

The staff members of FOH and the communities that we work with in climatic region 5 of Zimbabwe would like to hereby express our gratitude to Bright Hope World for all the support that is being rendered to communities and the vulnerable children under our care. Climatic region 5 of Zimbabwe is one of the hardest, driest, most difficult regions of all the regions that we have in Zimbabwe. It covers three provinces of Zimbabwe, that is Masvingo, Matabeleland South and North and we are so very grateful that there is our presence in each of these three provinces. The soils are not good, and rainfall is very limited hence the people are encouraged to practice Foundations for Farming. We thank God for all the staff members that we have who are so committed to improving the quality of life in this region through training communities on sustainable agriculture, increasing the number of orphans and vulnerable children getting education and employable skills, improving access to clean and safe drinking water, establishment of gardens to improve food security as well as household income, and above all discipling communities to know God.

Thank you so much for your support. Please find more in this update of what the Lord has been doing in these communities. 

Foundations for Farming / Farming God's Way

This is one of the ways of breaking the cycle of poverty and hunger in rural communities and of ensuring that children attend school on a daily basis as they will have food in their tummies. In this region many children, especially those from vulnerable families, have been dropping out of school due to a lack of school fees and also because of hunger and malnutrition. Our team is doing their best to reach out to these families, one village at a time from the 3 provinces of Zimbabwe. Our training for this farming season began in July last year and seeds were distributed to farmers at the end of October 2022 for this season.

Many new communities like Majiji embraced this program with both hands as they were convinced that this was the best way of taking people out of poverty and hunger. Thank you so much for enabling us to train 520 people from the three provinces of Zimbabwe.

Makamure Community:
Number of people trained = 320
Number of people who received seed = 151

Chikofa Community:
Number of people trained = 70
Number of people who received seed = 45

Gwakwe Community:
Number of people trained = 80
Number of people who received seed = 35

Majiji Community:
Number of people trained = 50
Number of people who received seeds = 25

We thank God for the enthusiasm that all the communities are exhibiting, even the new communities, which got the training from mid–June 2022. Many people from these communities are completely tired of hunger and they want to see a change in things. The chief of Makamure had this to say:

“Our hearts are very much grateful to Fountain of Hope for coming to our community to chase away hunger and starvation. We really are for this new way of farming; we will never let go of this because we want food in our families and the entire community.

Thank you so much for coming to our community and other surrounding communities to be a blessing to us. We would like to ask you to keep on praying for rain, for without rain there is nothing that we can do. Thank you also for training us on how to make fertilizer out of the resources that we have. Our soil is so poor that we need fertilizers, and it is always expensive to buy fertilizers from the shops and this new way of producing fertilizer is not all that expensive, anyone can just do it. Thank you Fountain of Hope that you have a heart of empowering people to produce their own food on their own”. 

Challenges and Solutions

Since we operate in a very dry environment and in places where the soils are really old without any nutrients to sustain crops, we have come up with a way of making people produce their own home-made fertilizers using the resources that they have. The community does not have to go to the shops to buy expensive fertilizers but just have to work at their homes producing their own fertilizer. This is one of the ways that the people are so happy about this way of farming. 

Our other biggest or greatest challenge in this season is inadequate rainfall especially in places like Makamure, Chikofa (this has become the worst place of all places), Mtshazo, Gwakwe, and Majiji (which is better than the other places). We met with the chiefs, the district council of Chivi and the church leaders in December to look into this after the whole December was so dry that there was no moisture for crops to survive. We agreed that this farming is the best way of farming in this region although we need to augment the rainfall by sinking boreholes or harvesting rainwater. If these communities do not get meaningful rainfall in the beginning of January, then there will be no moisture in the ground to make crops grow.  

Transformation Centres

Orphans and vulnerable children often suffer a plethora of problems especially those who live in deep remote areas. A number of them drop out of school for lack of all basic necessities, some of them get married (mainly the girls) while they are still teenagers and many times become the third or fourth wife of an old man. Many of them grow up without proper identity documents which reduces their chance of getting better jobs or even running a business of their own. Some of them work while they are still young in order to get food while others end up roaming around the streets of our towns in search of food and clothes. They eat from bins, sleeping on pavements, and teaching one another to indulge in drugs. It is to this background that Fountain of Hope runs and would like to keep on running Transformation Centres in deep downtrodden communities where an ongoing process of healing is provided to these wonderful children.

We are glad to let you know that Fountain of Hope has so far established three Transformation Centres where children are provided with education, both formal and informal, food, psycho-social support interventions, skills for development etc. We are so very indebted to Bright Hope World for the smooth way these three are functioning. Hope for the future is amazingly being ignited in the hearts of children who attend our Transformation Centres.

One of our Transformation Centres in Mthombothemba runs a bridging school, which is a school for children who have dropped out of school. These children are given another chance, they are even taken out off the streets and the bush to go back to school and begin to prepare a better future for themselves. This year 22 children from our Mthombothemba Bridging School will be integrated into the formal school and we trust God that they will be able to do better at the school. 

Peniel Centre (ZIM02)

This is a centre that provides a home, family, hope and a future to abandoned, abused, neglected and orphaned children. The centre is also a place of refuge for children returning back home from neighbouring countries and children who are abused or neglected. It has the capacity to have 50 children at one time and we have seen the centre accommodating this number especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The centre is a place where these children are provided with knowledge on how to grow like Jesus in all aspects of life. It is our pleasure to report that the centre has produced pastors, agriculturalists, caterers, drivers, mechanics, businesspeople etc. out of such children. It gives pleasure to see some of them who passed through Peniel being able to live an independent life.

There is a pre-school that is running already at Peniel Centre and this is because schools are far away and we have the desire to have our own school, from pre-school to advanced level.  

Sustainable Projects

Fish Farming 
We have just started a fish farming project at Peniel Centre and have initiated the project with 1500 baby fish. Our desire is to have many more fishponds around the centre, so that we produce more fish as an income generating project. The fish will also be used to augment our food for the children so the centre will benefit from the project. 

Polytunnel (Green Garden) 
We have also established a small green garden to produce mainly fresh tomatoes for consumption as well as for sale so that there is some income for the centre. The green house is also helping the children as well as some people from the community of Mthombothemba learn farming techniques. We are therefore killing many birds with just one stone, people come to learn farming, our children also are equipped with farming skills, as well as enabling our kitchen to have fresh vegetables (tomatoes).

Skills Development

We are so very grateful to Bright Hope World for all the support that is being rendered to our skills development team for young people. Most of the young people who are being trained are young people who used to live on the streets without hope, with no future, no skills. Now these youngsters are being housed at Peniel Centre where they are equipped with skills to make a living, thanks to Bright Hope World. We are doing our best to empower young people with skills that create livelihoods and transform lives. Here is a photo of the carpentry class working on the roof of a house. 

Boreholes and Garden Projects

The communities that we work in are in the dry, drought prone areas of Zimbabwe and therefore people struggle to get water for consumption as well as for productive purposes. Our thrust is to glorify God by making people in dry areas have clean and safe drinking water as well as water for productive purposes. The boreholes that we drilled in these areas are undoubtedly going a long way in providing safe drinking water to communities as well as providing them with opportunities to grow fresh vegetables for their families and for selling. Our team is working on how to add value to all these garden products and this year 2023, so many training meetings will be run in these communities to help the community to get maximum benefit from their gardens.  

Comments

Thank you once more Bright Hope World that you are making communities to be able to stand on their own. The training and the support which they are getting is by far making them to realise God’s plan for them. The communities where people used to be enemies are able to work together, do things together, plan together and transform their communities together. Apart from that, slowly we are taking young people out of the doldrums of hopelessness and into the channel of seeing the future through the eyes of God. A number of them are turning to Christ and are growing in learning more about Christ. 

Towards the end of last year our organisation was regarded as one of the best organisations which brings development through relationship building. Our teams are always with the people and whatever is done in communities, the people take ownership of it.

Thank you very much. 

Fountain of Hope Team