Sunday, April 8, 2007

Welcome!

Thank you for visiting Wellspring International’s first blogging experience! Our hope is to capture in these postings the events of Wellspring’s current trip to Africa, to offer its supporters a voice from the field and a glimpse of Wellspring’s current and potential efforts in Africa. Director of Wellspring International, Naomi Zacharias, RZIM staff writer, Jill Carattini, and Jim Manning of Tigert Communications have traveled to Johannesburg, South Africa where we will hit the ground running.


The purpose of this trip is twofold. Naomi will be investigating both new opportunities for Wellspring involvement as well as following up on projects currently funded by Wellspring donors. In the weeks ahead we will attempt to offer a personal account of the projects we are seeing, the people we are meeting, and the role that you as Wellspring supporters are playing in Africa. In short, we are attempting to take you on the road with us. To highlight a few of our upcoming destinations:

In the Gulu district of northern Uganda, Naomi will evaluate Wellspring’s partnership with Invisible Children, an organization that has been on the frontlines of raising awareness of a war torn Uganda. Since 2003, Invisible Children has been at work developing projects that foster ongoing entrepreneurial support for people living in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps and providing educational scholarship programs for the children.

From Uganda our team will travel to Tembe, South Africa where Naomi will be looking into opportunities to come alongside the efforts of Umbono, a non-profit organization whose purpose is to provide humanitarian relief, entrepreneurial development, and educational opportunities to communities affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

The team will also be making several visits to current Wellspring projects and scholarship recipients and reporting to you an update of each. The Balm of Gilead, a rehabilitation home for women in prostitution, houses a young women Wellspring granted a scholarship for culinary school in 2005. She has since graduated at the top of her class and is now employed as a chef in one of Cape Town’s four star hotels. Naomi will visit with her and congratulate Wellspring’s first graduate personally. Also in Cape Town, our team will attend a ribbon cutting ceremony for Home from Home, a housing unit for children orphaned by AIDS. In 2006, Wellspring pledged funds to cover the building costs of the home as well as three years of their operating costs. This building will now be home to six children and a house mother.

We hope that the coming entries accounting for our time in Africa will further open hearts to a continent of vast heartache and need.

“Whatsoever you did for the least of these, you did unto me.” –Jesus

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