I've been keeping up with my sister Heather's Zeway Trip Team 2010 while they're in Ethiopia for 10 days by reading the group's blog. Some of the faces and stories of the orphans and widows you meet break your heart. Last summer the Zeway Team was inspired to travel to Ethiopia by the verse" pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit the orphans and widows in their distress," James 1:27. The Zeway team unites Food for the Hungry, Grace Covenant (Austin, Texas) and Zeway Evangelical Church partnership to help orphans get shelter, food, job training and community in Zeway -- very rural Ethiopia. Here is the beginning of a story about the team's visit yesterday with one such orphan. Her name is Eden, and she needs your prayers.
Zeway Team -- Matt Kouri tells Eden's story:
Our first house visit was with Eden, a young teenage girl who is new to the partnership. She is in rough shape. She is HIV positive. Her father died last year and her mother died when she was 3. She also has epilepsy, and about 4 months ago had a seizure when she was roasting coffee and fell unconscience into the fire. She was severely burned on her left arm and leg. Because of our FH partnership and funding, they were able to get her to a hospital for treatment. She is doing better now but still has significant grief.
She opened up to us in an amazing way. Her step-mother who practically raised her refused to have anything to do with her since her father died and since she learned she had HIV. She is so desperate for a family, so much so that she called her relatives from another town and acted like she was a friend of herself and told them that Eden had died, just to see their reaction. They immediately came to Zeway and to Eden's house, but only to collect her things for their own use. When they saw her, they were angry and demanded that she pay for their transportation costs back home.
Click here, to read the rest of Eden's story.
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