Emmanuel Nsabimana of Rwanda, standing in his formerly-useless field, and praising God for his soon-coming bountiful bean harvest!
French Beans Millionaire
David’s 2nd Photo-Blog from East Africa
Dear Family,
I’m absolutely convinced that if more people learn what is happening in rural East Africa through Heaven’s Family’s Farming God’s Way (FGW) and Disciple-Multiplication Ministries (DMM), they will become as excited about it as I am.
Farming God’s Way is not a handout thrown into a bottomless black hole of need. Rather, it is a door of opportunity for small-scale subsistence farmers to apply the simple but revolutionary agricultural methods on land they own or rent. Success requires their brains and their sweat. Hard workers reap ever-increasing bountiful harvests, year after year.
Farming God’s Way is the best of what is known in the international development world as “Asset-Based Community Development” or “ABCD.” With ABCD, stakeholders utilize the knowledge that God is giving them with assets God has already given them, in this case, farmland. Without the knowledge of Farming God’s Way, East African farmland is often unproductive, and small-scale farming is futile. But by using FGW methods, poor soil becomes rich, nutrient-filled, and drought- and erosion-resistant. It works so well that Farming God’s Way farmers are often accused by their neighbors of using witchcraft!
As our team of four repeatedly met with groups of FGW farmers in rural Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda, my admiration for them swelled. We heard so many stories of men who at one time were full of shame because they could not feed their own children more than one meal a day with a mono-diet of corn, but who now feed their families a nutritious variety three times a day. We heard stories of widows and abandoned wives who are prospering and sending their children to school because of applying FGW methods. We even heard stories of children who are farming small plots of land using FGW methods and are now buying themselves new clothes in exchange for the old rags they used to wear!
I wish you could have heard all the stories that our team heard! Plus, most all of the stories we heard included a wonderful spiritual component, because our FGW farmers are all part of small house churches called “God’s Love Groups” where serious discipleship is happening.
While our team was in East Africa, we extensively interviewed quite a few successful FGW farmers, and each of our team members took portraits and wrote down the stories of several families. The intention is to share one of those stories every month with everyone who is making those stories possible by their investments into Heaven’s Family’s Farming God’s Way Ministry.
Below is one of the stories I wrote. FGW investors will receive it in their email inboxes sometime in the next twelve months, but you are getting a sneak preview…because I hope you will become a shareholder! All you have to do is invest $34 per month, as that is what it takes to train one household head how to eliminate the annual “hunger season” through FGW, and turn a failing subsistence farmer into a successful cash-crop farmer. Your monthly $34 investment will transform one poor African family, as well as every subsequent generation. As you continue investing, your portfolio with grow every year, and your dividends will be paid to you when you stand before Jesus! It’s a “no-brainer” opportunity! Ready to start investing? Just click here!
Below is the uplifting story of Emmanuel Nsabimana of Rwanda, whose photo is at the top of this email. Read it and rejoice! And remember that Emmanuel’s story actually began in the generous heart of someone who supports Heaven’s Family’s Farming God’s Way Ministry! (After Emmanuel’s story are some additional photos from my trip, with captions.)
French Beans Millionaire
“Wise wives remain quiet when their husbands return home in the morning because no one will hire them to work.” Those are words of wisdom from Emmanuel Nsabimana of Rwanda, who is no stranger to disappointment. Agricultural day-labors know what it is like to arise early in the morning and walk to the place in town where crowds gather in hopes of being hired by landowners for a day of planting, weeding or harvesting. Too often, there is not enough work for them all, and able workers return home quietly, hoping for a better tomorrow. Worse, it could mean that they and their families go hungry that day or the next.
Emmanuel even owned his own plot of land, but weather-related risks were so great and harvests were so meager that he decided it was safer to just lease his land to other growers.
Then Emmanuel met one of Heaven’s Family’s Farming God’s Way trainers named Peter. What Peter promised at first sounded too good to be true, and Emmanuel argued with him about the apparent foolishness of not tilling his land and covering it with dead vegetation which Peter referred to as “God’s blanket.” Eventually, however, Emmanuel decided to give it a try. He followed all of Peter’s instructions and planted French beans in his small field. He covered the soil with God’s blanket. He removed weeds at the prescribed times.
To his amazement, his French bean plants produced a bumper harvest. The quality of his beans was so high that few had to be discarded during harvest sorting. In the end, Emmanuel was holding 1.2 million Rwandan francs in his hand (about $1,000), and his beans were being exported to Europe!
Now, just a few months later, Emmanuel is leasing three fields from other landowners to grow even more crops, and he has hired as many as 30 day-laborers at a time! He is not only creating jobs, but he is unselfishly training many of his workers in Farming God’s Way, while at the same time discipling them to follow Jesus.
One other added benefit is that his wife, the mother of their two young children, has, in Emmanuel’s words, “found her voice.” She is no longer quiet when her husband walks in the door as before, and she no longer worries about food security for her family.
Who are the heroes in this story? It is everyone whose investments in Heaven’s Family’s Farming God’s Way Ministry changed the life of Emmanuel and his family, and hundreds of other East African farmers like them. On their behalf, thank you!
A Ugandan beauty and her niece. Both of their fathers are men of God and successful farmers who are spreading the good news about Jesus and the good news about Farming God’s Way.
This lady was welcomed at God’s Love Group even though she was a Muslim. She’s enjoyed her first FGW harvest, and I suspect she will soon be enjoying the new birth!
One advantage to living in a dirt-floor house is that you don’t have to worry about children tracking dirt into it…
My son, Stephen, a team member who has traveled all over the world for Heaven’s Family for 17 years. He now serves as Executive Director, having done every job at Heaven’s Family at one time or another. He has always been a kid magnet.
Team member and former Amish minister, Jonas Kurtz, being swarmed by students at a Christian school in a Nairobi slum that Heaven’s Family’s Education Ministry has supported for many years.
David Servant
President Heaven’s Family
