Village Care

Director David Glenwinkel:

What is going on?

To anyone spending time in Africa beneath the surface of tourism one fact becomes painfully clear. Fifty years of foreign aid programs and missionary efforts have failed to impact either the economy or the culture. One hundred years of colonial influence shattered the traditional family structure and failed to prepare the population for eventual independent leadership. Today Africa groans under the burden of oppression and corruption and half remembered pre colonial traditions that bind them to a life of poverty, disease, and death. Western assistance programs both in the church and among the humanitarian community continue to repeat the same pattern of failed program approaches that seem wonderful on the surface but inevitably lead to further destitution in the society as a whole. It is time to try something new. Village Care is not a traditional aid program, and is not an evangelistic organization. It is a compassion based initiative that partners American Churches to form a long term commitment to small African Villages in a program that emphasizes encouragement and personal contact along with sustainable development within the village itself. We use short term visiting teams to accomplish long term objectives.

I never intended to go to Africa. In the early 1970’s, during my college days, I trained young Peace Corps volunteers at a training facility in Southern California. My job was to teach them how to care for livestock and manage crops in third world countries and prepare them for the rigors of farming in a non mechanized environment. I grew up on a small farm in an Agricultural Community and earned a degree in International Agriculture in 1976. Ironically I did not travel outside of the U.S. for the next three decades. I did keep in touch with the process over the years and made a study of work being done around the world in humanitarian assistance.

In May of 2002 I finally did make the trip as a board member of a fledgling non profit called Health Education for Africa Resource Team that has a developing a work in Kenya. My true motive was to see and attempt to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. I spent five weeks traveling through Kenya’s rural villages and remote areas and came to an astounding conclusion. After over 30 years of massive world assistance and church programs and billions of dollars in Aid, Africa is poorer today than it was before it al began! I was very familiar with the failed process of the Peace Corps, but I had no idea how bad things really are, and how they are only getting worse. I kept thinking “whatever we are doing, it isn’t working!” And yet the same processes remain in place today surrounded by new words and jargon like “sustainable development” and “teach a man to fish”.

I returned in October of 2002 and began to visit and stay in rural villages, make friends, take time to listen and learn. Late in 2002 I wrote a plan for an idea called Village Care. Tossing out all the old assumptions and myths I and a few friends started with some basic concepts that are not widely accepted in the world today.

The resources are available in Africa to sustain development.
The Africans are as hard working and intelligent as the rest of us but lack the training and immediate resources needed.
People will gather around the needs of their children and the community can be mobilized to meet the needs of their own orphans and widows.
A model has to be developed that does not count on foreign aid or government assistance, but on local resources and small partnerships and locally sustainable practices.

Village Care Outcomes and Practices is an initiative program that brings together African rural community and church leaders mobilized to oversee and assist Widows and Orphans using resources developed within the community in partnership with American Volunteers. The Village Care program provides practical guidelines and training in home sanitation, nutrition, health care, education, and economic security; the Practices driven by the simple concept that we want every child to be safe, healthy, at home, in school, and doing well in the community.

We are initiating small accountability groups will gather to learn and apply the principles of marriage, family, parenting and life principles of integrity and leadership and other topics as they work together around our development targets for sanitation, nutrition, health care and economic security. There are programs for children, youth, and adults. These materials are designed to help villagers in the challenging need for cultural change. The key to the program is the development of local resources and the restriction against bringing in outside assistance that cannot be sustained by the Village. This partnership calls upon individual churches and groups in America to assume a long term relationship with a village by sending Volunteers to teach and encourage and provide specific levels of assistance designed to build self sustaining programs. Our goal is for a thousand churches to partner with a thousand villages across sub-Saharan Africa. Our first Model Village project in Nyamusi Village, Kisii, Kenya has been an astounding success. Currently we have 109 Orphans and 58 Widows registered in the program all assisted by local churches in the village partnered by Cherry Hills Community Church of Littleton Colorado.

What is the Answer?

The Model Village: The vast majority of Widows and Orphans of Africa live in small village communities where they receive little, if any, assistance. Village Care mobilizes the community to create a safe and healthy home for those in the greatest need. The practices taught in the VC curriculum promote conduct that can empower the powerless and transform the lives of the entire village. Outcomes The Outcomes program indicators help us to target needs effectively and measure success.

Leadership: The key to any program is qualified leadership. In each community we seek people who have the integrity and skills necessary to articulate our vision and implement an effective Village Committee consisting of church and clan leaders. The village committee varies from 7 to 10 members and their job is to influence change, recruit churches to the program, determine who qualifies to be in the program and insure that the program guidelines are followed. This is an unpaid volunteer group.

The Monitors Activating the Village Churches: Our approach to assisting the widows and orphans within the village is to call the church to the task. There is an underlying spiritual darkness and oppression that insures a state of poverty and distress not only in the village as a whole but in the African Church as well. God has called the church to address this problem. A few volunteers in each participating local church assume responsibility for daily visits to the homes in distress and bring reports to the committee to assess areas of need in the family. The cross section of community and church involvement and the unpaid volunteer requirement for participation insures a transparency and fairness in the program.

The Guardians: Someone has to look after the orphans 24/7. Family help is available but family members can barely feed themselves and care for their own. Often in Africa the task of caring for the small children falls upon Grandma or sometimes the older children are left to raise the younger children. Village care seeks to assist these folks by offering help on several levels to insure that the orphans have care and oversight.

The Registrants: The knowledge of who is in the most serious need in a village and why rests within the network of the village itself. The measure of poverty between those in the most serious distress and those who are working to help them is often very little. The committee works closely with the village network to determine who will be assisted. The number of people who can be helped is limited by the budget and the number of volunteers that participate in the program.

The Cost: Sustaining an orphan during the establishment of a Village program costs about $10.00 per month. That is about one third of the cost of an orphanage. The child has many advantages in this environment. Ancestral land is not lost, tribal identity is maintained, and the child can grow up in an environment filled with family and friends. Our goal is to bring widows and orphans out of the program and into independence as quickly as possible. The program targets community involvement and brings assistance where necessary based on the decisions of the community. Funds are needed to develop educational material, minor in home supplies, some food supplements, and educational assistance. We hope to introduce microfinance programs as the process matures that will be self sustaining. The largest cost is the development in each participating village of a resource center where training can occur, supplies can be gathered and a base of operations can be developed. Built on land donated by the community the average anticipated cost of a resource center is $12,000.00.

The Five Levels of Assistance

When the Nyamusi program was established we encountered several levels of need. The first level of need is to those families in immediate danger of death. As part of the process of assessing a village our Teams along with the Village Committee visited many households with the community and did interviews ranging from a few minutes to several hours. Some families were seriously distressed and we decided that in spite of the program principles there are cases where food, blankets, clothing, and medical treatment are a matter of life and death and some program funds are used for this purpose.

The second level of need is to establish the basic daily principles of nutrition and sanitation within the home. As poverty increases so does despair. Many families simply lack the energy and knowledge to keep the home clean, properly store food, boil water, and cook the variety of food necessary for good nutrition. This is not a costly process and is the area where the volunteers provide encouragement and help.

The third area of need is for children under the age of five. This group is most at risk of death from water born diseases, malaria, and acute respiratory diseases. The main need here is to train mothers and family members how to care for young children by keeping them warm, providing nutritional meals, and learning how to identify serious illness and empower them to seek medical attention.

The fourth area of need is for school aged children. Primary school in Kenya is free, but a child without a school uniform and books cannot attend. Our aim for this group monitor their nutrition and health and provide them the basics to keep them in public school. Secondary school is not free and most families do not have the resources necessary to pay the fees. The cost of keeping a child in public secondary school for a year is about $500.00.

The fifth area of need is to empower widows to live healthy lives, earn a living, and take care of their families. This is counter culture, where widows are generally inherited by a brother or uncle when the husband dies in order to keep the land in the family. A widow is powerless to protect herself and her children from predatory abuse or from ending up on the streets to earn the money to feed her children if she is not inherited. Women have no rights in the African village culture. We seek to develop microeconomic programs that will enable these women to earn a living. Pilot projects over the last two years, especially project WEEP (Women’s Equality and Empowerment Project) have been very successful.

Through the program we also implement a series of bible study and life style programs around small groups that address many topics at the village level. These programs encourage establishing biblical relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children and members of the community.

The Role of the American Church

The American church is the key to the success of this program. By some estimates there will be forty million orphans in Africa within the next ten years. A staggering number, and a staggering cost in lives and dollars. Even at the village level it would cost over 400,000,000 dollars a month just to feed these kids!

However, for one or two churches in America to partner with a single village and work with them in a long term relationship is not an unbearable burden. The gift of encouragement provided by volunteers who come in small teams to pray and teach has an overwhelming life changing impact on both the Africans and the Team Volunteers. Village Care provides the logistics and training, you provide the manpower!

Village Care is part of a holistic approach to the Gospel. The American Church may form a relationship at any one of several phases in the life of a village ministry. One church, working with the adopt a language program as part of the Jesus Film project among the Dukawa Tribe in Nigeria is now looking at how to foster a long term relationship with the village as new pastors are trained. Village Care meets a growing need to meet the physical and spiritual requirements of a third world community. Sonrise Church of Auburn, California is introducing Outcomes and Practices to the Dukawa this year.

The Big Picture

The key to the Village Care program is the development of local resources without creating dependency on outside assistance that cannot be sustained by the village. In our first model village project in Nyamusi Village, Kisii, in western Kenya near Lake Victoria, our Village Care program has already mobilized community, clan and church leaders to find adoptive homes for more than 100 orphan children. Most of the resources needed to support these children either already exist in the village or they can be purchased locally with modest outside funding – funding that can eventually be replaced by developing the village economy. What the village leaders need most right now is support from organizations and churches in America who are willing to reach out with encouragement, modest financial support and a personal visit from time to time. Most of all, they need the knowledge and hope that people on the other side of the world care about what is happening in their small village in Africa.

Over the next generation forty million orphans will grow up in Sub Saharan Africa. Their parents are already lost. Will they grow up on the streets? Will they join the rapidly expanding ranks of Islam? Or will the church mobilize to nurture these children in the way of Christ and bring up a generation of healthy adults?

- David Glenwinkel