Inspiring Message from Nepal - 9 years helping survivors

I think you will enjoy this moving and deeply personal letter from Silvio Silva, Director of one of our partner agencies in Nepal – Apple of God’s Eye. This organization just celebrated its nine year anniversary in Nepal, and they are now caring for 170 survivors and street children and helping hundreds more through education and outreach programs.

In 2010, we will be launching a new initiative with Apple of God’s Eye - marketing the handmade, fair trade rugs made by AOGE survivors - to individuals, faith communities, and colleges across America. Stay tuned because we are going to need everyone’s help to make this new program a success.

Apple of God’s eye is a faith-based organization run by a family of Brazilians and supported by churches and donors in Brazil and the US. They have overcome many obstacles to build this incredible network of five homes (they don’t call them shelters and don’t run them as shelters, but as family homes), including bureaucratic hurdles, health issues, financial struggles, and always the harrowing circumstances and trauma of the girls’ situations. Silvio, his wife Rose and their co-Directors Lucas and Shayla have persevered through their love for the survivors, their faith, and their conviction that these lives are worth saving! 

Our school sponsorship program sends children from AOGE and our other programs to school.  To learn more click here.  

From  Silvio, Rose, Davi, Asha and the girls of Nepal

Dear friends,

I'd been remembering for several days. I thought I wouldn't write, so as to not bother you. But now, tonight, I thought, "People will be encouraged." So, I am writing.  On this day, November 20, 2009, we completed 9 years in Nepal.

We left Brazil on November 13, 2000…From Paris we went to Delhi and Varanasi in India where we stayed some days and on November 20, 2000, we arrived in Nepal. The skies were clear, and I saw the people in the streets and thought everything was beautiful, even the urban chaos. I remember each detail of the trip from the airport to the hotel in Sundara, the center of Kathmandu.
In our luggage we carried faith and a dream: to rescue girls! Ever since the situation in the 90s where Pastor José saw a Nepali girl dead on the sidewalk in Mumbai, this vision had consumed us.

The beginning was so difficult, not just the beginning, but many moments, some even quite recent. Many tears have fallen in different moments and situations, but we sense that each one was worth it. Many gray hairs have appeared ("And that will give you white hair," as Rose Says...). But telling about difficulties isn't worth it. We want to focus on the joy of the smiles
we have in ourselves and with us.

Today we are five homes, almost 170 lives in them, eating clean and healthy food, sleeping in a warm bed, and going to school. We have girls and boys with their dignity restored, dreaming and knowing that God is a real God of love who loves and rescues and presents new opportunities when everything seems hopeless.

 Many other victories have arrived: our own school here, rug factory, and the Nepali girls themselves leading almost everything. We have the respect of the government of Nepal that has granted the paperwork for repatriation from India and other countries. (In the last three months five girls repatriated from India and 16 others are arriving by the end of 2009.) We believe we
will open another house in the next few weeks.

 In Nepal we have an eternal inheritance … to see the girls today dreaming, singing, loving, smiling, playing, working, studying and so beautiful: they are a marvelous inheritance, priceless, truly diamonds of inestimable value.
 
Don¹t think I am spiritualizing. I need to say this. They are God’s! Because He brought us, supported us using people to put bread on our tables, using people to keep us bundled up in the cold of the Himalayas, using people to warm our heart with their friendship and caring during lonely moments, using people to protect us with their prayers. So many dear people have let
themselves be used by Him.

 Many started and stopped. Others continued. Others came each time. I can’t cite all to thank each one, but He touched people and they blessed us here in Nepal. We are thankful to all.

 Thanks to Him who brought us to this point and will take us much farther. Thank those of you who dreamed with us that it would be possible. Thanks to the Nepalis who gathered us into this beautiful land of God. Thanks to the girls of Apple of God’s Eyes Nepal who are the apple of God’s eyes.

 We are not an institution. We are not just a ministry. We are a big, animated and dreaming FAMILY OF GOD IN NEPAL.