2020 Vision Update: December 2018
Last December, ICCM launched our 2020 Vision campaign, believing God for a major step forward in our ability to impact thousands of children’s lives. Our faithful sponsors and donors have gotten us off to a strong start. Thank you!
We thought you’d like a brief update as 2018 draws to a close.
2020 Vision is a three-year focus to strategically invest in three key areas:
01: Developing Our Global Team
02: Leveraging Our Technology
03: Completing Our Capital Projects
Developing Our Global Team
In 2018, three groups of leaders gathered for vision casting, team building, learning and strategic planning. Southeast Asian leaders met in the Philippines, seven Regional Coordinators from around the globe met in the U.S., and Latin American leaders met in Colombia.
When our leaders experience the power of being on a unified team, they are energized for the sacrificial work of administering the program and blessing the children. Equipped and motivated leaders end up benefiting the children in much greater ways.
Leveraging Our Technology
Thanks to your 2020 Vision gifts, we’ve finally upgraded from our 19-year-old database and website to a much better software and website, connected to each other.
You can create an account, view your child’s photo, birth date and other data and write a letter to your child. You cam make an online contribution and check to see your prior giving. You can also browse our new website with its many informative pages, one for each country. If you have friends or family members who don’t yet sponsor with ICCM, you can send them to the beautiful new site to find a child who desperately needs their support.
Completing Our Capital Projects
Buconyori Boys Boarding School in Kenya, now in it’s second year of operation, has added classrooms and dorms for its growing enrollment of students.
Davao City, the Philippines, Door of Hope Project had experienced a tragic fire in which a beloved young woman was killed. A memorial gift accomplished the first phase; 2020 Vision funds are being used to build a second story and make the space useable for the wonderful Holistic Child Develoment program at Door of Hope.
In Paraguay, an adjacent property to our Juan Wesley School became available to expand our preschool and outdoor play space. We were able to seize the opportunity to purchase and renovate this strategic property.
Alem Tena, Ethiopia now has a functional high school for the first time ever. The bright young learners are excited!
Will you help use finish strong for our first year of the 2020 Vision?
A generous year-end gift will keep the 2020 Vision on track and position us to face the New Year’s opportunities and challenges. These investments are bearing fruit all over the world. Through child sponsorship and ongoing gifts, children who had no hope of an education are thriving and growing. Vulnerable children are protected. Hungry little ones are being nourished. Thousands of them experience the joy of learning, hope for living and the love of Jesus.
Thank you for caring!
Thank you for investing in children through ICCM.
God bless you!
– International Child Care Ministries Staff
Ethiopia: They Yearn to Learn!
Ethiopia is home to five excellent ICCM schools. Children may be living in material poverty, but their educational environment is rich. One of those schools is at a crossroads, where desperate need meets tremendous opportunity.
The town of Alem Tena, an hour or so from Addis Ababa, suffers from four serious problems. A very hot climate and deep poverty are two of the four — but these are common to many towns in Ethiopia. The third is almost unique to Alem Tena: The water is contaminated with fluoride, with perhaps 400 times as much as our city water systems use for cavity prevention. The visible result is that most of the children have dark brown stains on their teeth. Even worse, their bones and teeth are being destroyed. And yet, this is home. Families live here. Children are growing up here.
Our school in Alem Tena boasts high academic achievement. On regional and national exams, these students distinguish themselves. In 2016, all 8th graders passed the regional exam to 9th grade, averaging more than 80% on their results. But now comes the fourth major problem: no high school. Once students pass 8th grade, where will they go? Our school only goes through 8th grade. Because of sponsorship, the children have had the benefits of a private school and a Christian education. Once they graduate from 8th grade, they must travel a long way to a public school, move to a place with a public high school, or find a Catholic or Muslim school — but these private schools charge more than most parents can pay. Sounds like we are in dire straits!
But there is amazing news. About a year ago, the local government granted a good piece of property to our school for construction of a high school. This gift of land was received with great joy! In fact, in 2014 our Africa Learning Conference attendees had stood on this very land and prayed that God would give it to us. He has!
After a whole year of working through the bureaucratic red tape and planning with architects and leaders, we are ready to build! All documents are in hand. High school can be a reality.
The local government is pressing us to begin construction immediately or risk losing the land. So far, we have managed to build a security fence and a guard house on the property. We have just sent $25,000 to begin construction.
To build the classroom block, bathrooms, and required laboratories, the estimated cost is $167,000. We are now raising funds for this first phase. Phase two will add an administration block and a library. This is projected to cost another $67,000, for an approximate grand total of $234,000.
Is this impossible? Absolutely not! God has helped us complete big projects like this before, through compassionate and generous donors.
Is this a good investment? If only you could see our wonderful high school at Arbegona, another rural Ethiopian community! To help you envision it, look at the photo below. Students are lined up for a tea break in front of a classroom block on which is painted the Periodic Table of Elements. No educational space is wasted! The photo above that is a university-educated science teacher in a lab furnished by parents’ contributions. Students in this excellent school earn top marks in their whole state! We know this is possible in Alem Tena, too.
Will you pray with us for this dream to become a reality? Donated land, visionary leaders, a partnership from ICCM, and construction support from abroad will change the Alem Tena community for the better in a wonderful way!
Giving and Working Together as a Global Family
Linda Adams, ICCM Director
As the director of International Child Care Ministries, I get to watch God work through people. It will happen soon. Some people will learn about a need and be moved to direct their donation very specifically. Maybe a photo will grab someone’s heart, and they will respond to the need.
I love people’s passion when they give in this way. Gifts to special projects or for “where needed most” often show up in the nick of time, in exactly the right amount.
Some of the most amazing of these gifts come from wills and trusts established long ago. The donors never saw the precise situation where the need arose, but they gave in faith and their gift was perfectly timed, many years later.
You can read about this more fully in my December Light and Life magazine article. (Click here to read it online.)
The story illustrates the unity of our global family — Free Methodist World Missions, ICCM, national leaders, sponsored children and the Free Methodist Foundation. We work with one purpose, toward common aims. … Givers partner with God for the good of the world.
Straddling the Gap: My Radical 10-Year Learning Curve
My life reached a turning point one Sunday in 2007 when the Munyakuri family walked into New Hope Church (Rochester, NY). I was clueless at the time, but a new chapter in my life had begun. When these new immigrants from Africa called me “Pastor,” I was honored.
When they called me “Mother,” I was perplexed! Their membership in the household of faith was a primary reality for them, not just a metaphor. Belonging to the family of God was central to their identity and has become central to mine, as they and thousands more from 37 countries have inducted me into a new way of seeing the world. Why 37?
Since 2008 I’ve visited 30 countries where ICCM children live and seven sponsoring countries. I’m beginning my 10th year of local-global living, straddling the income and development gap and recognizing sisters and brothers for who they are: family. I’ve joined heart and hands with people who care passionately about children and give their lives to develop the little ones. Some work in places where helping children grow physically, spiritually, mentally and socially is done at great personal risk.
I recently met with leaders who are regularly interrogated by authorities who oppose our Christian faith and do everything in their power to thwart our ministry to children. Yet these leaders persist in giving children life-transforming opportunities for education and holistic growth.
These people are now my beloved teachers. What have I learned in the past 10 years? Too much to fully include here! But a few themes rise to the forefront:
Tribalism
This world is riddled with strife and conflict among people groups. Cultures are often structured in rigid hierarchies, with dominant groups and marginalized ones. And yet, the Kingdom of God includes and unifies people from every nation, tribe, people and language (see Revelation 7:9). Our oneness must overcome our divisions!
Gendercide
I had no reference point for the level of discrimination against women and girls in this world. My grief at the practice of eliminating daughters either in the womb or immediately after birth, simply because of their gender, is indescribable. Our Creator gives the image of God to both male and female (see Genesis 1:27); together, we reflect the totality of who God is. Seeing girls welcomed into the joy of learning, alongside their brothers, brings deep satisfaction and sets in motion generational change.
Child Trafficking
As ugly as it is, we cannot turn away from the enormous evil of slavery in our world today. More than ever before in human history, men, and women, boys and girls are being sold into lives of exploitation and desperation. Yet our Lord said His mission included “setting the captives free” (see Luke 4:19). We can do no less. ICCM’s preventative measures express the reality, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Local Transformation
As grateful as I am for aid and strategic interventions by governments and non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), I’m more convinced than ever that transformation takes place in local contexts. As we dream of a world where every child is loved, safe and developing their God-given potential, that dream takes place in a thousand grassroots settings. Adults in the sponsored child’s world are the ones who know her by name, teach him day in and day out and share life in the community. Love is local. We can support from a distance, but the most important realities in the child’s life are mediated by godly men and women whose example and instruction make the most difference. As director of ICCM, it is my great privilege and deep honor to invest in these leaders, resourcing them with both finances and organizational knowledge. Together, we can see children whose learning curve is already steep, growing to be all God envisions them to be!