A Potentially Continent-Changing Discovery
If you ever travel in rural, sub-Saharan Africa, you’ll soon notice that every piece of land that isn’t vertical is being used for farming. 70% of Africans are farmers.
Read MoreIf you ever travel in rural, sub-Saharan Africa, you’ll soon notice that every piece of land that isn’t vertical is being used for farming. 70% of Africans are farmers.
Read MoreI'm happy to report that Heaven's Family is not just involved in micro-banking in this region. Today our team was invited to a meeting of about 40 people, from babies to the elderly, who all suffer from the same terrible physical affliction. I don't know how else to tell you but to just say it: due to an apparent genetic defect that is strangely common to their particular tribe, all were born without an anus.
Read MoreIt has been such a joy to meet with our micro-bankers and their borrowers over the past few days, at their places of business and in their God’s Love Groups. One of those borrowers really caught my attention. He lives in the middle of nowhere, way out in the bush, in a tiny village consisting of thatched-roof mud huts named Pumuzika. His name is Robert Odaga, and before he received his first and second loans from Heaven’s Family, he attended one of our Micro-Loan Ministry’s Small Business Trainings (SBTs). It changed his life.
Read MoreOver the years, Heaven’s Family's Micro-Loan Ministry has evolved. We’ve come a long way since the initial $100 loans that I made to ten poor Nigerians in 2004 to help them start small businesses. When I returned one year later to collect, only three borrowers showed up for the repayment meeting, and those three came to explain why they could not repay.
Read MoreSince we started Heaven’s Family 16 years ago, I have repeatedly been asking this question: “Why are people poor?” And a second question related to that one: “What is the best way to eliminate poverty?”
Read MoreIt is a basic principle of economics that supply always increases to meet demand. If there is a demand for widgets, more widgets will be manufactured, all due to the hope of profits. And that is generally a good thing. When there is demand for heroine, however, heroine supply will increase to meet the demand. The same is true for porn. And the same is true for pseudo-orphanages and pseudo-orphans.
Read MoreMicro-credit, when done properly, can be a huge blessing to very poor people who, with a small business loan, are given an opportunity they would never had otherwise to lift themselves from poverty. Heaven’s Family’s Micro-Loan Ministry, under the very capable directorship of Dan Steward, is the biggest thing Heaven’s Family is doing around the world. Dan and his team, consisting of his wife, Terry, Isaac and Sarah Smoak, and Jenna Liberati, are touching lives in 13 nations now, and one of those nations is Myanmar.
Read MoreToday I spent the entire day with Philip Barker, who directs our child reintegration program in Myanmar, and one of our Burmese social workers, Htoo Say, as we visited three children who formerly lived in a large orphanage that Heaven’s Family once supported. Now they are living in families.
Read MoreToday at a Working Group meeting at the Heaven’s Family offices in Yangon, I heard a wonderful story about two brothers whom we’ve recently been able to help. Their names are Huang Maung and Huang Khui Shin. Eleven years ago, at ages 4 and 6, they were torn from their mother, other siblings, and their home and village in Chin State. At the time, their twice-widowed mother was struggling to care for them, and a pastor from Yangon promised her they would have better lives in a Yangon orphanage hundreds of miles away. So she let them go with him, and that was the last time she saw them.
Read MoreGreetings from Myanmar (still better known as Burma), where Heaven’s Family has been working since 2003. It was here that we launched Orphan’s Tear, what ultimately became a monthly child sponsorship program that served almost 1,000 children living in orphanages in seven nations, but predominantly in Myanmar.
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