2024 has been such a special year – full of gratefulness, deep in emotion, challenging in the depth of need and amazing in the provision of resources and progress in projects. With the continuing support of our incredible family of supporters, volunteers, trustees and staff, and our profound dependence upon the provision, wisdom, grace and favour of God, we look forward to 2025 and to building on those twenty-five years past.
As a God-inspired and partner-led organisation we are often reactive in our focus and growth as partners’ requests for support and an open ear to God’s direction combine to govern our ongoing decisions concerning projects and commitments. Here below, we layout our understanding of where those lie at present.
In Rwanda, where it all began, the Comfort Transformation Centre, in partnership with Comfort Rwanda, is our biggest ever project (birthed as a response to the continued need of children living on the streets of Kigali), providing rehabilitation care in a residential supportive setting for 80 street children each year. We are building this as funds allow which means it is taking longer than if all the funding was immediately available, but we were really pleased with the progress last year and trust God for the resources to keep progressing. Our hope being that the main structure will be complete (or getting towards that!), by the end of the year, but with finishing (windows, doors, internal walls etc), utilities, kitting out etc. still to be done.
We continue to work closely with Comfort Rwanda to develop the reporting and also the monitoring and evaluation side of things with a view to data evidence showing clearly what we already believe is the effectiveness of the projects. When both those things are in place we would hope that an expansion of the projects to meet the ongoing needs of vulnerable street children and mothers & babies could move forward. The increasing number of successful graduations into independent sustainable living from the Comfort Rwanda projects is testament to the effectiveness of the Comfort Rwanda team’s work with project members and is exactly why we do what we do with them.
We have been really pleased to see the expansion of our partnership projects with Good News International (GNI), a goal we have had for some years. With the Feeding Project working well at nursery and school level at Bisesero, the Karongi communities continuing to flourish and complete successful projects, and our growing partnership of support for the Vocational Training Centre at the GNI Joy Centre working well, our goal at present would be focused on trying to help GNI build a proper workshop at the Joy Centre for the carpentry and welding training.
The challenges of genocide survivors extends also to our work with Solace Ministries. Those in middle age who survived the genocide but were left with injuries, bereft of husbands and children, often robbed of all they possessed, and facing a long journey back from trauma, are now in their sixties, seventies and eighties and at the other end of the independent sustainable living spectrum from the young people above as they face the challenges of old age. Our commitment to support for genocide survivors continues therefore to be firm. We are aware that the work in Rwanda with Africa Hope Initiatives and the Solidarity Groups of vulnerable women has not expanded over the last year and we would love to see growth in this through more women helped and increased grants enabling them to build even more successful businesses, incomes and lives.
The work in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been growing consistently over the last fifteen years and is now similar in size to what we do in Rwanda, although much less designated support is received for DRC projects compared with Rwandan projects. The needs in DRC are extremely large and urgent with life and death scenarios frequent. On an ongoing basis we need to increase our sponsorship uptake as several projects such as Congo Teachers/ Adopt a Class, Children of Liberty/Child Soldiers and Central Hospital of Rusayu staff are all significantly under-sponsored for the present project members, and others need expansion to enable intake of those waiting for help. This is something we would love to find breakthrough with and hope very much to make progress with in 2025.
The feeding of two thousand displaced children has put a significant pressure on funds but captures the heart of our vision, ‘To help rebuild lives devastated by poverty, genocide and conflict in the nations of the world.’ That is why we seek whenever possible to respond positively to Comfort Congo’s requests based on the lives devastated around them. Working with Comfort Congo is very much about partnering them through the challenges of a country racked by war and the degradations and abuses of conflict, as well as the adversities that severe poverty presents. We will continue to work with them to increase our support through the loop of crisis intervention, sustainable development, capacity building, and movement into independent living.
In 2025 the completion of the new maternity unit at the Central Hospital of Rusayu will, God willing, be a long-awaited conclusion to the vision of a dedicated maternity unit. The Children of Liberty project has a new group of child soldiers due to start this month and we are hopeful that work can restart on the Rubaya school, presently on hold because of the occupation of the area by the M23 army. We are also aware that the situation in DRC is very fluid and new needs are likely to surface regularly.
Comfort Congo have long desired to introduce the Comfort International Ministry School (CIMS) to DRC and we are hopeful of a start to be made to this in March this year. A new CIMS intake will also begin in Burundi with two LEMA locations running in Uganda. The work in Uganda at the LEMA Hope Centre (run by our partners Life Edifying Ministries Africa) with street children is, of course, the first development project in Uganda and we will work closely with LEMA and supporters here to see that develop.
In a similar way we look forward to the fruits of the Batwa project at Ngozi, Burundi and a partnership which works together to build a resilient and hope-filled community. The Street Kids Rescue (SKR) project in Bujumbura is moving towards the point where children can graduate, largely through the empowerment of project members’ mothers and work on that will be a focus of the Burundi SKR work this year. The Child Support project in South Sudan, which still faces insecurity and deep poverty, and to which very few of our supporters have travelled, is our least known area of work but we would love to see it grow significantly.
With our resources generally emptied out each quarter after the quarterly funds have been sent, we have not been actively looking for new horizons. However, we do keep an open ear to the Holy Spirit and are open to possible new partnerships with the belief that God’s supply never runs out and that He will connect us with the right people in the right place at the right time.
