This comprehensive project provides education for development, sustenance, immediate medical care, and life skills training to AIDS orphans, other children at risk. Currently ACTS has 1,000 orphans participating in the program.
Education
A quick start education project provides a way for children who are slow or who have been unable to attend classes to catch up with their fellow students. This program operates in 24 villages.
ACTS Center began a grammar school for orphans in October of 2007 and a secondary school in 2008.
The Ten Basic Rights of the Child are taught to the children who attend ACTS schools. Basic moral principles, such as integrity, truthfulness and purity, are also part of the curriculum.
Literacy and Vocational Training
For older orphans literacy and vocational training to provide future income and to gain dignity to become productive citizens. It breaks the poverty cycle and gives them hope for a future.
Feeding Program
Three meals a day are served to school-aged orphans who were among whose health and nutrition level put them at risk. It was common for these children to go for two or more days without a meal. This made them weaker and more susceptible to malaria, cholera, typhoid and other diseases common to this part of the world.
Children enrolled in the quick start educational program are given one meal a day.
Housing
Orphans are placed in family-like groups under the supervision of a widow. Housing has been built on the ACTS Center site to insure safety of these orphans.
Medical Assistance
Medicine and medical assistance is not available to villagers because they are not able to travel to Ouagadougou for treatment and they do not have sufficient income to pay for any medical services. ACTS medical team brings medicine and vaccines for diseases common to Burkina Faso, such as malaria, typhoid, parasites and cholera.
One girl suffered from seizures so severe that she could not talk or walk. ACTS found medicine that stopped the seizures and her condition has improved so much it is like a miracle in her life. She can talk, walk, go to school and help with things around the house.
One brother and sister have sickle cell anemia. During the worst of the cycle the children lie on the floor and cry from the pain. ACTS is trying to secure treatment for them as the doctor in Ouagadougou who examined them said they would die without treatment.
ACTS is providing medical care and dental care to 725 orphans and 180 widows.
These efforts are initially confined to rural, forgotten villages in Burkina Faso. To date, seven villages have been targeted.
Joanna Ilboudo, the Executive Director for ACTS in Burkina Faso, received her theological degree in 2005 and she works hand-in-hand with village pastors to provide spiritual guidance to those who respond to the witness of Jesus Christ. Pastors provide on-going daily support and counseling for village orphans.
Background and Description of Need
Burkina Faso is a developing country where poverty is perceptible at every level of society. The UN ranks Burkina Faso as 175 out of 177 countries on their poverty list. The situation is extremely serious in rural areas. Rural villagers are subsistence farmers who rely on sporadic rains for meager harvest yields. They grow millet and a little corn. During the dry season, crops wither and when rains fail
Poverty has been exacerbated by the AIDS pandemic because of the growing number of orphans whose parents died of AIDS.
These orphans live in extreme poverty lacking access to basic education because they can't afford to pay the required fees. They then become rural street kids used in child traffic or decide to flee to larger cities where they end up in a worse condition due to lack of education and job skills.
Orphans who flee to the larger cities are drawn into drugs, stealing and prostitution; they do not know what love is like.
ACTS' vision is “to bring the love of Christ to the hurting people through education, literacy, publishing, socio-economic empowering programs which bring life changes and gives hope to the poor.”
ACTS reaches AIDS orphans without distinction of their religious background, through holistic projects which restore human dignity. We encourage them to become self supporting and remain members of their community.
Through the practical means described above, ACTS Ministry brings hope and gives a future to AIDS orphans and other children at risk.
By partnering with ACTS Ministry you develop local capacities and reduce misery and death from poverty in the countryside.
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