We Networked today!

Special Hope Network, by God’s providence, today “happened” to find a tremendous networking potential, through a dear friend here in Lusaka.  There is an organization here that has been training volunteer ‘teachers’.  They go into the compounds, work with parents of children who have special needs that aren’t welcomed into schools, with the purpose of training them to work with their own child.  I asked about the follow-through, and how this works week after week after week.  The director of this program said that the ‘teachers’ are VOLUNTEERS!! They aren’t paid, so the follow-through isn’t very reliable.  It varies, depending on the compound, and the volunteer, and the supervisor, but, as a whole, the system isn’t working as well as they had planned. So, maybe we can help with this.  The most well-attended meetings are the ones where the Ministry of Education offers a travel fee (to cover their travel to get to the meeting) of $50,000 KW, which is about $10.  So, it seems that if these teachers were paid to do this traveling teaching, they would show up.  Please pray with us for wisdom for how to partner with this tremendous group of people.

This group has created a training manual!!! And, they gave me one, so I can see what is being taught and trained for both parents and teachers in this city.   They were excited about our presence here, and what it could mean for the multiplication of their work with orphans who have intellectual disability, and I was excited about meeting them, and seeing their work.  They are in the process of creating THREE sensory integration centers for children with autism and sensory issues, which will be amazing.  We will visit this classroom in the next few days (tomorrow we need to deal with vehicle issues, so we probably won’t be able to go back to this school), and I’ll write more.

They’ve had 1,000 of their 1,035 chickens stolen, slowly, over the past weeks.  If anyone has an infrared videocamera so that they could catch the nighttime marauder swiping chickens from orphans, we would love to donate it to them!  They use the chickens for meat, and eggs, and this is a huge loss to them.