Beautiful Wind

Beautiful Wind is 12 years old right now. Her story came to our attention at a time when her family was contemplating pulling her out of her school because of their financial situation and also because she had been failing in her exams.

The profits from the handicraft program was used to support Beautiful Wind through one year of school on the following conditions:

The support would be for one year only subject to review at year end
To qualify for support in subsequent years, Beautiful Wind would have to show year on year improvement in her grades. We advised her that it did not matter to us if her grade was a failing one. As long as there was improvement, we would continue our support.
She had to leave the program once her family’s finances recovered sufficiently
The speed and magnitude of the results of the scholarship assistance surprised us all as Beautiful Wind started to improve in her studies and in the course of a year found herself among the top students in her class.

It was a such great blessing and encouragement to see this and we continue to be amazed at what God can do with a few loaves and fish.

Xiao Zhang

Xiao Zhang and her family are subsistence farmers. The crops they plant are enough just to feed themselves. Their pigs are critical because during the Spring Festival, these are slaughtered, eaten to celebrate the New Year, and the remainder salted and kept as food for the whole year. Anything in excess of this are sold for cash and used to pay for school fees, buy cooking oil,other essential groceries as well as manure for their farm.

About two years ago, Xiao Zhang came onto this handicraft program because her family had lost their entire pig brood to an infectious disease and for several months struggled to survive amidst tremendous financial difficulties.

The money she earned from the sewing helped tide her family through the difficult times and grow her pig herd again. This took time as they lost their new broods to disease repeatedly.

However, as you can see from the photo above, taken the last time we visited in late 2008, she had a healthy stock of pigs in the pen. To the best of our knowledge they are doing well and her family is slowly coming back onto their feet once again.

She will continue to sew for the program for a little while more. We are praying for her and with her as she seeks to discover God’s Purposes for her life.