May 25, 2007 - Life in Abundance
A Holistic Approach
Florence Muindi desired, in obedience to God, to make a lasting impact in the communities of the poor in Africa. She believed it was a calling from God as she graduated from high school. As a physician with a master’s degree in public health and years of experience in community development, she had training and tools to offer as she stepped out for the task. Yet she had not seen a development model that applied a holistic approach – acknowledging both the physical and spiritual needs of these communities among the poor.
She found a natural partner in the local churches strategically located in the slums and among displaced people that are spread all throughout northeast Africa. These churches place a high value in regularly gathering together, providing natural and enduring community based structure. Although they desired to care for their neighbors in a church based outreach program, the need was overwhelming, with little know how on where and how to start. Capacity was also lacking in most of these churches among the poor. Florence felt compelled to work directly with these churches to equip them to bring sustainable transformation in their own communities.
Small Beginnings
It began as a short term family ministry (with her husband Festus and two boys, Jay and Kyalo) in 1996, working among the Maasai people in her native country, Kenya. Here, Florence had the opportunity to pilot her project and learned how community health strategies can work in small churches, being implemented as ministries. After about two years, the family moved to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as career missionaries to work among the poor.
In Ethiopia, the work began in an urban poor community partnering with one church. Florence further piloted strategies for empowering and training the local church, beginning with a baseline survey of the felt needs of the community. The church members were eager participants, as they desired to learn effective methods for caring for the sick. Florence saw the importance of working within the existing system of care (to the extent that it was formed) and the local church became a network of trained home visit agents, doing first aid and health education at the home level. Seminars and training sessions were raising awareness and knowledge of health prevention and intervention tools. Bible studies and cell group meetings were helping them to see a God who cares deeply about them, and who desires to use them as agents of community transformation.
As word spread of Florence’s facilitative role, more and more churches began to request trainings to launch similar projects. Florence observed, though, that the first church team began to naturally train other churches in what they learned, and were doing so in a culturally-contextualized manner. Just as significantly, the church cared for the whole person – integrating clinical care, spiritual care, meeting emotional and social needs, counseling, and even financial help. Florence believed that this was the key to multiplying the impact of her work. As the vision grew, sensing the need for a legal and accountable structure, the international headquarters of a Christian relief-and-development NGO that she called Life in Abundance (LIA) International 1 was established in Ethiopia in 2000 and preparations to expand the ministry began.
The Growth Process
The expansion of the work followed new open doors and a sense of God’s lead. The Sudan Council of Churches invited LIA to work among local Sudanese congregations. A similar invitation was extended by the Anglican Church in Cairo through Refuge Egypt and then with other Egyptian churches. Meanwhile, LIA was also extending its reach within Kenya and Ethiopia. When a tsunami hit southern Somalia, LIA began working with local communities to provide relief and development, and then eventually into Eritrea and Djibouti.
In each locality, LIA was designing innovative programs and policies while guiding and supporting church-based pilot projects. Expanding in scope beyond first aid and health education, LIA facilitated projects in literacy, house renovations, public toilets, water stand pipes, environmental hygiene, vocational training and micro enterprise development. The focus was always on building the capacity of the local churches to be the agents of holistic transformation, by addressing felt priority needs in their communities.
Impact
In all, LIA has catalyzed about 100 church-based projects. LIA has worked with local churches in 62 communities across 7 countries (representing approximately 620,000 people), with a total of 2,850 trained in community development approaches. Examples of community impact have included:
- 600 participating in income generating activities
- 880 receiving livelihood skills
- 500 women receiving care at a fistula hospital
- 12,200 youth receiving sexual and reproductive health education
- 800 PLWHA 2 receiving home care
- 200 AIDS orphans receiving care and support
In Addis Ababa, baseline data was collected on the prevalence of a battery of preventable diseases among 320 children. 85 percent of these children were found to have at least one of the screened diseases and half of them had more than one of the screened diseases. After two years of working with the local church in the community, LIA was able to witness the reduction of the prevalence of these screened diseases by over 50 percent.
Prior to the arrival of LIA, many of these local churches – especially in areas where they were a minority – were marginalized, reviled, or considered outcasts. As a result of the increased relevance of these local churches in meeting the needs of their communities, all of the participating congregations have experienced significant acceptance and growth in size and dynamism.
If you were to ask Florence, though, she would quickly tell you that this is not her story. This is the unfolding of what God intended all along for these churches and communities – empowered and equipped to help one another live a more abundant life.
1 The name “Life in Abundance” comes from the Bible in the book of John, chapter 10, verse 10, which reads: “I [Jesus] came that you may have life and have it abundantly.”
2 PLWHA refers to “People Living with HIV/AIDS”
