all we need is love.......

baby walking boy.....

our social worker at the village of hope (emma podmore from sunny buckinghamshire) came to our morning meeting earlier this week with a wonderful story of love, hope and progress, we love sharing our stories each morning with the rest of the team, they encourage and inspire us and we wanted to inspire you all too so i asked emma to write up a succinct overview of this story which i hope will give you insight into what sort of work we are doing with the children who are placed with us.

emma writes "we often take children into the Village of Hope who have been extremely sick in hospital and have been severely neglected, they come to us to be loved  upon and cared for whilst we support the and empower the families to be able to care for their children. 

we see the children come on leaps and bounds whilst they are with us which is amazing. One of our little boys who came to us last July, was very sick and in hospital, they where concerned that he would not survive, but once he was stabilised he came to live at the Village of Hope.

upon his arrival we undertook a development check on him and although he was nearly one year old he couldn't sit independently or hold his own bottle, the check informed us that he was operating at the same level at the same as a four month old baby! 

Since he has been at the Village of Hope he has been loved on, stimulated, encouraged and given plenty of time and attention by our amazing house mothers and volunteers. We are now nine months on and he is healthy, running around with the other children and trying to talk. this week we undertook the same development test which showed that he is now operating at the same level as a 2 year old....this is amazing news.

we have been working with his parents since his arrival and they have made significant changes that mean that we are looking at reunification in the very near future.

We don’t do anything out of the ordinary at Village of Hope we just love upon and care for the children and invest it the families but it always amazes us every time how love, encouragement, acceptance and stimulation can have such an amazing impact on a child’s life".

we hope that you are inspired by this story of new hope!

more birthday parties

birthday cake!

last weekend our oldest little girl celebrated her sixth birthday, she enjoyed the day with an outing to 'children's church' at everynation somerset west with josh and emma, followed by a meal at the spur and a film at the mall. josh didn't want to go to see the film, he said it was too girlie but we think he was a little scared as it was in 3D!

and birthday presents!

its always good to share these special days with the children and we took time out on monday afternoon to have a smaller celebration with a cake and present, mommy maz sorted out the cake and emma blew up some party balloons but forgot to bring them out of the office, if truth be told we are sure that emma actually wanted to play with them herself so kept them from the children in case they burst them!.

we do hope that our now six year old felt even more loved than normal during those times and we thank God for her and the year that is to come.

thanks for the support...

the work we do here at the village of hope is made all the easier by some amazing relationships we have with friends, families, church groups, schools and businesses around the world and we thank God for all the support we get from them. it has taken time to build up those relationships and keeping our blog, facebook and other social media sites up to date with current projects is key to sharing our 'thankyous' with those people.

during the six years we have been here in grabouw we have also built up some very strong relationships within our own community, those can be seen during our big events like the hope@paulcluver where we hosted our season of concerts during the summer but most of the help and support goes unnoticed so we would like to send a huge thank you to the following two businesses who were able to provide some amazing but unseen support last week.

the first are the guys at hyundai somerset west, these wonderful people managed to fix our H1(mircobus) with a new clutch in super fast time last week so we were only missing the bus for the daily school run for a couple of days.

the second is our local peregrine farmstall, these guys have an amazing restaurant and farm shop and have been supplying soup for a weekly 'soup run' over a number of years however last saturday their kitchen burnt down but even with all that going on they were able to provide soup for us as normal on friday which was an amazing blessing to the creches we support.....thanks guys!

as we said there are so many other's who help us out in so many ways, they know who they are and we thank them too however we hope that they aren't offended by us picking up on these two companies who really helped us last week!

our 9th sports outreach starts to provide themba to those in hillside!

following quickly on from our eighth club comes the news that we have been able to set up, or at least reestablish, our ninth sports club. this 'new' club is run in an area called 'hillside' and whilst this was an area where we have worked before we did have to merge two clubs together about two years ago and the children from hillside were expected to be picked up and transported to siteview.

although siteview is less that a mile away from hillside and should be within walking distance for those children they are from different cultural backgrounds and felt slightly 'excluded' from the merged club. therefore it is with great joy that we have been able to reestablish their original club, which has been running for a couple of weeks now, and we are seeing lots of boys and girls attend this club which takes place each and every monday afternoon.

we want to thank themba (yes that's the name of one of our mentors..obviously meaning 'hope') for his enthusiasm for reestablishing this club which is in the area where he lives and therefore he is continuing to be a role model to the younger children who attend his club...well done themba!