TLC Children's Trust We appreciate your support and prayers for the work at Home of Peace Children’s Home.
Here is our quarterly newsletter. Briefly God is blessing, it is exciting to see what He is doing and to a part of changing the lives of these precious young people.
If you want more regular news please ‘like’ our Facebook page where short snippets of news are regularly posted. Click here.
MARCH
BIKES
Our Primary school children are able to walk to and from their school, but it is much too far for our Secondary School students so they each need a bicycle. These bikes are ridden for many miles in all types of weather and over bad roads. As a result, we needed to get them all new bikes.
Erick, our Purchasing Manager and Administrator was able to arrange with a supplier to give us far better bikes than normal. Bikes that will last much longer, He got them for the price we would have paid for cheaper bikes.
They all arrived, and the Students were delighted. (More about bikes later in this letter)
A LETTER
We received a delightful handwritten letter from a young girl. It was such a blessing we wanted to share it.
Here is what she said (note the spelling is as we received it)
Deer mister ray,
you spoke at our church and telled us about the kids in kenya. I get £2 poket monie every week so i telled my parents to just give me half and to send the other half to you for these kids. I hope it will help you to feed them all. They will send you the £4 each month.
Sandra
What a lovely little girl. If only more adults shared her compassion and concern! Her parents have made it up to £10 per month.
APRIL
Law Court Proceedings
All our children are committed to Home of Peace by the Children’s Courts and periodically the court needs to review every case and re-commit the children.
To save us transporting all the children and records to the court the Senior Magistrate, 2 Court Clarks and the District Children’s Officer came to Home of Peace and turned our dining room into a court for the day.
While there they were also able to inspect all the facilities and check all our records.
They were very happy with what we are doing, found no problems and the children have all be re-committed to our care. This includes the 5 new children that Children’s Services asked us to take in this year.
Day Care
Some of our dedicated staff have small children who need to be cared for while their Mother is working so Hellen (the wife of our Administrator, Erick) runs a Day Care Centre Monday to Friday using a room in our small staff house which was built next to their home.
Erick and Hellen have also recently legally fostered 2 children who were abandoned and rescued by the Homabay Church. (The church next to Home of Peace is called Peace Church and the church at Homabay was a plant from Peace Church). Hellen & Erick have 3 of their own children and they were going to foster another baby girl who was also abandoned with the 2 boys but then Hellen found that she was unexpectedly pregnant.
Please pray for them.
Always something unexpected
We received a message from Home of Peace saying the water pump that supplies all our water has decided not to pump.
They arranged for a person with donkeys to transport large buckets of water to the home until they could get a mechanic after the Easter weekend.
We thank God that the repair was not very costly, and we also thank people who heard about this or read about it on Facebook and contributed towards the cost.
MAY
Sharlet
We were delighted to welcome Sharlet to our staff. She is a qualified Nurse Aid and spent a year working with testing children for HIV. She joined us as a nurse aid and girls house mother.
Registration
Our status as a Government Registered Children’s Home must be renewed every 3 years. As part of that process we were inspected by a team from the Ministry of Health.They produced a comprehensive report saying how pleased they were with everything and concluding that they were happy to recommend that our registration be renewed.
The only point that was a concern was that our students’ bikes were not stored in a safe, waterproof, locked storage facility and that additional office for James our manager were required.
A charity that has previously supported us kindly agreed to fund this and work is well under way building an office and a large store room which will also have room for an extra 12 bikes next year as additional children start secondary school.
Medical Advisor
Our staff and children are all insured through the Kenya government national health Insurance Fund. This and the staff pension fund are both required by law and it costs us £275 per month but saves us money as medical treatment and hospitalisation is expensive.
Occasionally we have a child or member of staff who has a serious medical problem and we felt it would be good to have an independent medical expert who could monitor their treatment and, if necessary, speak to the hospital or doctor. We needed a doctor who has treated patients in Africa so understood their culture.
Praise God we have a Medical Advisor who will guide and help us if we have serious medical problems. His name is Dr Leopold Reinecke.
Leo is from South Africa and we got to know him 46 years ago when Marilyn was 5 months pregnant with Belinda and had a bad fall. He saved both her life and Belinda’s life twice and then he became our doctor for many years and a friend for the past 46 years. He is a strong Christian and has always been used as a preacher and bible teacher.
In addition to his work as a GP, he also worked as an anaesthetist at hospitals.
He then went on to become a Consultant Oncologist and he worked in South Africa and Malawi before moving to England where for many years he worked in hospitals in England and in Ireland as a Consultant Oncologist. he is now semi-retired and moved back to South Africa 2 years ago, but he is still working a few days a week as a GP treating patients.
He has kindly agreed to be our Medical Advisor (without any charge) and to guide and oversee any complicated cases.
We thank God for this wonderful provision.
Finance
We have provided so many additional facilities for Home of Peace but our general expenses keep growing and sadly our regular support income has not kept pace. As a result, we do need to ask you to please consider how you might be able to help.
There are many ways.
• Regular monthly sponsorship is fantastic as it helps with budgeting
• Occasional one-off gifts are a real blessing
• Please think if you have friends or family who may be willing to become sponsors. No amount is too little to be a blessing.
• Would your church be willing to adopt us as one of their missionary projects and support the work? Ask them
• Do you belong to a club or group that may be willing to take on this as a project?
• Do you know anyone who is planning to run a marathon, a half-marathon, a 10k race, a fun run or anything else? Why not get people to sponsor them to raise funds for Home of Peace Children’s Home? Contact us and we can help you set up a free fundraising page with Virgin Money Giving.
God is blessing the work at Home of Peace but the combination of inflation, a poor exchange rate, and other demands on the pockets of our supporters means that financially things are very tight now.
That means your support is even more important.
May God richly bless you all,
Love in Jesus
Marilyn & Ray
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