HOPE starts with YOU❣️

February is the often thought of as the month of love with millions of people celebrating Valentine’s Day.  A quick Google search lead me to a statistic that said that is projected that $20.7 billion will be spent in the United States alone this year.  This is how that breaks down:

·      $3.9 billion — Total spending on jewelry for Valentine’s Day.

·      $3.5 billion — Total spending on date night.

·      $2.1 billion — Total spending on clothing.

·      $1.9 billion — Total spending on flowers.

·      $1.8 billion — Total spending on candy!!!!!

·      $933 million — Total spending on greeting cards.

Am I the only person that thinks THAT IS CRAZY?

Here’s an idea – why not sponsor a child at Project Canaan and give that sponsorship to your loved one for Valentine’s Day?   It’s giving the gift of love, and the gift of HOPE starts with you!  You can always add a piece of candy to sweeten it up, but a photo of one of our children is pretty sweet!  You could give primary medical care for a child for only $30/month, or give formula to a small baby for $50/month, or even pay for a night shift Auntie for $100/month.

Today was a big day at Project Canaan because we had TEN little ones move to their next home.  Five babies moved from the El Roi baby home to the toddler home, and five toddlers moved from the toddler home up to Emseni #1.   There is a video below of their welcome to the Emseni campus.  Of these ten children, six of them are sponsored and four are not.  Here is who moved, and who needs sponsorship:

Babies home to Toddler home:

Angeline - sponsored

Bruce - sponsored

Cornelius - sponsored

Julian – NOT SPONSORED

Miracle - sponsored

 

Toddlers to Emseni #1:

Amanda - sponsored

Lithle - sponsored

Mandy - NOT SPONSORED

Sbahle - NOT SPONSORED

Peace - NOT SPONSORED

Lithle (sponsored), Peace (not sponsored), Mandy (not sponsored), Sbahle, Amanda (sponsored)

We now have 261 children living at Project Canaan and we are committed to these children until they are 21-years-old.  Most children who come to us arrive in bad physical shape.  Two weeks ago we welcomed little Raphael, who was severely malnourished and immediately admitted to our hospital.  The social worker didn’t know how many days it had been since he had eaten last.  The photo below is of Josiah (a baby we received at birth) and the new guy.  These two boys are two days apart in age, and you can see the size difference from malnutrition and stunting.  

Josiah (left) is sponsored. Raphael is NOT SPONSORED.

Raphael may never catch up to Josiah, but he will grow in strength and stature, now that there is hope for his future.  Isaiah 40:31 says, “But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”

Would you consider sponsoring Raphael or one of our other children today?  HOPE starts when YOU sponsor a child.  I can’t think of a better Valentine’s day gift – the gift of HOPE and LOVE all wrapped up in a child's life❣️

🇺🇸 US: http://bit.ly/hfahopestarts

🇨🇦 Canada:  http://bit.ly/hfahopestartsca

Live from Eswatini … praying for HOPE to be restored for many children this month.

Janine

We just never know what we will see...

Ian and I love walking around the farm. It is a good way to really see what is happening, what needs to happen and what shouldn’t be happening.  Today we walked 5.3 miles, up and down mountain roads and paths and it was simply incredible all that we saw!

First, the worm pit tarp has been installed, and we are now composting into the worm pit! This is a really big deal (you can read about it in the Jan 4^th blog https://janinemaxwell.blogspot.com/2020/01/whats-up.html).  Our papayas have gone crazy and each tree is heavily laden with huge papaya fruit!  Thank you to everyone who bought trees last year – we will be harvesting soon and delivering to the children’s campus!

As we walked past the beef cattle and the hundreds of goats (and the cutest babies!) we came upon a cow giving birth!  There was our dairy guy pulling the legs of a calf out of the mother’s womb, and then there he was!  I’m sure the readers who are farmers are laughing at me, or rolling their eyes, but this was a big deal and it was really cool to witness.  The calf was pulled under the fence and the mother lead around to start cleaning him and trying to get him to stand up.  New life is always a good thing on a farm, and I was thankful that we got to witness it.

Then we went down to our dragon fruit field where there are hundreds of flowers on the cacti that will provide delicious and highly nutritious fruit in the months to come.  On to the fields we passed tens of thousands of beetroot seedlings that had been planted last week and are in a crop rotation every six weeks.

Everywhere we walk there are wild flowers growing, and each one is so unique we often stop and just stand in awe of God’s creativity.  As we walked through the Primary school property we saw another kind of creativity on the walls of the new 3^rd and 4^th grade classrooms!  The kids had drawn life size chalk drawings of themselves on the concrete block!  It was so unexpected and just so very sweet, we had to go in and take photos of it.  Our children are SO creative and encouraged to be that way by our teaching staff.

 

We are building a stadium style fire pit behind the boys E4 dorm, that will lead to many fun nights of games, storytelling and fireside chats. And the stairs from E5 down to E3 were started and finished this week!  All in all, things are hopping around Project Canaan!

Live from Eswatini … we had a GREAT Saturday morning.

Janine

A new kind of January?

Typically, Ian and I travel to the US/ once a year, in October for fundraising events and Board meetings. But this year we were invited to a very special event at Sea Island in Georgia in early January so we headed west and started a busy year of travel. We were honored to be able to speak at the AWAKENING 2020 and to spend time with dear friends AND, a bonus visit with Spencer!

Jan & Ernest Taylor with Jean and Jerry Eickoff

Spencer in the Canadian seat at the G8 Summit table at Cloister.

Then we headed up to Boston to visit Nokuphiwa (Phiwa) and Nokwanda.  Phiwa is here in the US for her second round of reconstructive surgeries to repair the burns she sustained when she was only 2-days-old.  She is here with Nokwanda, her faithful friend, big sister and guardian. They are in the US for four months while Phiwa has the skin on her scalp expanded through weekly injections of fluid that will allow enough skin to stretch enough to eventually cover her scalp once they do the crainioplasty in early March. We enjoyed taking the girls to see “Star Wars” (don’t judge), out for a great seafood dinner, and of course, ended with a trip to Target for whatever they needed (including introducing Nokwanda to “Cherry Garcia” Ben & Jerry’s ice cream).    

From there we traveled to Nashville where we had a two day “off site” meeting with our Heart for Africa US staff.  It’s always fun to get together with this team of people whom we love dearly, and it was a chance for us to share our vision for 2020, discuss plans to help feed more children and have a good belly laugh or two.  This year we added Hannah Gaddis to the team and she will be leading our Hunger Initiative 2020 (stay tuned for more info next week).  We also hired a Marketing Coordinator, whose name will be familiar to many of you … Maggie (Taylor) Lian!  Maggie’s mom, Donna Taylor, worked at Heart for Africa for many years and we are thrilled to have the next generation on the team.

Yesterday we came back to Atlanta to meet with some amazing women from Easter Seals who will help us think through and design our home for disabled children. Then it was home to pack, enjoy a quiet evening (did you know that you can order pizza and it is delivered to your door? We need THAT in Eswatini!). 

While we were busy in the US, the Project Canaan Academy School year started with 187 children in attendance!  The kids were SO excited to go back to school, and we are so thankful for Amber VanWinkle and incredible group of teachers.

In addition to that excitement, we welcomed our 260^th child last week. His name is Dillan and he was born on March 27^th, 2018.  We are thankful for his life and thankful that we get to play a big part in his future.

Ian and I hop on a 16-hour flight back to Johannesburg tonight and then make the 5-hour drive home in the morning.  These trips don’t get any easier, but we enjoy the time we get to spend with friends and family and are thankful for the team that keeps everything running smoothly at Project Canaan while we are away!

Live from Pete & Julie Wilkerson’s couch … we are going home today!

Janine

Total opposites

 

This week has been a VERY busy one in Eswatini, with six teams of Project Canaan staff, volunteers from the US and our older children going out to 25 of our 30 church partners and doing “well child checks” on the 3,500 children whom we feed every week. We are trying to get a baseline on the level of malnutrition at each location so that we can improve our feeding program in 2020.  

In the weeks ahead we will be accepting applications from churches or organizations (ie Rotary International or a school) in the US and Canada to partner with one of our 30 church partners to help eradicate malnutrition in that church in 2020.  More on this initiative to come.

I am thankful for Anthony Mutua and Ncobile Dlamini who are leading the charge with these assessments and for Janice Johnson, Lori Marschall, Beth Blaisdell and Kim Kennedy who flew to Africa to help with the this project all week as Ian and I are in the US.  It was a monumental task.

Anna and Joshua at the end of a LONG day.

Each day I get photos from Eswatini and I long to be there. Seeing our children out in the rural communities learning about how Swazi’s live without running water or electricity makes me want to be with them as they learn

Today I received photos from Margie about the four toddlers (Dinah, Shalom, Simeon and Phiwa who moved from the toddler home up to the Emseni Campus.  They just look so very sweet and excited to move up with “the big kids” (our 3-year-olds).  

Dinah, Shalom, Simeon and Phiwa moving to E1.

 In complete contrast, Ian, Spencer and I are at a beautiful 5-star hotel at Sea Island, speaking at a conference and enjoying an incredibly comfortable bed, delicious food, lots of hot running water and great friends.  I had the privilege of speaking at this “Think Tank” yesterday and now get to enjoy learning from some brilliant minds for the rest of the weekend. Ironically, the internet this morning was as bad as it is in Eswatini and I couldn’t get on line to post this blog so Spencer had to set up a hotspot from his phone  😂!

Ian and I typically only visit North America once a year, in October, but we will be here four times in the next six months. We are blessed to be invited to share the situation in Eswatini and the plight of the children, while inviting people to join us in fighting hunger, caring for orphans, decreasing poverty and providing education in Eswatini. Would you like to join us in 2020 too?

Live from Sea Island … it’s Saturday morning.

Janine

What's Up?

I don’t think I have ever wanted a year to end more than 2019.  Last year was a tough year, but also a great year with much being accomplished, but 2020 should be fun, so this blog is about what’s up for 2020.

Both beetroot and butternut squash are staples here in Eswatini and while we are still growing hundreds of thousands of beetroot plants for consumption and sale, we also just harvested enough butternut squash to last our kitchens a WHOLE YEAR (6,000kg/13,228lbs) and we are selling it too!  We have a large cold storage facility to store it in, and we are thrilled to be able to provide these products from our farm.

Ian is very excited about our new “worm pit”. Yes, you read that correctly.  We just built a concrete composter that is 12 yards wide x 6 yards long x 2 yards high.  It has four sections which will be filled with worms and compostable material from the kitchen and fields.  There are four sections so that our worms can move from one section to the next as we harvest the compost to use on our fields.  We will have a LOT of compost going on.  When we were telling our kids about this new project, Esther asked Ian, “How will you protect the worms from birds who want to eat them?” 

Excellent question Esther!  We are waiting for a cover to be made to put over the top and keep the worms safe from birds and sunlight and keep them focused on the job at hand. This important project helps get us one step closer to sustainability and eco-friendly.  A worm can procreate every week, producing up to six baby worms so we expect to have more than one hundred thousands worms by the end of 2020.  Did you know that worms are hermaphrodites, which means they have both male and female sex organs?  Oh the things we know now, that we NEVER thought we would need to know!

This year our construction department will be building a 3^rd and 4^th grade (two-storey/double class for both grades), and it will be constructed only during school breaks so that the kids aren’t going to school in a work site(!).  The plan is to have the foundation and floor pad poured and the work site cleaned up before the school year starts on January 18^th.

Our construction team will also be building “Oasis 2”, which will eventually be a dining hall for our teenagers, but for the next few years will serve as a recreation center for our kids, and a place to receive oxygen for their minds, bodies and souls, which is why we affectionately call it “O2”.   Beside O2 we will build a home for disabled children. This will be a home for our most severely disabled children who will not likely be able to attend any kind of schooling due to the extreme and complicated nature of their disabilities.  And as soon as we raise the funds needed for the next Emseni dorm (E6 will be home to 40 children) we will start building it immediately as we have children who will need to move in to it by the end of 2020.

We received 42 babies last year for a total of 258 children (we average between 35-40 babies every year), so we would expect that trend to continue.  We are raising these children as our own, and so they have always done age-appropriate chores (including the 2-year-olds who clean up their toys before going in to eat and even take their own dirty diaper to the garbage can. While we have an exceptional team of cleaners who keep all of the buildings clean and healthy, we decided to have our older children (living in E4 and E5) learn how to clean and take care of their own house back in December.  As Ian and I do our morning walks around the farm we were encouraged by seeing both boys and girls learning how to mop the floor properly, hang out laundry and take pride in their home.  I cannot say enough about how INCREDIBLE our Caregiver team is.

The video below was taken this morning at an impromptu dance party at the Oasis. These kids just crack me up! I hope it makes you smile too.

I have no doubt that 2020 will have challenges of its own, for all of us. The world seems to becoming a crazier place with more instability every day. For those of us who are followers of Jesus, we must remember to keep our eyes Him, and Him alone.  Be prayerful in where you are to be and what you are to be doing, and have peace in the knowledge that Jesus is securely on the throne.

Live from Eswatini … Happy New Year!

Janine

Same same.

Happy 9th birthday Gabriel!

Happy 9th birthday Rose!

 When our children see something that looks the same as something else they immediately say “same same”.  It could be a twin, an article of clothing or a candy.  It’s really cute, and we hear it all the time.

The past 48 hours here has been the “same” as the past 12 months and also the “same” as the past 10 years – filled with the highs and lows of life in Eswatini.

On Thursday we had extreme heat here and the humidity was unbearable.  The heat caused the power in the whole country to shut down and then come on for a bit and then off again.  The greenhouse was too hot for anyone to walk in to it because the fans weren’t working.  When the power grid for the Kingdom goes out we have back-up generators that automatically turn on. On Thursday the generator which provides the air for the green house (keeping the plants alive and fish oxygenated) is the same one that keeps the 5,000 laying hens cool with fans and it’s the same one that we use to milk cows and keep the milk cool (not to mention the power for mechanic shop and many people who live there).  We don’t have air conditioning in our buildings so we depend on ceiling fans to keep us alive.

Well, that generator got so hot that it too overheated and shut off. Within 30 minutes we started seeing chickens die from the heat.  While one team worked on fixing the big generator, another team got a small generator to the green house to try to at least keep the fish in the Aquaponics systems alive, and another team went to work at the laying hen barn to try to mist water on the birds and water the roof to cool it down.  Within an hour we had lost 166 chickens to the heat. The power finally came back on and major crisis was averted.  Another day in Africa. 

Early the next day I received a phone call from social welfare about a newborn baby girl who was born on Sunday, December 22^nd and whose mother just ran away from the hospital, having given a false name for herself so she was untraceable.  Within an hour Ian, Chloe and I were in the car to go and bring home a new baby girl (whom we are naming Jaimee). Ian looked at me and said, “You will be 74-years-old when Jaimee finishes High School with us”. Another 18-year commitment (God willing).  A sobering thought.

The lows are low and the highs are high. This year we lost two babies, we had a massive fire that burned most of our property and we watched people die of hunger or malnutrition throughout the country.   We also celebrated the 10^th anniversary of Project Canaan, received 42 new babies who now call Project Canaan “home” and were able to restart our agriculture program. 

I could share similar highs and lows over the last decade, but I think you get the drift, and I’m tired.

The one thing that has remained constant through the joy and the sorrow has been the presence of God.  We try not to fear, we try not to worry and we try not to be discouraged, which would all be impossible without His peace that passes ALL understanding.  He is the King Kings and the Lord of Lords and the Prince of Peace, and we rest firmly in that knowledge and rely on His power. 

This job is an impossible one by human standards, but NOTHING is impossible to the creator of the universe.

This morning Chloe and I went down to hang out with the kids.  As we sat and chatted with some of the older kids, others were doing chores around us, taking down Christmas decorations, sweeping, weeding and even delivering toilet paper from storage to each house.  As I rounded the corner to the swing sets I could hear our 4-year-old girls swinging and singing “Away in a Manger” and it simply brought me joy.  God has a plan for each of these children just as He has a plan for Spencer and Chloe and just as He has a plan for you.  Don’t miss out on His plan because you think your plan is better. I promise you, it isn’t.

Thank you to everyone who has read this blog in 2019 or maybe even from the beginning. Thank you to everyone who sponsors a child, gives to Heart for Africa on a regular basis or has made a year-end donation.   We only have three more days to meet our year-end goals that will allow us to continue accepting more children, growing more food, feeding more children and employing more adults in 2020. 

Will you partner with us by giving your best gift to HIM today?  He is our provider, but He is inviting you to be a part of His plan. 

🇺🇸 US Donors: http://bit.ly/2019YEGIVINGUS

🇨🇦 CA Donors:  http://www.heartforafrica.ca/2019-year-end-giving/ ‎

Many blessings to you and your family and I pray that you have a God filled 2020.

Live from Eswatini … hopeful for 2020.

Janine

Joy and heartache, often in the same day

One of the things I LOVE about living in Africa is that I don’t feel the “hustle and bustle” of the Christmas season. My shopping is done, wrapping complete and now it’s time to sit and enjoy the view, and my many children.

We did have two staff parties this week for our 320+ employees and I didn’t have to do anything other than attend.  I love seeing the child-like joy that our Swazi brothers and sisters exhibit with their bread eating contest or when they cheer on the three men who are trying to drink a 2L bottle of Coca Cola first. From a tug of war (in bare feet on a gravel road) to the free dance competition, from Swazi cultural dances to poems about Project Canaan – it’s all fun and there is a sense of innocence that I don’t feel at any other time of the year.

2019 started with the death of two babies – a very bad way to start the year.  Throughout the year we received 41 new children, some very sick, malnourished and almost dead. But we have managed to love them back to life.  We have had many hospital admissions, broken bones, Tuberculosis, meningitis, brain surgery, HIV/AIDS, lumbar punctures and we have a little guy with a very rare and serious condition called Steven Johnson Syndrome (he also has been diagnosed with Lissencephalye).  Please pray for Kenneth and the Aunties who are caring for him. My learning curve remains steep, my prayer life active, and my eyes focused on the creator of the Universe.

Most of Project Canaan is closed for the holiday season and our staff typically save holiday days for this time of year so that they won’t be back to work until January 6^th.  Of course our Children’s Campus staff are all busy with keeping 257 children fed, cared for, loved and busy!  Our days are filled with swimming lessons, karate, long walks, scavenger hunts and yummy food.

Yesterday we started our day with an urgent phone call about a mysterious fire that started in the Emseni 4 boys home, that burned a couch and could have ended in disaster.  Then we ended our day hosting 22 kids up to our house for dinner and ice cream sundaes.  They were all the Primary school kids who got all A’s and B’s on their final report card. Our lives are filled with joy and heartache, often in the same day, and lots of “unknown”, but we know that we are exactly where we are supposed to be, and rest well in that knowledge.

Spencer and Chloe are home for the holidays and my heart is full.  I love sitting by the fire and talking for hours, I love cooking their favorite meals and I love seeing them interact with the other children who call us “mom” and “dad”.  My world is spinning properly today and I have much to be thankful for.  I pray that you can take a moment of calm to reflect on all that you have to be thankful for – even in the darkest days we all have reasons to give thanks. 

Live from Eswatini … Merry Christmas from our family to yours.

Janine

PS - please consider making a year end gift to Heart for Africa today.

 

🇺🇸 US Donors: http://bit.ly/2019YEGIVINGUS
🇨🇦 CA Donors:  http://www.heartforafrica.ca/2019-year-end-giving/ ‎