Devotional, breakfast or coffee – hard to know which ranked at the top of my list but all were great! Since I’m writing a blog for church I’ll say the devotional but if you read between the lines the coffee was awfully nice!
After such a good start to the day we drove to Zoe Ministries in Madisi where we met Mercy and her staff. Zoe trains orphans to take care of them
selves and their younger siblings through a holistic, self empowering approach. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to compare her with Mother Teresa – though Mercy has more of a focus on development of these young men and women.
As an example, we met Violet today who is in her first year of the Zoe program
. She’s a 15 year old orphan who takes care of her three younger siblings and a blind uncle. She grew 7 tons of corn and opened a tiny grocery store to sell her own produce along with sodas, crackers and candy. We’ve seen numerous deeply emotional sites on this trip, but the site of this fiercely determined 15-year-old girl by her corn and store that she set up to support her siblings, her uncle and herself has to rank among the most moving.
Zoe has served or is currently serving about 3,000 orphans in Malawi. Most of whom became orphans due to AIDS and roughly 20+% of the kids are HIV+.