During two lovely days of this trip to Ethiopia, I’ve had the blessing of visiting very poor women who’ve received two or three goats from Heaven’s Family. The goats—always at least one male and one female—are absolutely free, but there’s a catch. The women have to agree to pay us back in kids.

This afternoon I had the bittersweet blessing of dedicating a new water well funded by Heaven’s Family’s Safe Water Ministry. It was sweet because the beneficiaries, tribespeople from miles around, have been drinking unsafe, muddy water all their lies. Now, for the first time, they will have pure, safe water to drink. They will no longer be plagued by waterborne diseases.

On our final day in Africa, Diane Scott and I traveled by car for a little over an hour outside of Nairobi to the village of Kangure. There, one of our Kenyan micro-bankers, a church-planter named David Gaita, has planted one of his churches. It is named, Emmanuel Joy Glorious Fellowship Church, and when we arrived, some of the saints were waiting for us.

Because I've been traveling in East Africa with Becky (my wife), Diane Scott, and Mel Miller, we've been focusing on projects related to our Safe Water Ministry, Food Ministry (both directed by Diane) and our Refugee Ministry (directed by Becky, and before too long to be directed by Mel). So, today we spent some hours at Cindi's Hope, a Christian boarding school in Naivasha, Kenya, whose 89 special students all have heart-breaking stories to tell.

Most Kenyan parents know that the only hope that their children have of escaping poverty is through an education. So parents who live in Nairobi's most squalid slums—that are unimaginable by Western standards—go to work every day on the outside, working at the lowest-paying jobs in order to earn enough for their children to attend school.

Pastor and prison minister Deogratias Gashagaza is known in Rwanda as a type of Mother Teresa figure. God has used him, perhaps more than anyone else, to bring reconciliation between Hutus and Tutsis since the 1994 genocide during which at least 800,000 Tutsis (and moderate Hutus) were massacred by rampaging Hutus. Pastor Deo lost 45 members of his own family.

I'm tagging along in East Africa with three of Heaven's Family's finest: my wife, Becky, who directs our Refugee Ministry, Diane Scott, who directs our Safe Water Ministry and Food Ministry, and Mel Miller, who has recently joined our staff after retiring as a career pilot for American Airlines. Mel is being trained to take over directorship of the Refugee Ministry as it has exceeded Becky's time capacity.

In my last blog, I told you the story of how American Joseph Zanetti began serving the Badjao people who live in a section of the Isla Verde slum on the Philippine coast of Davao City. It was the Badjao who first built their stilted huts, decades ago, over waters that were then teeming with tropical fish.