Zambia Winter/Spring Update
Zambia, Church Partners
With the launch of the Zambia Learning Centres, children and young people will receive help with their schoolwork, learn computer skills, acquire vocational training, and be mentored for success through discipleship, and also health & nutrition information. Also, in 2022, emergency pandemic food relief wrapped up – many families made it through some very tough times thanks to Hope Story donor generosity!
Published February 16, 2023, 2 min read.
Calvary Church, Livingstone
The Learning Centre, and computer skills courses, are expanding their ministry so any child can access tools for school success. Over 100 children have already graduated from the basic computer skills course – children who come from poor backgrounds are getting a chance to learn job skills they would receive nowhere else, including at the overwhelmed public school system. Reaching out to families and children at risk became so important during the pandemic, but the repercussions will be with the city of Livingstone for a long time.
One of 2022’s most encouraging outcomes was the success of the new income-earning and small business & savings training given to parents of at-risk children. Many families are managing on their own now, and no child of a family reached by Calvary Church’s ministry during the pandemic has dropped out of school – a huge praise point!
Livingstone Christian Centre (LCC)
With the new Learning Centre, any child in this especially troubled part of the city of Livingstone can get help.
Word is spreading – LCC is a place where some of the poorest of the poor can send their children for tutoring and extra-curricular instruction at their Learning Centre. The church community is able to meet with families and help with needs that would otherwise have been missed among people living on the fringes of society. At the Virtual Christmas Dinner, the leadership spoke of a two-year-old boy who was born with a club foot. They got him help, and took him to a physiotherapist, and this little boy is able to wear shoes for the first time in his life!
Mongu Evangelical Church (MEC)
Reverend Alec had a message to Hope Story donors at the December 2022 Virtual Christmas Dinner for Hope Story Partners. He said: “It’s not easy to support people you don’t know – people you’ve never met. But it is God who prompts! We are encouraged and blessed.”
With the construction of the Learning Centre here, children are coming in for computer skills instruction. and tutoring. And both parents and young people are accessing the tailoring class to increase their capacity to provide for their children (for present or future families).
Please pray for...
all three Learning Centres at our three partner locations. Previously called ‘After-School Clubs’, these critically needed centres have a new name but the same mandate: to keep primary children and high school teens from failing or dropping out of school!
“grace and wisdom not to be self-centred but to share God’s love.”
families in the community and in all three church congregations who are still recovering from extended pandemic job losses and are rebuilding their lives and livelihoods.
About our Church Partners in Zambia
Starting outreach in 2003 Calvary is a well-established centre for city outreach and ministry. Livingstone Christian Centre (LCC) began in 2019, with the goal of helping people forgotten by others but not by the Church. Mongu Evangelical Church (MEC) is already teaching pre-school children aged 4-7 years old and will soon reach older children too. Our three church partners in Zambia are mobilized to serve vulnerable children in the population centres of Mongu, in western Zambia, and Livingstone in southern Zambia, with more than two-thirds of the country living below the poverty line.