Presidents Report – December 2019
“…..let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” Mathew 5:16
Presidents Message
As International President we stay focused on a stable home for the children of The Agape Orphanage Foundation as well as addressing social issues and problem resolution towards these issues.
Shining Light
From an Orphanage to a Home
The Agape Orphanage Foundation was founded in the early 2000’s and in 2014 Agape expanded from living in a rental home to our Msundwe property. We started out with a bare piece of land and since 2014 have completed the girl’s dorm, boy’s dorm, garage, pump houses, duplex, large kitchen with community hall, library, and covered laundry area over these years. The relocation to Msundwe provided multiple maturing opportunities for the children through the need to adjust to their environment as well as adjusting to local village schools.
Our Vision is to empower all children at the orphanage with life skills that will enable them to participate, contribute and serve the local communities and beyond. Additionally, we are passionately reaching out to vulnerable children beyond the orphanage walls. We identify and reach out to children-at-risk in neighboring villages by supporting them in their own family units.
Partnering with local communities in Msundwe and Community Based Organizations (CBO’s) opens up opportunities for life changing impact on children-at-risk in these communities. Agape’s outreach initiatives include: Outreach visits with a social worker, private sponsoring post secondary education, Agape’s Family of God Nutrition Program also known locally as Agape’s Feeding Program.
Feeding Program
Since January 2018 we initiated a new weekly nutritional program at The Agape Orphanage site that complements Agape’s outreach to neighboring villages. Every Saturday children from the community come to the orphanage site for fun, games, 2 nutritionally protein enriched meals and spiritual nourishment. This program has been growing and we now have up to 200 children registered from local villages. For many of them it is the main physical and spiritual nourishment of the week.
“But as for you, be strong and do not give up, for your work will be rewarded.” 2 Chronicles 15:7 NLT
Building – 2019
This year we built more fence panels. Fencing is ongoing with a total need for 364 panels around our property. Balance to build is 216 panels to complete. Each fence panel is 12’L x 8′ H at a cost of $250.00 per panel. A donation towards building a fence panel can be made in dedication of a loved one.
Farm
We continue to farm our land and grow crops of Maize (corn) a main staple in Malawi as well as Ground Nuts (Peanuts) which we grind and mill for high protein as a blend in the milled maize. We would like to grow more crops and are looking for a small tractor with these attachments of rototiller, cultivator, plow, disk, bucket and cart.
Mission Report
Each year THE AGAPE ORPHANAGE FOUNDATION is enriched and strengthened by the outpouring of love, passion, talents and skills from local and international volunteer teams and visitors. A warm thank you to all who volunteered their services at the orphanage this past year. Team Ontario came with team leader Gary and his crew of 7 amazing helpers. Mission workers came from Edmonton and Devon as well as mission minded families from Lilongwe.
Children
We highlight the progress of two of the children who live at the foundation to show the impact of your sponsorship: Hopeson, whom we welcomed into our family as a very sick and malnourished orphaned baby in 2018 is thriving. He is walking, holding onto furniture and loves to show off his new motor skills. Chifundo is 4 years old and has been with us for 1.5 years now. She is learning English and preparing for school. Teresa, Ebony and Norman graduated from secondary school and we need private sponsors to send them on to Post Secondary School. Ebony would like to work as a electrician. Norman would like to work in Community Development. Teresa would like to work with the public in hotel management.
Staff
Wezzie is one of our staff and has advanced to head of girl’s dorm and managing stock and inventory.
We have additional staff who we hire as a Administrator, aunties in the dorms, guards, farm staff and a social worker. Special thanks to all our staff and a special focus this year to Farai our social worker who is always available and smiling. He has great communication skills and works well with all the children.
Needs
We need to build a fence around the project for the safety of the children and this is one of the 1st goals we will be working on. This is a huge cost.
On site we have built a foundation for a future administration building.
On the construction site, we hired local Malawians with their skills to help inprove and impact the villages around us. We are culturally sensitive and are building into the Malawians cultural sector and championing our cause in Malawi as well as in Canada.
Our goal is not to just make poverty comfortable but we are passionate to create initiatives to train our youth to transition into responsible adulthood. Digging into the root causes we know that by providing structure we will be able to engage them on skills development.
We have much work to accomplish ahead of us in the years to come and look forward to seeing how God will grow The Agape Orphanage Foundation.
Appreciation
We are humbled by the ongoing generous support THE AGAPE ORPHANAGE FOUNDATION receives. We appreciate your prayers, gifts and generous financial donations. We are blessed by mission groups and individuals who visit our foundation putting their love and compassion into action. THANK YOU for your ongoing support which enables us to multiply our efforts to provide children in Malawi with hope for a future.
Together we are changing their world by combining love with a desire to help. With heartfelt thanks.
Ingrid May,
International President for The Agape Orphanage Foundation
Have you ever had the chance to talk with an orphan – to ask what it feels like to be an orphan?
An orphan (from the Greek ὀρφανός orfanos) is a child whose parents are dead or have abandoned them permanently.
Most orphans would say that they want more than anything else to have a family, to become rich and to be established in the world. This would enable them to get away from being an orphan. Finding their birth parents, if they are still alive, is not that important to them. They know that their parents will never look for them.
Nobody would ever choose to be an orphan. It is lonely, painful, and frightening. 1st fear is starvation. These children know people take advantage of orphans. When children are raised with chronic loss, without the psychological or physical protection they need and certainly deserve, it is most natural for them to internalize incredible fear. Not receiving necessary psychological or physical protection equals abandonment. Living with repeated abandonment experiences creates toxic shame. Shame arises from the painful message implied in abandonment: “You are not important. You are not of value.” This is the pain from which people need to heal.
Children are totally dependent on caretakers to provide safety in their environment. When they do not have this safety, they grow up believing that the world is an unsafe place, that people are not to be trusted, and that they do not deserve positive attention and adequate care.
Emotional abandonment occurs when children do not receive the emotional environment necessary for healthy development. Emotional abandonment occurs when a child has to hide a part of who he or she is in order to be accepted, or to not be rejected.
Abandonment issues many times are fused with distorted, confused, or undefined boundaries.
Abandonment plus distorted boundaries, at a time when children are developing their sense of worth, is the foundation for the belief in their own inadequacy and the central cause of their shame. Abandonment and boundary violations are in no way indictments of a child’s innate goodness and value. Instead, it reveals the flawed thinking, false beliefs, and impaired behaviors of those who hurt them. The wounds are struck deep in their young hearts and minds, and the very real pain can still be felt today. The causes of emotional injuries need to be understood and accepted so they can heal. Until that occurs, the pain will stay with them, becoming a driving force in their adult lives.
Orphans, are a vulnerable, unprotected group, that have not only experienced the immense grief of losing one or both of their parents, but are also at especially high risk of abuse because they have no one looking out for their best interests. Physical abuse, sexual abuse, or abandonment are all too common.
Many children and adults in Africa experience trauma through poverty and stress of not having a job, or enough money to support their family. Understandably, these experiences have left these individuals broken, guilty, angry, un-trusting, and in need of immense emotional healing. With no government programs in place, Unemployment Insurance, Blue Cross for medical needs, Soup stations for the poor, welfare programs, or hostiles such as we have in Canada, and often they are left to beg on the streets.
Our children are no longer orphans but have become a member of our family. They receive encouragement, prayers, love, education, shelter, food and all the other essentials. This shows them a glimpse of what the family of God begins to look like.
At Agape we are a foundation committed to this vision. We wish to transform children and raise them up from the ashes as per Isaiah 61. This passion we feel is to focus on the individual child. We apply first a physical environment of security. This is the main reason why we have committed to purchasing land and building a permanent home for our children. This ministry is focused on mentoring, teaching and equipping our children with skills. Each child as you have read above first feels the physical poverty, then the emotional poverty and last the spiritual poverty.
We have rescued children in the most desperate of circumstances. We have brought in young children who have been raped at a early age because in their culture men with HIV Aids had been told by witch doctors they would be healed of aids by raping a baby or a child, regardless of their sexual gender. They have experienced the loss of parents due to HIV/AIDS or other numerous diseases such as Malaria, Hep A, Hep E, the Dengue fever etc. . These children have tasted poverty, death, rape and abuse. We have brought them into a loving family where we carve out a future of hope for them. Our desire is to see each child succeed.
We believe that a family-style homes provide the stable, nurturing environment our children need to develop into healthy, relational, well-balanced adults. We provide well-rounded care for the orphaned children we serve. Due to the many children especially our high level of teens we decided to build dorms. Each dorm consists of 4 house matrons (or could in the future provide sets of married house parents on site) who care for children with the assistance of “aunties” which they consider to be their mothers.
Currently we are seeking positive male role models in a teaching capacity to provide male leadership roles to our children.
We are a Christian registered Charitable Foundation and God is the center of our foundation. We seek His Holy Spirit for leading, guiding, providing, and sustaining this work.
It is our heartfelt desire to serve God by helping the orphans and the widows as per James 1:27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultess is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
We wish to carve a future generation, by mentoring, forming, molding and shaping many young lives for Christ and His Kingdom.
We invite you to learn more about us through our website and to join us in the numerous ways that you can come on board to help.
Ingrid May,
International President for The Agape Orphanage Foundation
