A New Pickup to Start Building a New Home
Thank you, Avenir Project family!! You rock! We officially have a new pickup for our partner orphanage, EMSF’s Le Prince Orphanage. Now they can finally start developing their new land to prepare it for the building of a new home all their own.
For 18 years, EMSF’s Le Prince Orphanage has rented a property for their orphanage, which has been expensive and turbulent at best. They need a new home, all their own. This truck is one of the first steps towards making that dream a reality! With the truck, they will now be able to start bringing tools and materials to their new land and start preparing it for construction.
Mama Auguy and the late Papou Claude Reynaud started the orphanage in 2005 after witnessing an incredible need for care for children orphaned by Ivory Coast’s first civil war. Over time, with another civil war and myriad reasons children become orphaned, they’ve nurtured a flourishing family of more than 50 children. But while renting a property for their orphanage has been a blessing, it’s now become a severe trouble.
Renting is expensive. And recently their property owner passed away and passed the property on to her children, who are wanting to raise the rent. Further, the property simply isn’t big enough. There are only four bedrooms and four full bathrooms for ~40 children. It’s clear they need a new home.
With the new pickup, they will be able to bring all the supplies they need to this new land to turn it into a safe, new home for the children of their orphanage.
Recently, a local pastor and friend of Mama Auguy and the orphanage gifted them new land to build a new home for them—an incredible gift! But it’s swampy and very much still a delightfully wild bushland for all sorts of birds and bugs and other wonderful creatures. They didn’t have an appropriate vehicle to bring supplies to the new land and start preparing it for construction.
Now they do, thanks to the gracious generosity of our Avenir Project family! This beautiful Toyota will carry all their tools and supplies to the new land so that they can finally start getting it ready to build. They’ll also be able to bring trees and crops to the new land to start their fruit and vegetable garden, which they will be able to start eating off of and selling from soon.
This is easily the biggest thing we’ve done together yet, and I’m so grateful and thrilled. We all are. I hope you are, too!
When I asked one of the girls at the orphanage, Maï (12 years old), what her favorite thing we did together was last June, she said, without a millisecond of hesitation, “Going to the new land.” We’d done an incredible ropes course, gone to the pool, took a day-trip to the capital, and done a bunch of other really fun activities. But the new land. It’s everything to them. It’s a sign of hope.
