Welcome back from Easter holidays!! On Easter Sunday, we had the privilege of baptizing 8 new converts at Mercy Church. Please pray for them that they will grow in their faith and pursue God’s will for their life.

Since Good Friday, at our main Church, The Worship house, we have had a revival conference going on. We have invited the most respected men of God in our country to come and share. We are having over 3,000 people attend each day from 4 to 11 pm, and on some days, we have people outside in the overflow tents. Yesterday, we had the president’s daughter attend and share for a few minutes.

In African society, one of the benefits of having many kids is first for protection. The more kids you have, the safer you are. The second reason, is since most people don’t have a retirement program, when you grow older, your kids are expected to provide and take care of you in your old age. Having many kids, means you will not be lonely and destitute in your old age.

In such a society, when a parent gives birth to a child with special needs, they know that this child will not do any of the roles mentioned above and most see it as a huge disappointment. On top of that, most of these kids are born with health complications, and they need continuous treatment, therapy and assistive devices such as a wheel chair. Many of the families cannot afford these things since there is no government support available to help them. In society, there is also a stigma attached to having special needs children. People think that the mother or someone in the family did something wrong, and the gods are punishing them. As a child growing up, the way we knew that some families had a special needs child was when the child had died. Some people end up hiding their kids in the rooms.

One of the doctors told Vena that with the condition that led to the death of our daughter, birth asphyxia, that if she had been born, there was a high chance she would be with special needs. This changed how I see these kids because now I see my daughter in them. We try to make everything we do inclusive; we built ramps in the children’s village to allow easy access for special needs kids.

We now have over 20 special needs kids supported in our program. Six of them stay at our children’s village. For most of them, their fathers abandoned the homes for fear of being associated with a curse. These single mothers do the best to care for their kids. For some of them, their parents abandoned them, and we brought them to the village.

We are organizing a camp for children with special needs from April 9th to the 12th. We will be giving free Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy and Speech Therapy to children in our neighborhood that cannot afford these services. We are looking at serving around 50 children.

We are mobilizing volunteer therapists to donate their time.

For $20 you can sponsor a child for this camp.

Ways to Pray:

• Pray for financial provision
• Pray for the therapists as this is going to be a very busy and intense time for them.
• Pray that more people are encouraged and come to the Lord through this revival meeting.