Building Projects …
Bethel Home (completed 2014)
The first project was the building of the primary home in 2014.
This house was designed for 20 orphaned children.
It has a kitchen and dining hall that will eventually be used for future ‘families’.
This first phase also included fencing around the property.
.
Boys Dorm, Library/study hall, guest rooms
Bethel Home was designed, at capacity, to handle 20 children but it quickly filled to 32 children! It was soon apparent that the older boys needed to have more space, so 5 were moved out to a small metal house on the property that had been built in 2012. This still left 11 young boys in one bedroom!
We quickly realized we must build a proper dorm to allow for growth in the number of children we care for, and a team of workers went over to Kenya and started building at the start of 2017. The second house was designed to mirror the original house. It was to be the boys dorm while the original house was to become the girls dorm. The boys would take over the second floor of the house while the first floor would contain two offices, three guest rooms, a storage room and a study hall.
We very quickly filled up our houses to capacity and how care for about 65 children.
New School Building
In 2016 we opened an elementary school on our property to educate not only our own children but also the children living in the four large and very poor communities that surround our home. The school, which currently goes up to grade 8, is a private school with highly dedicated and excellent teachers. Our students quickly became some of the best in the area and our school typically outperforms the public schools in the area. Our children regularly score highly on national exams and receive scholarships to attend the best high schools in the area. All this excellence coming out of a school built on mud floors and a rusty, hole filled metal roof with wire fencing for windows.
This building has done its job but the time has come to replace it with a proper building. The mud floors in this school have washed away in the rains a few too many times, and the termites and rot are getting to the wooden supports. When it rains, the roof leaks all over the kids. Also, the Kenyan Board of Education has told us we have to upgrade our facilities or they will no longer allow us to operate a school.
Designs and costs are still being determined but we know we don’t have the money we need to pay for a school build. Please consider helping us as we begin the process of building a new facility.
