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Our president, Art Barron, recently returned from a 2 week trip to Tanzania and Uganda, Africa. The purpose of the trip was to set up new child sponsorship programs for both countries.
As volunteer president of R.E.A.CH., Art made the trip to expand the charity’s programs into Africa. Since 1998, R.E.A.CH has raised almost a half million dollars to help children in St. Lucia.
“We are proud of all we have accomplished in St. Lucia. We were instrumental in bringing about a National Summit on Poverty and inspired changes in their legislation that made education free and available to all the youth of their country. We had a really wonderful impact there. But now, we felt it was time to expand our programs into other countries,” says Art. “We had started some pilot projects in Tanzania through a personal contact of one of our Board Members but felt it was time for one of us to check out the situation first-hand.”
“I can’t believe the situation over there,” Art comments about his first trip to Africa. “We hear about the African people and everything they face, but it’s hard to believe exactly how bad it is until you see it for yourself. They have so much stacked up against them. The communities where these children live are in dire poverty - the poorest of the poor – so their families are not able to provide the basic necessities of life like education, medical services, clothes and food. And they lack the required knowledge to break that cycle of poverty.”
“HIV/AIDS has totally devastated most of the communities, wiping out most of the working-age adults. In some communities, two thirds of the children in the school were orphaned! I saw a lot of organizations working to help stop the spread of the disease among the adults, but there seems to be very little help for the orphans - over 34 million orphans in Africa alone.”
“But I have to believe there’s hope,” Art exclaims. “Our organization believes that education is the key to breaking that cycle of poverty. One child at a time, we can make a difference by making sure he or she gets everything needed to stay in school by linking them with sponsors from Canada. Education helps him or her to develop skills and knowledge to bring them up into a better way of life.”
“We send every penny of the $20 per month sponsorship to provide necessities such as medicine, food, books and school fees for the child. Part of the money also goes toward providing rural community development projects and HIV/AIDS Awareness programs for their guardians and community. We do separate fundraising to raise money for our operating expenses so that we never have to touch the sponsorship money.”
“When I left for Africa, my goal was to get 100 new children to sponsor. I came home with the profiles of over 1600 children that need sponsorship in East Africa and I won’t rest until we can find sponsors for every one of them.”
Sponsor a child today!
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Mission Statement: To provide the means for the poor to attain health, education and housing,
leading to independence - while honoring personhood, culture and an individual's right to self-determination.
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R.E.A.CH INTERNATIONAL--RELIEF, EDUCATION AND CHILD SPONSORSHIP INTERNATIONAL
Operating as "R.E.A.CH INTERNATIONAL" - registered Canadian Charity BN #883736126 RR0001
Copyright 2007-2015 © All rights reserved.
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