Update from Dr. Mark Ottenweller of Hope Worldwide

I recently received an email from Dr. Ottenweller thanking the Austin church for our support of the various benevolent works in which he is involved. Below is an excerpt from that email updating those projects we supported.

Haiti

We have provided food, water, medical care, shelter, and counseling to 500 disciples and their families. Recently we have had a medical outreach at Canape Vert with doctors, dentists, and nurses from HWW, the church, and the community which provided medical care to 300 clients. We have plans to expand our psycho‐social support to training of lay counselors, support  groups for adults and children, and individual counseling for disciples and community members. We hope to receive 50 additional tents soon and more food from local donors. We have 140 disciples that are out of work but we have begun training men with vocational skills for job creation in construction and hope to build houses with Habitat for Humanity and other local groups. We have planned several community programs for the poorest areas of Port‐au‐Prince which include vocational training and skills development, orphan care and support, mobile medical care, and education. We have had meetings and discussions with the American Red Cross, Americares, ShelterBox, USAID, UNICEF, Partners in Health, Project Kid, University Hospital of Miami, and Habitat for Humanity to develop partnerships to scale up our community work for the poor in Haiti and employ more disciples in doing so. We hope to bring small groups of French‐speaking volunteers with special skills to Haiti this summer to work at a children’s camp in Ganthier until we can develop large scale volunteer activities next year. Many of the children have struggled with anger, guilt, and depression aVer the loss of their parents and feel that they could have done more to save them. We have a lot of work to do with them in Haiti but we also have a lot of experience with loss and bereavement in Africa that will help them. We will make announcements about those opportunities soon. Please continue to pray for the children of Haiti especially all of the orphans.

Africia

In Africa we are beginning to recover from the loss of USAID funds in 2009 due to the termination of grant funding from the Olive Leaf Foundation in South Africa. We lost two country directors, 30 staff, and care and support for 30,000 orphans across Africa during this transition period but our management and staff in Africa have persevered despite all of these challenges and the OVC programs of HWW have already assisted 104,000 orphans and vulnerable children in the last 5 years. In the Ivory Coast the HWW team wrote the National Guidelines for Behavior Changes among Youth and in Kenya they were the primary implementers for the computer Prevention programs of the HIV‐ Free Generation which involved Nike, Warner Brothers, Yahoo, Google, and USAID. In South Africa Dr. Marc Aguirre has developed large scale partnerships with Nestle, Shell, Vodacom, Coca Cola, and AusAid to help us further develop our work there. Many of the churches in Africa and the US have also helped these programs with volunteer and financial assistance during the last year. Please pray that God would “open doors that no one can shut” for funding from the US Government and other donors that would assist the orphan care and support programs in Africa that employ disciples, engage the churches, and meet the desperate and growing needs of these orphans. We want to thank you for all of your help in the past and all of the encouragement that you have given us, our programs, and the people that we serve in Haiti and Africa.

Isaiah 58:7‐8 Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.