Friends of Orphans and Vulnerable Children

Friends of Orphans and Vulnerable Children
What could be better than an Ethiopian welcome, FOVC style?

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Needed: Short-Terms Sponsors for Widows...Will You Help?

Dear Ones, 

I have been awake much of the night, thinking and praying and tossing and turning about how we can do more. How I can live with myself, in my comfortable life, while too many are suffering desperately.

Here is an email I received from Desalegn last night. He has found a way to send the FOVC widows to a sewing school. The school goes for three months. It is run by a Catholic organization that is only about a fifteen-minute drive from FOVC.

Hi dearest Lory,

I have been working to find more effective ways to teach Beauty and other widows how to prepare materials and how to sew it. Luckily, I found a wonderful Center which offers a short term sewing training in Boditti. Its monthly training fee is only 40 birr ($2.5 USD). It is very amazing for me Lory. The widows will have a good training and that will help them to change their lives completely, I believe that!!! 

And Lory, I worked out the break down which is needed to teach a widow at the Center per month:
1. For training fee = 40 birr per month
2. For meals=12 birr per day (360 birr per month)
3. For transportation = 10 birr per day (300 birr per month)
4. Miscellaneous = 50 birr per month 

So, we need 750 birr or ($45.5 USD) per month per widow to teach widows a life changing skill. And we need three months training for each widow. Before finding this cheapest and effective way, I was thinking to teach only Beauty. But as this is very cheap and effective, I think it is good if we teach all widows to have basic knowledge there in the Center. By the way the Training Center is Catholic based and it will offer good skills in how to prepare materials for sewing and how to sew it. Thank you so much for bringing this idea and you will see the impact and result which the sewing project will bring soon.

With much love in Christ,
Desalegn

FOVC currently serves eight widows. For $135, a short-term sponsor can send a widow to sewing school for three months. $135 will cover her tuition, transportation and meals.

If you know very much about the problems faced by orphans and widows in poor countries, you know that providing an education for the orphans is the key to lifting them out of poverty. And the key to giving the widows a hand up is to provide them with job skills. 

A widow in Ethiopia is typically responsible for four to ten people. But she has no means to earn an income. No social status. No help from the government.The churches have no means to help. The community is struggling to survive, so the neighbors can't help. In the small villages where we work, there is no other NGO or NPO presence. 
  
It's up to us. 

Please email me if you can sponsor a widow for this destiny-changing opportunity. 

Because it's up to us.
 

Mom is so proud for her baby. These moms are me.

Gift of food that we delivered to each of the FOVC widows.

Another family stands back, looking on. Looking in.

These kids are NO DIFFERENT from our children...
except that were born on the other side of the world.


After we delivered our gifts, we climbed into our vehicle and drove away.

LET US NOT DRIVE AWAY AND FORGET!

1 comment:

Renee said...

Oh wow, what an amazing opportunity! I will talk to my husband tonight about it. I think we can swing this.