Report from BHW Field Director Following Visit

Recent Events

Activities

The work continues day after day training young people. The day we visited there was a hairdressing course underway. A few weeks earlier S had run a training for young women at the Nasr City Evangelical Church. The course was about inner and outer beauty and out of that emerged this training course for eight women from that course. 

Over the previous year more than 250 people have been trained in various programmes. These include English, hairdressing, cell phone repair, computer software and some hardware repairs, and also Christian discipleship. 

They have begun to train trainers in some areas as well and to date 40 people have been trained as trainers. 

Programmes 

The following courses have been completed, catering for more than 250 people;
- A number of hairdressing courses for both male and female hair
- Cell phone maintenance and repair
- Computer repair
- Computer software use
- Christian discipleship
- Training Christian musicians and children's workers

Partnership's Influence within the Community
Even though the training centre has only been running for little over a year, more than 40% of those trained have obtained employment. This is a huge testimony to the influence and quality of the training. Most of that 40% would not have employment without the training.

Those participating are very impressed by the quality of training and the attitude of the trainers and staff. 

The local people around are very impressed by the team and the quality of the training facility. This is building trust with the community. 

Ideas for the Future

An emerging need is developing to assist women to get married. This is an issue as there are expectations on women to provide certain items for the set-up of the home when they get married. Many young women cannot marry, especially if they have become believers from other faiths and have been ex-communicated by their families. 

Also there is another need in the area of ministry to Syrian refugees. The team goes out to areas where the refugees are being settled but they do not have adequate resources. 

There is also a desire to increase the number of courses being made available.  

Current Issues and Challenges

There are many challenges doing ministry here. They have to be very careful that all the students are known to them or recommended well and they have to be careful about what they say in the courses so they cannot be accused of anything. 

Funding for the training programmes is a challenge. They have not been able to get any further contributors to the vocational training.

Prayer and Praise Points

1) Egypt is still suffering from instability conditions economically wise and this is making life very hard for millions of Egyptian families. On Friday 11th November the Muslim brotherhood undertook to make a new revolution. They called it "Hunger Friday" and their aim was to destroy the country and burn down churches in order to put the country into chaos. However, the army and police had spread all over the country to protect it from the danger. They were successful and God protected Egypt from harm; the day passed peacefully. This happened as an answer to the prayers of Christians in all different churches: Evangelical, Catholic and Orthodox churches as well. Not only old people but also young children gathered from different places to pray for this day and ask for God's protection.

2) The success of the training in terms of the number of people getting employment from the training. 

Comments

This is developing into a nice partnership. They are getting good things underway with a good balance of training in discipleship and vocational. They have not been able to raise any further donors although I'm not sure why. Nathan has had to do some international travel to promote a new book about his life and he has found it difficult to talk about that and the work at the same time. 

There are some other opportunities developing here for the future but I think for the moment we should concentrate on trying to add to the funding for vocational training.