Thank you all for your abundant patience as it has been a little bit since we had an update for you. We’d like to take this post as an opportunity to run through what is going on with Yada at the moment – updates on the Christmas celebrations from December, our progress with the well, the housing project, our farming initiative, and our porridge program.
There is a lot here, so feel free to scroll to that which interests you most. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be zooming in on each of these initiatives and sharing more specifically about their progress and challenges.
🎁 Christmas Celebrations 🎁
This past year’s Christmas celebration was extra special for us, as it marked our 10 year anniversary as an organization.
In Buterere, our celebration included a feast for 400 members of our community, who came dressed in their best igitenge ready to dance, give speeches (a Burundian celebration staple) and partake in yummy food. Teachers from local schools gave powerful testimonies of Yada’s impact on students being registered in their schools and remaining in their classes with almost no drop-outs. Local administrators praised our work in this community over the years, and previous students like Annick and Fiston shared their stories of how Yada shaped their childhood and helped them become successful adults.
In Gihanga, we celebrated Christmas by gifting each family a food package for the month as well as offering each person in the community a medical card. The medical card allows them to enter into any government clinic and receive care without cost. One of our team members noticed in the following weeks that the children no longer had heads covered in ringworm – a clear effect of families being able to treat their children for sickness and disease without having to sacrifice food!
Thank you to all who gave to make our Christmas celebration in both communities happen!
💦 The Well 💦
In September of last year, we received funding for a much-needed well in the Gihanga community. While we had hoped to have the well completed and functional by the end of 2024, an ongoing fuel shortage in Burundi, as well as a few bureaucratic snags unfortunately stalled our progress. However, through the diligent and patient work of our small team and the Lord literally opening doors for us, we can happily report that we are WELL (😉) on our way to having this project completed in the coming weeks.
Though we have had to wait longer than we wished, the delay has actually meant that we were able to partner with a well-drilling charity here in Burundi who, in partnership with Yada, will be providing clean drinking water not just to our community of a few hundred people, but to the 21,000 people in the area! We won’t just have 4 taps at our Yada community center, but 16 taps across a larger area of Gihanga! Also, the partnership with this other organization, who has a long history of building excellent well-systems in Burundi, has meant higher-quality parts and experienced engineers than what we could have initially afforded on our own.
We look forward to celebrating the opening of this well on Easter – a profound metaphor of the Living Water of Christ who declares in John 7:37: “Come to me, you who are thirsty, and I will give you something to drink! For the Scriptures declare, ‘Rivers of living water will flow from their hearts!‘” 💦
As we look toward April as the finishing date for the well, we are not unaware of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, just 25 kilometers away from the Gihanga community. 🙏🏾 Please join us in prayer that this conflict would not hinder any progress of this good work, and that we will miraculously have enough fuel to complete the well on time! Pray also for the safety of our team and those in our community, as this area is particularly vulnerable to violence at the moment.
🏠 Housing 🏠
We have spent the last year fundraising for the building of homes in Gihanga, and while we are still praying for more funding, we have decided to start with what we have! Late last year we encouraged the community to elect a committee of trusted members of the village to vote on who should receive the first home. They unanimously elected their mid-wife, to be the recipient of the first home! Her name is Zira (pictured below). She is beloved by the community, as she has successfully delivered over 1,000 babies! We’re THRILLED to announce that the groundbreaking for her home began a few days ago! 🎉🎉🎉
Her home, which should be completed within a month or so, will serve as a demo-house for the rest of the homes we are hoping to build this year (pending funds). You will remember that most of the homes in Gihanga look like this:
For obvious reasons, we are still pushing for funding to build homes for the remaining 50 or so families. If you are interested at all in supporting this work, you can give here.
Thank you for partnering with us building safe and secure homes for our friends!
🌱 Farming and Land 🌱
The Gihanga community is almost entirely agricultural. However, very few people own their own land, so they spend their days working the land of wealthier land owners while often making less than a dollar a day. Unsurprisingly, it takes more than that to feed families that average in size of 6-8 people, especially in a country with skyrocketing rates of inflation. When we first began to partner with Gihanga 2 years ago, they were eating just once every 4 days. Such starvation led to a whole host of health problems and community conflict, as you can imagine.
To combat this chronic hunger crisis, we have recently purchased 3 hectares of land, which the Gihanga farmers are now cultivating in order to provide a sustainable food source to serve the entire community!
We spent the last few months of 2024 planting the first crop of beans on one of these hectares. Within weeks, we were harvesting beautiful legumes! The community met to pray over the land before planting, and there was great joy on harvest day as each of the families celebrated the fruit of their labors!
While we were very thankful for this crop yield, we felt the harvest could have produced more. Thus, we have teamed up with an organization full of brilliant agriculturalists called Foundations for Farming, who spent the last month training many of the community members on new and improved methods of farming which have shown to yield a far greater quantity (and quality) harvest, Their training has been invaluable to these farmers!
While we’re all very excited about this agricultural progress, those who were farming last week were fainting from hunger while planting. Because they were not going to work (farming other’s land), they were not making money, thus not eating. Imagine planting in the scorching hot sun, without fresh water on an empty stomach for hours on end… For this reason, we have provided a simple meal of beans (harvested from first crop mentioned above) and rice to the farmers as they cultivate the land so they will be strong enough to plant.
We hope to see the cultivation of our maize crop in the coming months, and we will keep you posted on how this project is unfolding! Please pray for God’s blessing on the land to yield a great harvest, and especially for rain to fall regularly as it has been unusually dry for this time of year.
🍴 Porridge Program 🍴
By now you can see how the many sustainability measures we have worked hard to put in place are starting to take shape. Houses are being built. The well is being drilled. Crops are being planted. We’re seeing the transformation we have hoped and prayed for in Gihanga!
However, while these programs and projects are unfolding, this community is still severely vulnerable to hunger. We find this to be especially true for the children and nursing mothers who are daily struggling with malnutrition. We see far too many distended bellies and dry breasts, and it breaks our hearts.
In defiance of this reality, we’ve decided to temporarily provide porridge three times per week to roughly 100 children and nursing mothers. We do not see this program as a long-term solution, but while we wait for crops to yield and the community to become sustainable, stop-gap measures like this must be put in place to keep people alive and well. We are indebted to a few of you amazing partners for giving monthly to provide fortified porridge to fill the bellies of these hungry kids and mamas.
🙏🏾 Thank you 🙏🏾
Thank you for taking the time to hear about what is happening with Yada and the communities we love. Your prayers are what we covet the most, so please continue to pray for the above mentioned projects and initiatives. Transformation is hard work in the world’s poorest country, and many days feel like one step forward, ten steps back. But we keep our eyes on the Lord, knowing that he cares about these communities far more than we do. We will continue to fight for freedom and breakthrough here despite the many challenge and barriers we face every day.
We look forward to updating you more in the near future! God bless!