Personal Update

Dear Friends

Greetings in the matchless Name of our Lord and Saviour.   We continue to be grateful to God for his love and care.  One of the ways we experience God’s care is through our faithful supporters.  We thank God for all of you.  Well, since our last communication quite a few things happened.

Berdian tendered his resignation at the end of last year giving 6 months notice, however the Board asked him to withdrew his resignation on the condition that his roles and functions will change.  We were all in agreement and Berdian commit himself and of course me as well until the end of this year.  We have prayed about the situation and God gave us a lot of peace to stay in the organization.    

We are excited about the staff in Namibia, we have some very faithful, committed and diligent workers.  On days where we feel like throwing in the towel, our staffs has kept our arm lifted high. They are truly an encouragement to us personally.   May God bless and keep them safe.

The work and ministry in Christ’s Hope Namibia has stabilized a great deal.  Our days are less filled with crises, which is a huge blessing.  For some it may appear like not a lot is happening, but there is some steady and gradual growth.   In Okahandja we used to take care of 12 to 14 children in the Residential Care Facility.  Since we phased out the home by the end of 2009, we are taking care of orphans and vulnerable children in our CarePoint.  Currently we serve 40 children on a daily basis and our Children’s Club on a Friday has grown to 180 children.  The staff also started with evangelism activities for the youth over weekends. 

In Rehoboth we have some challenges and we are in the process of re-structuring the program in such a way that we will best meet the needs of the children.  The children that is sponsored must walk far distances to reach the CarePoint, unfortunately  we have not succeeded in finding a venue closer to where they live as well as recruiting suitable staff and volunteers.  For now we are looking at ways to develop a standard that we can be satisfied with. 

The Ark Keetmanshoop continues to be a Children’s Home, but we are in the process of developing our Children’s clubs into Ministry CarePoints.  There is currently 3 Children’s clubs running during the week in Keetmanshoop with over 200 children attending weekly.  We have started to accommodate 12 children in a Ministry CarePoint in Oshikuku.  We have registered 28 and started a program, but could not sustain it due to a lack of funding.  We have very little to no funding available, and only have one full time staff worker in Oshikuku.

We have a very busy Country office.  The Country office administrates ALL the financial and other official correspondence and administration on behalf of all the ministry centres.  Instead of appointing four office people in the centres, we have three people in the office handling the administration.  This enables us to have better control measures in place for the finances and other urgent administrative functions like VAT claims, subsidy claims at the MGECW and liaising with potential donors. 

Our personal support has dropped to a very low.  Please do pray in earnest for our situation.  It is quite critical.  In the light of this we have started to bake Dutch Stroopwaffles to sell.  We hope and pray that this small venture will grow big in order to generate some consistent funding for us.  Berdian has a personal hobby of "playing with sand", he makes sand paintings.  He has sold a few of his paintings and someone just help him to mount a few paintings which give a real professional touch to it.  Pehaps this is also a way of generating some funds.  We continue to pray and trust God for tentmaking ideas that will not hi-jack us from our ministry responsibilities. 

Dante and Jamie-Nicole are doing very well.  Dante still enjoys school and he is a very good learner.  Jamie goes to pre-school, she is starting to speak a very broken English. Both Dante and Juliet had finished their dental overhaul and are grateful for all the support by our friends during our fundraising event last year.   Life has been busy since we started with our tent making project.  In general we are doing well as a family, we are rejoicing in the Lord for his continued goodness, love and care.  We have so much to be grateful for.  We had some heavy rains for days on end and our house was intact.  We know that many people suffered losses due to damages caused by the rain.

Jamie-Nicole had a very bad accident at school and broke her arm badly.  She had a closed reduction under anaesthetics and developed pneumonia the next day.  By the grace of God we took out a hospital plan just the previous month and it covered ALL the cost.  The whole ordeal cost us N$ 30 000.00! Jamie recovered beautifully!

Through all our trials and challenges we have grown in our relationship with the Lord.  Truth is that God sustains us, care for us and encourages us daily.  We stand in awe of his love and care.  There is truly no-one like Him. We feel honoured to be His children, knowing that He is sovereign and in control of our lives.

We struggle a bit to keep regular contact and updates, but it is something that we are working on.

Keep well and may the Lord bless you all richly!

The Beukes family.

PS.  I am not good with technology, so Berdian will post some pictures later.