Mwayi and His Family

Snoden is introducing Mwayi to you. He’s seven years old and a member of our feeding program and Kindergarten. His father died two years ago, and now his mother is terminally ill. He’s one of eight children. Mwayi has a quickly developing skin condition that you can clearly see in this video. We want to address that immediately, and two hundred dollars, the amount of money Snoden is asking for, should cover a trip to the hospital and a visit to a doctor. It may even cover his medication or a small procedure. However, as you may have deduced from the situation, we’re going to need more.

Friends and neighbors are helping the family while their mother is sick, but when she dies, the children will be orphans. As much as we want to take in all eight of them when that happens, we can’t. Not only is it probably best that family take care of family, but the government encourages it. The closest relatives will be responsible for them, whether they want to or not, and we would like to help lighten that burden—especially since sometimes these “unwanted burdens” are targets for abuse. Eight more children without more income can be devastating, so we want to be sure that wherever they go, there is enough money to provide for them.

This family is under an unbelievable amount of stress with their father gone and their mother as sick as she is. We will get Mwayi to the doctor even before you help us pay for that. It’s obviously urgent and cannot wait. But we’ll need your help to provide for these kids during the most difficult time of their lives. We would like to try to keep them together, but nobody in the village will be able to afford them all, and it’s likely they’ll be separated and possibly shipped to relatives far away from each other. We pray Mwayi will stay close and continue his education with us. It’s not up to us who they’ll live with, but we can offer to help pay for their food, clothes, and medical care until we’re no longer needed for that. Snoden is asking for two hundred dollars, but after learning more about this family, we realize this is just the tip of the iceberg.

This is one of the situations we dread the most in our ministry. It’s out of our hands and seems hopeless, but we know it never is. God is fully capable of making something beautiful out of this tragic situation. Please pray for Mwayi and his family, and give whatever God puts on your heart. We’ll do our best to discreetly provide for them and keep them together while they lose their mother and make the transition so many village children make every year to orphan status. We’ll continue to be as involved as possible and to keep you informed about their lives as much as we’re permitted. Thank you for your love and generosity!

Send a tax-deductible donation here:

HUGS for Tomorrow

P.O. Box 1816 

Azle, Texas 76098

Or make a tax-deductible PayPal donation here.

Long Distance Connection

Snoden and Angela at her new boarding school

Snoden and Arthur (in the background) harvesting food for the kids

When I was an exchange student in Vienna, for an entire year I had to walk to the end of the street and use a calling card at a phone booth for my mother to hear my voice—and she could never call me back. In order to talk to my friends I sent aerogrammes and waited weeks for a return letter. The problems of a sixteen-year-old girl are many, and by the time my mom or my friends got back to me in writing with their well-thought-out responses, I had already moved on to the next crisis. Times sure have changed, and now I can sit with a cup of coffee on my comfy couch, touch a button on my phone, and talk to people in an African village, where they don’t even have running water or electricity. It’s amazing, really. 

We talk to Snoden and Susan that way quite often. They have the kids wave to us while they’re enjoying a meal or let us “sit in” on a class while they teach. They walk us around and show us the progress on a construction project or let us see how well the maize is growing on our land. We chat over a 9,000 mile distance like we’re standing next to each other on the same soil. That makes it easy for us to forget how difficult it is to live in the village and just how much those kids need this program. No water, no electricity, no health care, no security, and no education—for too many of the children there. But the kids in our program receive all these things, so we continue to work together over this long distance to improve and expand our ministry. Snoden just sent us the two beautiful pictures I’m sharing with you here. They’re not the highest quality images or even textbook examples of composition, but what they represent is of far greater value.

The first picture is a selfie that Snoden took of Angela and himself while he was dropping her off at her new school. It means she doesn’t have to walk four miles through dangerous neighborhoods anymore just to arrive at a school with hundreds of students to one teacher per class, no books, and no lunch. She’s a bright girl with untapped potential, and we want to see her thrive. Thanks to our generous friends and supporters, she will. We started out by applying for her to attend the international school where I taught and where the boys went when we lived in Malawi. After the initial enrollment process, we realized that may not be the best school for her after all. Among a few other issues, getting there and back each day was going to be a challenge. It took a bit of searching but we believe her parents’ legwork has paid off and that she’s been enrolled in the perfect school to suit her needs. It just so happens to be the girls’ boarding school Gret Glyer, the founder of DonorSee, started when he lived in Malawi. (I wrote about his recent passing in my last blog article). We love to see Angela’s bright smile in this photo, and we share her sentiment.

The second picture is of Snoden at our new farm, showing off some of the beautiful produce already ready for harvest. He was on his way home from leaving Angela at school and stopped by to grab some food for the kids in our feeding program.You can see Arthur, Angela’s brother, playing farmer in the background. We know God is blessing this endeavor because it’s not the growing season in Malawi; there is no rain. This new land is low enough that it stays wet and allows plants to grow even when the land around it is bone dry. This means that even with the price of food on the rise, our kids will not go hungry and we should be able to feed others outside our program. It also gives the kids exposure to foods they have never eaten and increases their health and the likelihood that they will eat a well-balanced diet in the future. I cannot express to you how excited we are to see the abundance of nutrition represented in those green leafy vegetables! 

We hope to eventually eradicate poverty from the lives of every household in Malawi. Our latest two projects—the land purchase and enrolling Angela in school—have been especially fruitful to that end. We received the images that inspired this article just minutes after Snoden captured them on his phone, thanks to the miracle of modern technology. Now I’m sharing them with you just hours later. Isn’t it amazing that we can all be a part of what’s happening in Tambalale village right now? We don’t have to read about it in a book a year from now or a letter a month from now or even hear about it over the phone without actually seeing it. You and I can interact with real people living in real poverty today, and we can do something about it—today! It truly is an awesome blessing to be included in such a vital Kingdom work. We hope you feel the connection and the difference you’re making to put an end to the cycle of poverty in so many precious lives. 

Send a tax-deductible donation here:

HUGS for Tomorrow

P.O. Box 1816 

Azle, Texas 76098

Or make a tax-deductible PayPal donation here.