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From: Marty Rimpau
Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2016 7:18 AM
To: our place list
Subject: [ourplace] Rift Valley Children's Village: A place of miracles.
Entertaining and compelling real-life stories. The author is successful
business, real estate, and media entrepreneur Dick Kazan.
Published on August 2nd, 2016
Rift Valley Children's Village: A place of miracles.
Rift Valley Children's Village
Rift Valley is in the African nation of Tanzania, a nation in horrific poverty.
Half of Tanzania's 51 million people are children, many abandoned, orphaned or
abused.
But for the last ten years, in the Rift Valley Children's Village, some very
fortunate children have found a home and love, education and healthcare.
This is the Children's Village story:
Founded by India Howell, an ex-Boston businesswoman, and jointly run with Peter
Leon Massy, a Tanzanian, the Village is now home to 94 children, with more to
come.
It is set on nine acres, and has 90 employees, including social workers,
counselors and teachers. Some of the children are as young as toddlers.
The whole process had begun in 1998 when India came to Tanzania to climb Mount
Kilimanjaro with one of her closest friends.
"I had no interest in Africa whatsoever, but stepped off the plane and knew
that I was home."
India felt so strongly, that after she returned to the U.S., she applied for a
job with a Tanzanian safari company. She got that job and quickly resettled in
Tanzania.
Peter, who worked for her, gave her a proposal to setup a children's village.
But Peter's proposal was set aside. Then one of India's employees quit his job
and abandoned his 3-year-old son.
India, who was unmarried and had never had children couldn't let this little
boy struggle to survive and became his mother.
As the word spread, soon she had four children, and with time, 17 children, as
village and church leaders presented orphaned or abandoned children.
Peter's children's village proposal was activated and India began raising the
money to support it.
The Children's Village offers a quality education for these children, and for
many more, as India and Peter with village concurrence, took over the primary
and secondary schools.
Today, they educate 700 children.
To provide local jobs, they started a microfinance program which now serves 500
clients, and to offer healthcare, established a clinic that now serves 8,000
people.
When Peter was asked if this whole thing surprises him, he replied:
"I'm amazed, I'm astonished. I every single day, I live, I wake up, I'm, like,
wow. Did we really do all of this?".
Editor's Note: We learned of this wonderful story through the popular U.S
television show "60 Minutes." To see their 13 minute, 25 second video
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/the-childrens-village/ Our quotes in this story ;
were taken from that video. To visit the Children's Village website, click
here. To see heartwarming 5 and 7-minute videos, click here, andhere. To learn
more about Tanzania, click here.
In the next KazanToday: A man who brings joy to strangers.
