Win Souls for God

Programs: Hope for Children, feeding program, school project, former prostitute rehabilitation home, skills training centers, evangelism, children's rehabilitation homes
Children Served: 8,000 fed, 900 free school, 17 women in rehabilitation home, 30 boys in weaving training, and more...
Location: Addis Ababa
Contact: Gizachew Ayka wsg@ethionet.et
www.wsg-street-org


Originally members of a Sunday school class and choir of 105 children, the founders of Win Souls for God started their community outreach very early. At age 18 these friends began to invite street people to come to church services and even live in the church sanctuary. After the church asked them to take their outreach to a different location a core group of 10 pooled their monthly income and created Win Souls for God.

WSG members slept on the street with homeless and children. They describe eating from the trash in order to better understand the people around them. Primarily all outreach was evangelism but after building relationships with the neediest citizens of Addis Ababa the group decided to create projects that would take children and families off of the street, prevent trafficking and rehabilitate the abused and neglected. Staff and volunteers are inspired to join WSG through church presentations, school campaigns, and summer camp ministry that brings teens from around the world to Addis.

Hope for Children Family and Community-based Care Projects

1. Weaving training for trafficked boys

2. Women's home for teenage prostitutes and their children

Mitu's Story

In 2005 Mitu was a small 9 year old girl living alone on the streets of Addis Ababa. Her story is typical of many of the city's street children. Her father died when she was young and Mitu's mother brought her to the city to make a living. The two of them lived off and on with friends, often begging in the street to make ends meet.

Mitu's mother died very suddenly. But before passing away she left Mitu with a friend who was able to return Mitu to her grandmother's village.

Sadly, shortly after being placed in her home, Mitu's grandmother returned her to Addis Ababa, unable to care for her in her village. According to Mitu her grandmother told her "Mitu, Addis knows you well - better than I do. So you must grow up in Addis." She left Mitu back on the city streets with no way to support herself.

It is unclear why Mitu's grandmother would do this. Mitu does not remember much about this woman or where the village was. It could be that she was not a biological grandmother or she could have been simply overburdened by other caregiving duties.

Either way, Mitu was left in Addis Ababa at age 10 and quickly learned that the streets are a dangerous place to live alone. Mitu found a friend that she had known previously and stayed in a tiny tarp tent set up in the street median with her friend and her mother. Mitu begged every day to earn the 3 birr (30 cents) that her friend's mother charged her in "rent." After a nine year old friend was raped, Mitu lived in fear of not raising enough money and being forced to sleep outside of the tarp's protection.

In order to survive, Mitu begged at the back door of several Addis hotels and was given leftovers from an aquaintance who worked in the hotel kitchen. She lived like this for two years.

Children's Home Ethiopia (CHE) director, Nega Meaza, met Mitu during this period of her life. CHE was in the process of making relationships with several street children and inviting them to enroll in the drop in center. Unfortunately in those early days CHE did not have the funding to enroll more than 6 children and Mitu was not chosen for this group. Nega kept in touch with Mitu, visiting her in the street and keeping track of her story. Mitu's situation began to worsten. She was no longer able to stay with her friend and her mother and had to begin living at a room in the train station. She spent a lot of her time begging and selling gum to foreigners to earn enough money for rent.

In May of 2008 Children's Home Ethiopia opened its drop-in center and invited a larger group of children to enroll. Mitu was invited and happily accepted.

The transition from spending her days on the street to following the rules of the drop-in center was not easy for Mitu or the rest of the children. Nega explains that the street children are used to doing whatever they want, they think they are always right, and they have a hard time accepting authority. Street children often crave freedom and while some have families to stay with they may choose the street due to abuse, neglect, or desire for freedom.

By September of 2008 Children's Home Ethiopia had over 20 children enrolled in their program. Each child was off the street during the day-either in school or participating in the drop in center school preparation program. Each child was sleeping at night with his/her family or a relative.

Mitu was the exception. She was still living at the train station and struggling to balance the drop in center with begging for her rent.

Nega and his wife decided to take Mitu home to live with them as a foster daughter. They recognized the need she had for family and stability. Nega's wife Emu described Mitu as difficult at first. She didn't know how to cook, clean, help in the house, wash her feet, or take care of her clothes. Most Ethiopian girls, by age 13, would have been taught these skills in their home and these are skills they will need in order to marry and raise a family.

Nega could have taken Mitu to an orphanage. He did not have to take on the personal burden of caring for a teenager. But as an Ethiopian he values family and community. He feels that it is essential to create more family-based programs where street children without safe family can live with foster families. He wants to see more counseling and prevention of street child programs where staff and volunteers visit the homes of children who are not in school. He believes that while caring for individual children is important, it is more important to deal with the family as a whole. Nega and Emu decided to live these values by taking Mitu into their home.

Another child from the CHE drop-in center, Ephraim, has recently been placed with another staff member as a foster child. Ephraim was taken from his village as a young child and sent to Addis to work. He can no longer remember his family or where he is from. Ephraim's story is a good example of why child trafficking prevention and education programs are needed in rural Ethiopia.

Mitu is an amazing little girl. She has come a long way from the wild and dirty street child that Nega found initially. Without his intervention, by age 13 she would probably have been assaulted, forced into labor, or be working as a prostitute. But instead she is living in a home, much loved. She has accepted Christ, is in school, and looks forward to the future. When asked her last name Mitu responds with a huge smile "Mitu Nega" which indicates that Mitu is now Nega and Emu's daughter.

My Thoughts:

Mitu's story is special. But it is not out of the ordinary. I have met many kind-hearted African families that have taken in children from the street or from their community. Nega and his wife have a very simple house and get by on less than $100/month. Mitu sleeps on a mattress on the living room floor. This isn't the story of a wealthy Ethiopian family taking in a child. This is a poor family making room for one more person. That is the story of family and community-based care and these are the families and programs that need support so that they can continue to offer homes and love to orphaned and vulnerable children.

The Foresaken Children and Children's Home Ethiopia

Programs: Children’s Home Ethiopia and Kota Ganate Agriculture Project
Location: Addis Ababa and Chencha
Children Served: 80 in school, 20 at drop-in center, 2 in foster care
Contact: Joe & Karyn Bridges mrjoebridges@gmail.com or nega_meaza@yahoo.com

In 2004 two Americans, Joe Bridges and Mike Granger, traveled to Ethiopia to participate in YWAM (Youth With A Mission) training. The overwhelming number of children living, begging, and eating in the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital city, shocked and surprised them and they each began to feel God’s call to do something more.

During their time in Ethiopia Joe and Mike developed a friendship with their guide and translator, Nega Meaza, a Christian Ethiopian who had long been concerned for the children of his country but whose limited resources had prevented him from starting a project of his own. One night, near the end of their time together, the three men sat together and each shared their vision for ministry to the street children of Ethiopia. They found that God had given them a shared vision. They say that this was the first meeting of Children’s Hope Ethiopia.

Mike, Joe and Nega remained in contact over the next year and devoted time to prayer, learning and preparation. Mike and Joe had entered this endeavor knowing very little about the circumstances that bring children into the streets and they originally returned to the U.S. believing that the only answer would be to start an orphanage.

The project in Ethiopia began slowly as Nega moved to Addis Ababa to study community development and started visiting children in the street. In the beginning he simply met with children, played with them, brought food to them, and built relationships as they introduced him to family members. Through Nega’s knowledge and experience the three men began to realize that the street children of Addis Ababa had family, they had community, and they had developed resources and skills that required a different kind of intervention, one that would touch many more lives than simply building an orphanage.

Back in the United States, Joe and Mike gathered friends and family and started a small faith-based organization called The Foresaken Children to provide direction and oversight and to raise funds for Children’s Home Ethiopia. They began a sponsorship program connecting churches and individuals in the U.S. with children that Nega was meeting in Ethiopia. It was a simple concept, just $30 per month to support a child’s education or enrollment in the drop-in center and in return The Foresaken Children would keep each sponsor up to date with photos and information about their child. Because the organization was so small very little of the sponsorship money had to be used for administrative costs.

These days Children’s Home Ethiopia is a very busy organization. It operates two major programs with plans to expand its services. The first project is the Street Child Drop-in Center located in the center of Addis Ababa near Merkato, the largest market in East Africa. Children living near the Merkato often spend their days begging from tourists and families are very poor. Many of the children beg in the street and return at night to their parent’s plastic shelter. They are at high risk of exploitation and abuse and very few will ever be able to afford school fees. The drop-in center provides a safe place for these children to spend their days. They receive meals, Bible lessons, English lessons, a shower each week, and support from the staff. Each child at the drop-in center program is known by the staff and their families are visited regularly. The goal is to prepare them for school, to connect them with sponsors through The Foresaken Children, and to ensure that each child has a safe place to sleep at night either with their family or with a foster family.

The other major component of Children’s Home Ethiopia is a street child prevention project called The Safe Child Project, which sponsors 80 children by paying their school fees and providing school supplies. These 80 children are subsidized in 14 schools across the city. They are invited to come to the center each Saturday where they receive Bible and Amharic lessons and each family is visited on a regular basis in the home to ensure that the children are taken care of and not at risk of abandonment or abuse.

Children’s Home Ethiopia carefully monitors the situation of each child in their program. Some children found sleeping on the street were connected back to their families and no longer live on the streets. Others choose to live on the streets rather than live with family and for these children the program provides love, a safe place to play and learn, counseling, food, and support.

Children’s Home Ethiopia hopes to expand their services soon to include a formal foster care program in recognition of the fact that some children no longer have a family connection. They have already informally placed two of the drop-in center children into foster homes and with increased funding plan to create a transitional home to prepare older street children for family life.

The final component of Children’s Home Ethiopia is a street child prevention project called Kota Ganate Agriculture project. When Nega began building relationships with children living on the street he realized that many of the most vulnerable children, without ties to family in Addis Ababa, had come from a rural area in the southern part of Ethiopia, near his own hometown. Many of these children were boys who had come to the city lured by promises of work and income who could no longer remember their family name and had no money to return home when they found themselves living on the streets. The Kota Ganate project will begin this year with the purpose of introducing higher yield agriculture techniques in southern communities in order to improve food security and economic conditions. The goal is to assist these subsistence farmers so that they will have a surplus of crops to sell and therefore less incentive to send their children to the city. The project will also produce some income to help make Children’s Home Ethiopia self-sufficient for the future.

Lessons learned by The Foresaken Children and Children's Home Ethiopia

1. You can’t provide everything all at once for children. Building relationships, learning their stories, and creating trust is essential for sustainability.

2. You may be tempted to invite children to sleep at a drop-in center but this is not the purpose of a drop-in center and can very easily overwhelm staff and cause jealousy and resentment.

3. Be patient with a new ministry. Accept that you will make some mistakes.

4. Resist the urge to “save them all.” Do what you can do and don’t take on more too quickly.

My Thoughts:

We visited the drop-in center several times during my stay in Addis and I came to know Nega and the children there quite well. Many of us were touched by their stories of loss as well as the hope they have found through Children's Home Ethiopia. This is a model of community-based care that uses very few resources to care for a lot of children and families. I was especially touched by the stories of Ephraim and Mitu - two children, almost teenagers, without connection to family in Addis Ababa. These were children at very high risk for child labor and abuse. If not living on the streets their alternatives were limited. They are now in loving foster homes through the drop-in center. I will post Mitu's story here soon.

Beza Entoto Outreach Program

Beza Community Development
Host – Tamara Hayes
Income Generation Coordinator
Hayes.Tamara@gmail.com

Beza Entoto Outreach and Community Integration Program

(Sudiskilo Compound)

Founded 18 months ago by 10 young adults from the Beza Church in Addis Ababa, the Beza Entoto Outreach Program connects the children and families living on Entoto Mountain with income generating activities and social outreach in the city.

There are currently between 2,000-3,000 HIV+ adults and their children living on top of Mt. Entoto. The mountain draws people from all over Ethiopia seeking a cure through bathing in the holy water at its peak. These families have very little support or method of generating income. Their children do not attend school and the settlement experiences a lot of tension between Orthodox and Pente (Pentecostal) residents. It is a very bleak life for adults and children alike and many report feeling hopeless and moving to the mountain to die – without knowledge of treatment possibilities or outreach groups located in the city below.

The young adults at Beza Church were aware of the situation and began to pray that they would find a way to help these people out of their despondency. The small group regularly went up the mountain to sit with families and build relationships. They also started food and clothing drives to help but were very conscious about not starting something that could not be sustained. In time they organized the Beza Community Development NGO and were able to garner support from both the Mennonite Central Committee and 10,000 Villages.

The NGO has many programs that try to address the holistic needs of families affected by HIV/AIDS. They have children’s programming, income generating training including sewing and jewelry making, health training, ARV distribution, parenting classes, and community trainings/meetings.

The program has been successful but “Mara” shared with us some of the setbacks as well.
Success include the hiring of staff members who used to live on Entoto who are now leaders in building the bridge with families that are scared to come back into society. Additionally, self-esteem and empowerment programs along with work skills training has taught parents how to make future plans and think about life instead of death. A sponsorship program ($30/month/child) has allowed 50 children to attend local schools and 15 of these are in high performing private schools.

Lessons learned have included a sanitation and latrine building program which ended up with rents being raised for homes located near the new latrines forcing several program families out of their homes. Another difficult lesson learned was that Beza has to approach the Pente and Orthodox differences with caution. A recent “feast” planned for the communities still living on Entoto backfired with the Orthodox priests refusing to allow their congregations to participate.

A very interesting quote from Mara regarding the time it takes to build understanding through relationships: “Don’t carry too large a load over a thin bridge.”

During our visit to the compound we met with several participants engaged in various income generating activities. We met four women working on sewing machines as well as a man and elderly woman stringing coffee beans to create necklaces and bracelets to be sold at the monthly NGO bazaar.

My Thoughts:

I asked Mara about the children that they work with and whether or not they encounter many orphans. She said that so far the children who have been orphaned have been absorbed into families but that not many parents in their program have passed away yet due to increased access to ARVs. They are however, actively preparing for the next stage for children who become orphaned. Many of the children came with their families from other parts of the country where their extended family may not know the reason for the family’s departure or had rejected them due to their HIV status. They are hoping to begin a children’s home that can transition children back into extended family (where they can find them) or into Beza church foster homes.

I didn't take photos during our visit to the community at the top of the mountain but this was a poignant photo I caught from the side of the van coming back down to the city.

Monday January 26, 2009 Afternoon

Peter's Community-based School Project - Notes to come from Jon S.

Bole Bulbula Community Based Children's Project

Children’s House International
Host – Abdissa Benti Leye
Ethiopia Country Representative
chieth@ethionet.et or abdissabenti@yahoo.com

Bole Bulbula Community Based Children’s Project

Bole Bulbula is a small community located just outside of Addis Ababa 5 kilometers from the ring road surrounding the city. The group first visited a community school providing classrooms and teachers for 73 children within walking distance.

The children’s project was initiated two years ago in response to the overwhelming need for educational support in the area. School-aged children and their families in this community were unable to pay the $10/month in school fees or buy uniforms for the Addis public school system. A few literate volunteers began meeting with eager children and created an informal school. With help from the local government and volunteers the community built a small school house (see photo) from metal sheds and donated concrete and equipment. The teachers are all local volunteers who receive some in-kind support from the community.

The income generating activities viewed during this visit were some of the lowest paying available in Addis – collecting and selling grass, wood or dung to sell as fuel. The children and animals were thin and we were informed that many families are only able to eat one meal each day or rotate access to meals. This is also a community affected by HIV/AIDS but gathering that information was very difficult. Jon and I met with the local pastor privately behind his home where he told us that some community members have died of AIDS and left orphaned children. When we asked what happened to these children he explained that extended family members took them in.

The school project was quite obviously receiving less funding than other projects visited during the week. The school is not able to hire trained teachers with lesson plans and so each teaching volunteer creates lesson plans and activities herself. They reported struggling with finding school supplies and are in need of books, pens, pencils, and paper. Limitations on regular attendance include a 2 hour round trip walk for some children, caretaking of younger siblings, distraction created by hunger, and embarrassment over torn or dirty clothes.

The local pastor has moved into the community and appears to be a catalyst for mobilizing community response to children in need. He reported collecting clothes for children in need and has coordinated a children’s choir. He hosted the group in his home/chapel for a small discussion time. The pastor explained that hope is good for education and that the community has hope for funding that could expand the school from its current 2 classrooms as well as build a dedicated chapel on site.


Feel free to share your own thoughts on this visit.

I don't think at the time we realized it would turn out to be one of the poorest projects we would visit. It seemed pretty grim when we were in the classroom looking out at all of those serious faces (so different from other smiling classrooms later.) But later, interacting with the mothers and their children in the play yard I was struck, as I always am, by the power of a mother's love. The women wanted me to take pictures of them with their groups of children or babies and they delighted in each photo. There's nothing that can replace that pride a mother has for her children. It really transformed some of the sadder scenes of torn clothes and hungry stomachs for me. While those physical needs are still there, for some of the children at least, the fullness of love is obviously present.

Ethiopia Leader's Trip January 25-February 2, 2009

In January of 2009 a group of 25 American Christians gathered in Ethiopia's capital city, Addis Ababa. While we each came with individual interests, passions and purposes as a group our goal was to visit and learn about Ethiopia's approach to orphan care in the face of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Upcoming posts on this blog will chronicle our daily visits to orphan care projects, including name and contact information for each organization as well as a few photos from the day.

As a group we were surprised and encouraged to see so many families, communities and churches caring for the orphaned and vulnerable children in their midst. This blog will reflect on the projects visited and the importance of supporting community-based care in Sub-Saharan Africa.

All photos on this post were taken by Amanda Cox and are privacy protected.
Please do not distribute them.

Feel free to share a link to this blog with friends, family or congregations.