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| About
our Beginnings |
My
family of six lives in a beautiful rural village
in Vermont.
In our town, the postman recognizes our voices
on the phone, and our trash is picked up by horse
and cart. This was a big adjustment from my suburban
Boston upbringing, yet now it would be so hard
to give it up! It is a wonderful place to live,
and a wonderful place for children to grow up.
In the summer of 2002, we had a young man named James
come to live with us from Uganda, that we have since legally adopted as our
son. He was raised by his father and
his many wives to think his mother was dead, and
only after his father died of AIDS did he find
out she was alive and living in another region
of the country. By this time, he couldn't speak
her tribal language well, so they only communicated
in English. The stories he told me of her living
conditions and that of her rural village moved
me deeply, and our family, along with the members
of our tiny country church, began to send gifts
to her and her family.
When they sent back thank you photos, we were
stunned...the children were so thin and sad, and
the Christmas presents we and our church had sent
them were the first gifts of any kind that anyone
had ever given them. This was the first outreach
that our village, sent to theirs. One village
to another.
Over time, with more visits to the village, James
encountered many orphaned children, who made James's
impoverished family look almost stable economically
by comparison. Even though education through seventh
grade is free, these children did not go to school,
often digging in others' gardens all day in exchange
for a meager lunch of cassava, millet or sorghum,
or eating a mango they could pick off a tree as
their only sustenance.
He wanted to send me some photos, because he knew
my desire to help, and yet one eleven year old
girl ran to a neighbor's house to borrow some
clothing, so that she wouldn't be photographed
naked. Once he sent me names and ages and descriptions
of several children who needed help, it was irresistible.
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I had thought to organize everything perfectly first,
and then help...and yet God seemed to have another plan!
When I told a friend how difficult it was to look at
these names and know that they weren't eating and were
without help or hope, she encouraged me to just begin.
She was our first sponsor, and recruited her adult children
to sponsor three more children.
From there, our fledgling program was born. Through
FBC Bristol, whose members have been very active in
caring for James and his family since 2002, all donations
are tax-deductible. We now have partners in three countries,
reaching out from their "villages", into rural
Africa. Would you help us reach out from your "village",
too? |
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"We go along looking at the world with myopic eyes, and
then someone we love enters it and the world looks entirely
different. When I see the ragged children in the villages of rural Uganda,
or on the streets in Vietnam, I see the life my sons could have had (or in
one case, did have) and it makes me cry. And yet I wouldn't trade those
tears for anything. Now any vulnerable orphan could be my own family, and
any struggling mother could be a cherished relative.
Adoption has not just
expanded our family, but my world." ~Laurie Kroll
© Village2Village
Project |
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