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Manado Orphanage / Bitung FHE

We went to Manado to accompany Dr. Dean Hainsworth, the new vision specialist with LDS Charities. Our schedule had to change a little, because Elder Soares is coming to Jakarta, so we went to Manado a day early so we could leave early. We spent the morning visiting an orphanage to see if we could help then went to Bitung.

There are 23 kids at this orphanage, all with CP. It’s a beautiful setting, several thousand feet up in the mountains in the village of Woloan, about an hour from Manado.

“Wings of Love” Orphanage – all kids with CP

Most of the 23 residents

A real cutie…

Taking one of the kids for a walk

Looking away from the building – beautiful

DeeAnn and me with Eska, the manager of the orphanage

The orphanage cemetery. Four kids have died in the past two years

They just need the basics – clothes, food, diapers. These are very short term needs and LDS Charities typically funds more long term projects, so we’ll see if we can get this done.

Bitung

When we were here a couple months ago to assist with the flood in Bitung, we met Sefferson, the village chief, who really impressed us. He was very interested in the logo of LDS Charities, “Strengthening Families”. We had explained the basis for this was our program called Family Home Evening and we had information that we could share at a later date. This was the later date.

So on Tuesday afternoon, President Nofan (Branch President), Sister Ruth (Relief Society President and Sister Rini (Young Women’s President) and we drove to Bitung to share information about FHE.

President Nofan and Sefferson

We talked to Sefferson for a few minutes and explained more about the program and showed him the FHE manual. He was extremely interested and after a few minutes asked us to wait for a bit and left the room. He came back and said, ‘ok, I would like you to present this to my staff and they are waiting in the outer room’. So out we went to a gathering of 25 or so of his staff and we spent an hour talking about FHE!