2/7/10
1) 5 women
in outer Kathmandu who have been trying to support their families
making bricks...just like in Pharaoh are time... with mud and straw. Funny
it just doesn't cut it and they cannot make ends meet. A believer named Y..,
has taken it upon herself to teach these women how to bead and I have
encouraged them with new designs and a US market to improve on what they had
already started so they are pumped with what they can now accomplish for the
sake of their families. All 5 have now become believers and are eager to share
their faith with others!
2) Way out in far western Nepal, over 30 hours of bad road on the bus and 4 mountain ranges in from the plains, is the main area of my focus. I teach income generation skills primarily to widows and single mothers. This translates into teaching knitting, crocheting, beading and sewing to as many as 40 different women. We have selected 5 women in the past to offer microloans and try to teach them how to start their own little business. Two of these women are paraplegic castaways that have been at the hospital for 12/20 years and to date cannot support themselves. They lay in waterbeds and knit or crochet on their stomachs! We are trying to show them how to have their own small businesses but they keep eating all the profits!
Another woman in our micro-loan program (age 46?) has had 24 children in her life... only 1 is still alive! All the others have died! Can you imagine???
Last year two new women believed in Christ as their Savior and we are trying to encourage them and disciple these new ones in their walk with the Lord in an antagonistic community.
On this trip I intend to help my landlady, start her own microloan business. She dreams of starting her own bakery and Christian coffee house. The local church would support her and help her evangelize there and she is bold for the Lord! We just raised enough to help her buy an industrial oven and are trying to gather enough to help her get a small refrigerator. We have $110 out of the $300 needed for that! So she is excited and ready to start.
We picked her as she has good money management
skills, is a quick learner and a natural teacher. She will be an excellent role
model for working out the concepts of the microloans and teaching others how to
apply them practically. She is highly motivated to share Christ and can be one
who networks many others together. She also has a pulse on the homeless, the
truly impoverished and guides me to the ones who are really needy, not just
those who have their hands out!
We know she will play the new gospel recordings for the radio program in her cafe and will boldly proclaim where few have dared before! God has put a few pivotal people in our path to work His mission and she is definitely one of them!
Pray for us all as we use every class, connection and opportunity to share the Love of Christ with these precious women.
We have found that if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish you feed him for a lifetime, but if you teach a woman how to fish she will teach her whole village to be well fed for life!
I'd also like to work with the leper women in the community where D… is working with the agriculture and animal husbandry projects/ seed farms. Pray for an opportunity to encourage them as well! It is a 5 hour rough road trip to that village in the foothills of the Himalayas.
Please pray for our other projects too, the brand new radio ministry designed to reach women and children in the far west in their very own dialect, the orphanage run in Kathmandu with 19 adorable but needy children in it, and for encouragement of 13 college youth to be the best they can be and grow in the Lord. These youth are the future of Nepal and worthy of any way we can invest in them!
Thanks for letting me share and for lifting us up before the throne of grace. It is an awesome responsibility and privilege to be "on the mission" in this remote area of the Himalayas.
Warmly,
Dawn
