Spreadin' the Love: October 2008

Hope and a future

By partnering with Children's Cup, our community has the opportunity to directly impact the lives of CarePoint kids. I am returning to Swaziland in September and hope to establish the beginning of a long, life-transforming relationship between the active, open-hearted families of our community and the needy, vulnerable children of Swaziland. Children's Cup lifts kids up out of desperation and utter poverty and gives them love, safety, hope and a future. By opening our hearts and lives to these children, we can be a part of building the safe havens, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and raising children who are wholly prepared for a better future. A little bit of love and support from each of us goes a long way when we all join together to make a difference.

Children's Cup International

Children's Cup's purpose is to take humanitarian and spiritual aid into the hard places where war, natural disasters and disease epidemics have devastated societies.
Children's Cup has its Africa offices in Swaziland, a beautiful country that is being ravaged by the terrors of having 43% of its population HIV-positive. This contributes to a sick and dying middle generation, leaving vulnerable children to care for themselves with no adults to keep them safe and healthy.
By building a network of CarePoints in densely populated urban areas, as well as in peri-urban and rural areas, Children’s Cup cares for thousands of Swazi children every day, giving them food, education, medical attention and spiritual training. The most vulnerable children are placed in safe homes with loving adult care-givers.
Children’s Cup has found a long-range development strategy that involves the community heavily. It is proving to be very successful in sparking genuine change in lives by empowering and enabling people to have the desire, skills and opportunity to rise out of poverty.
A CarePoint can be looked at as a school, a medical clinic, a cafeteria, and a meeting place. No matter what program is going on at a CarePoint, each is most definitely a safe haven for hundreds of orphans and vulnerable children that are in such desperate need of hope.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

First Round of Photos!!

The long awaited photos are up. I spent half a day yesterday narrowing down the best of my photos and the ones that I absolutely wanted to print and share. Then I looked how many were in my album of must-haves--and it was 571! Ouch. So I painstakingly narrowed it down to 500. These are the first 125 of my 500 best. There are pictures of scarves and stickers interspersed throughout on happy cooks, teachers, and kiddos.