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Back 27th November 2010
Back 27th November 2010
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Radio Cracker Projects
2009 Projects
Tearfund / Oasis Trust
The Cambodia Hope Organization (CHO) works with the poor in the border town of Poipet to improve their quality of life physically and spiritually. They particularly look after children who are at risk from trafficking or whose parents have HIV or lack of money to provide food and education. CHO was initially set up to address the rising problem of child trafficking in Poipet, situated on Cambodia’s northwest border with Thailand. Due to gambling being illegal in Thailand, Poipet has become a Las Vegas style resort, and with it prostitution and trafficking has greatly increased. CHO’s vision is for a network of hope-filled communities that become self-sufficient and support each other in meeting their own needs. Education is a key part of the process, for example raising awareness of the issue of trafficking helps children stay safe. Home and school vegetable growing are also facilitated through training and support.
Vocational training is provided together with micro-loans to help people earn a livelihood and support their families. Many people become Christians because of the love shown to them and seeing the Christian message in action, so CHO also provide discipleship opportunities and have facilitated cell groups to come together, as well as running their own church. They also sponsor some of the poorest children to attend school.
Tearfund and CHO plan to continue a long term partnership together. Working increasingly with the local church, supporting it towards maturity and sustainability to meet the needs of the community and the poor in their midst. With an increase in resources the partnership hopes to enlarge its coverage area and scale up its response in the border area.
Lueth Yueth lives in Prachea Thom village with her 5 children – three of them orphans that she has taken in. Her husband died three years ago from AIDS. To survive, all the children have had to work – the fifteen year old collects wild vegetables in the forest and the younger ones collect recyclable materials to sell. Still they have struggled, with neighbours sometimes helping them with rice. Lueth contracted HIV and she was worried about who would care for her children if she died. CHO took her onto their HIV programme to access ARV’s and supported the family with food and sponsored the older children to go to school. Every week, CHO staff visit the family and provide health care education. Lueth decided to follow Jesus and go to church and her health is now improving. She hopes to use a micro-credit loan to start her own business.
Mission Africa
Mission Africa are supporting a project in Nigeria called City Ministries which reaches out to street kids in urban areas and provides them with the home and love that they have been previously denied. City Ministries also seeks to develop the kids' skills and education, whilst nurturing them spiritually and giving them the opportunity to know Jesus.
In Jos, Nigeria, the first point of contact is a city centre drop-in-house. Here kids are able to get off the street, get some food and play games together. The offer of a new home is always open to them along with a better way of life away from the streets. Once the kids indicate a desire for change, they are assessed over a period of time; they are introduced to discipline, shown love (perhaps for the first time) and they encounter God’s love in Bible stories and prayer. After this time of assessment, they are moved to one of the long term residential centres, either Transition House in the city or Gyero, a farm in the countryside purchased with the help of money sent out from Radio Cracker Ballymena. Here they are given an education and the opportunity to attain state education standards. The children are surrounded by strong Christian influences and have the support of family groups in order to give them as many opportunities as possible.
The children are encouraged to take up a trade and are given vocational training in building construction, joinery, car repairs, computing, tailoring or an equivalent vocation. This means that when the time comes for them to leave City Ministries they are able to support themselves.
A network of Christians in businesses throughout the city of Jos are willing to take apprentices for training. This helps prepare the children for adult life whilst also reinforcing the Christian values that they have been taught at City Ministries. The kids are shown how to live the Christian life in the everyday world. This year, your donations will go towards building two new homes for the boys at the Gyero farm site, providing shelter for 24 boys and two staff families.
Another project supported by Radio Cracker over the past number of years is the provision of wheelchairs for victims of polio in Nigeria. These specially adapted wheelchairs are manufactured in a small workshop in Jos, employing 21 local people, giving them a means to support their families, as well as helping the polio victims to get around more easily. At a recent Mission Africa conference in Belfast, Paul Bailie, chief executive of Mission Africa, stated that Radio Cracker Ballymena was the largest single supporter of this important project.
Emmanuel Hospitals
The HIV/AIDS pandemic has hit Malawi very hard and the scope of HIV/AIDS problem is overwhelming in Embangweni and its surrounding community.
One consequence of Malawi’s HIV/AIDS pandemic has been an unprecedented increase in the number of orphaned children. It is estimated that there are 1.1 million orphans in Malawi ranging between the ages of 0-17yrs, amounting to nearly 18% of the children of Malawi. There are approximately 200,000 orphans in the northern region of the country. Traditionally these children have been cared for within the community by their extended families. However, the huge increase in the number of orphans has eroded the capacity of their extended families to care for them.
At Embangweni Hospital, HIV and AIDS chronically ill patients occupy close to 50% of medical ward beds and about 70% of all pulmonary TB patients have HIV infection. Due to the frequency of opportunistic infections affecting HIV/AID patients, they end up requiring longer term care. This has an impact on the inadequate resources of the hospital and as a result, most of the patients are discharged from hospital still requiring on-going care at home.
To cater for the needs of increasing numbers of orphans and vulnerable children and the chronically ill patients in their communities, many areas around Embangweni Hospital, Northern Malawi, have established Community Based Organisations (CBO). Due to a lack of resources the CBOs have inadequate or no buildings from which to work and in which to conduct their activities (which include local health and hygiene education, community home based care for the chronically ill - palliative care, child care including psychosocial support classes for children, orphan and vulnerable children, psychosocial, skills and material support, HIV counselling and testing, Vocational Skills centre for out of school youths and orphans, Income Generating Activities and other community AIDS related developments).
There are 13 villages around Uchindami with a population of 2,391. The community has 56 chronically ill people, 25 People living with HIV and AIDS, 265 Orphans and vulnerable children and 135 children in the nursery school on the CBCC programme, 185 widows and elderly. Currently the Uchindami CBO is operating in a borrowed room within a dwelling house which is cramped and unsatisfactory. Radio Cracker hopes to provide enough funds to build a new community unit in this area, and the new building will consist of nine rooms including classrooms, offices, meeting rooms and a resource centre/conference room.
The Smiles Foundation
Since 2001, Smiles has established its cornerstone ‘Family Care Project’ which now supports over 1,000 people, predominantly children living in very poor conditions, through Food, Medical & Social support. Through this cornerstone project, every other project within Smiles has been established.
The family situations we have come to know so well have made clear to the Smiles leadership and supporters that there is a desperate need for some new facilities.
Firstly, a Home for the Elderly who are in need of daily care and an Assisted Living facility for those needing less than 24/7 care but are otherwise living alone and vulnerable to the dangers and limitations of life on their own in Romania.
Secondly, a Home and Facility for Children with Disabilities who have virtually no help or support from the Romanian State. There are many children, some with minor disabilities that with proper care and support could overcome the challenges of disability and have a much more normal life than currently possible in Romania.
We already have elderly people asking us each week we visit them, is the Nursing Home ready yet? We don’t like to keep telling them we haven’t started building yet! They are desperate and waiting.
Two such families have been on our Family Care project for 6 years. Agneta Vasilescu who at 74 cares for a mentally challenged younger girl, who’s parents died some years back and Agneta offered to take in Enrika to avoid institutional care.
Estira Domokosh at 82 lives in atrocious conditions with her mentally challenged daughter, Katalin who also suffers epilepsy. Just four of so many people needing a facility of a special nature. That is what Smiles plans for Cihei. A Facility with very special features.
For the Nursing Home, we plan single and twin rooms with special guest rooms for visitors. We also plan a communal lounge, dining room, TV room, reading room and elevator between floors.
For the Centre for Children with Disabilities, we plan single and twin rooms with special guest rooms for visitors. A games room, Sensory room, physiotherapy suite and hydrotherapy pool.
Both facilities will have specialist care and medical staff to provide quality supervision to the highest standard possible.
This year, Radio Cracker funds will go towards the building and equipping of the sensory room in the Centre for children with disabilities.
Second Sight
The man in this picture is 32year-old Dr Shiva, an eye surgeon living in the state of Orissa in India. The woman is ophthalmologist Dr Lucy Mathen from the London-based charity Second Sight. The boys are 9year-old Subala Suna and 12year-old Ranjit Bariha. Both were blind and had their sight restored by cataract surgery.
Earlier this year, Lucy met Dr Shiva and discovered that: - He had single-handedly cured 6,000 blind people in the past year - He had offered all the surgery free of charge - He took no salary and sleeps on the floor of his office - He works from 4.30am till midnight most days Why?
Because the state of Orissa has at least half a million people unnecessarily blind from cataract. And he can restore sight in just three minutes (perhaps five minutes when it comes to children like the two in this picture).
Shiva comes from a poor family himself. So he has dedicated his life as an ophthalmologist to eradicating blindness from his home state...an area where up to half the population lives on less than 15pence a day. With his surgical skills he could be earning a fortune in one of India’s wealthy cities (where 80 per cent of eye surgeons work in private practice).
Second Sight seeks out doctors like Dr Shiva who are actually curing the blind. Second Sight's own experienced volunteer surgeons also work alongside teams like Dr Shiva’s and cure the blind themselves.
Second Sight does not spend one penny of donated money on office costs. Second Sight is run by volunteers. So your donation of £15 goes straight to the hospital where the operation is carried out, and this year Radio Cracker will be supporting Gems Hospital, an evangelical Christian hospital in India.
Coaching 4 Christ
In 2006 a team of Coaching4Christ volunteers travelled to Kisumu, Nyanza province, Kenya to outreach using soccer, to the young people in this area. Whilst there they met George and Hellen Ochieng, founders of the Vispa Emmanuel Christian Academy and Vision and Passion Orphanage. It was after meeting George and Hellen, seeing and working with the children and witnessing the conditions of the orphanage and school that hearts were stirred.
The team travelled back to this area in 2007 and 2008, conditions had deteriorated and the need was more prevalent than ever before … something needed to be done!
Coaching4Christ would like to support Vision and Passion to extend it’s work by helping them relocate the primary school and build a new secondary school and dormitories on a new site. The land has already been purchased for the project, and plans have been drawn up for the building work to commence.
One of the most important first steps in the project is the provision of a clean, fresh water supply, and Radio Cracker hopes to provide the funds to drill a well and build a large water storage tank. This will ensure enough water for the building work, and then a clean supply of uncontaminated water for the children and staff of the schools for drinking, washing and sanitation.