Ethiopia Update-February 2018
“…But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people” Luke 2:10 NIV
“Great joy!” Christmas offers us supernatural delight — higher, longer, deeper, and better than any joy we’ve ever known. However, most of the people do not experience this great joy but instead great sadness prevails in their lives particularly in the lives of orphans and vulnerable children in Ethiopia.
But, we thank God for the vision He has given us to reach out to our children by the Gospel Jesus Christ through our various projects. In one of our school projects called Welenchity; we have more than 500 school children who most of them are orphans and vulnerable children. We prepared a special Christmas celebration event for them so that they may experience this great joy as they gathered together to praise God and worship him on Christmas eve.
It was such an impressive event to see our children memorizing Bible verses, sing songs, celebrate God for His precious gift Jesus Christ. Most of them never received gifts in their life and when they got some gifts it was a shocking joyful experience for them to experience it.
We thank God for all our partners who has supported us to organize this event for our children.
Christmas celebration with our school students & Orphans in Welenchity
Our animal project continues changing the lives of our orphans
We have continued giving out goats to orphans in different villages. Since last month was a month of holydays we gave out goats for several orphans during Christmas week. They were very happy and thank God for the gift. It was a good reminder for them that God has given His precious son to save the world.
Hundreds of orphans have benefited from this project in the past few months. And the impact is huge. This project has totally eliminated the spirit of dependency from our communities. After they receive the gift they don’t need us to continue helping them. They take responsibility of taking care of their goats and looking after them. We hope that this small gift has changed their lives because the goats have become many more goats in few years and they can sell it and buy their food, school supplies and any other needs.
Thank you all our partners for standing alongside with us to empower our communities.
Praying for our orphans and for their goats may God would bless them
Strategic meeting and training for our leaders.
Training and empowering our local leaders are one of our key strategies to empower them to transform our communities. After every training there is a discussion session to discuss our challenges and problems. The training and the discussion sessions help our leaders find out solutions for their problems and challenges. We are not there to seek solutions for their problems; but we are there to help them to see and look for solutions for their own problems.
This approach has helped us to be successful in our programs that we are doing in our communities. Even last month we did the same thing in Nazareth/Adama/ town. More than 50 leaders gathered together and I spoke on the Biblical concept and principles of community transformation and its challenge. After that we had a very good discussion session on the topic and discussed our challenges and how to apply it in our context.
Leaders training and discussion session
Here under are lists of our prayer requests:
- Pray for all mission trips that we are expecting this year to Africa and for our African leadership who will be coming to USA to meet our board and partners. We believe that the trips will help all of us to enhance our knowledge and experience so that we can contribute more for the kingdom of God.
- Pray for our upcoming baptism event. We are expecting more than 1,000 new believers to be baptize next month. Pray for them that may they experience God and follow him in the rest of the life.
- Keep Pray for our new Zonal offices and hubs that have just opened recently, that God would enable us to do more things to help our local churches in order to accomplish their call.
- Continued prayer for our school in Wonjishowa that God would enable us to purchase the school compound
- Continued Prayer for our leadership training & development program; that God would enable and provide us all the necessary resources so that we may train and develop more leaders in the future.
- Continued Prayer for our Animal Project that God would touch many orphans so they have a bright future through this small gift.
- Continued Prayer for our new classrooms construction project in Welenchity and Wonjishowa, that God would help us to complete it timely.
- We have started a new project for our local church – planters to provide them Bicycles and Motorbikes if possible, so that it will help them to easier their work as they travel many villages. So, continue to pray for us that God would provide us the budget for this new project.
Pastor Samson Weldemariam
Ethiopia Director and Vice President of U4A
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