Terminally ill people in sub-Saharan Africa with afflictions like AIDS will be receiving practical help from Southern Baptists through a new nationwide initiative of Baptist Global Response (BGR).
Churches across the United States are being challenged to send 5,000 in-home care kits — five-gallon plastic buckets with a wide range of everyday supplies needed by a caregiver, such as lotions, toothbrushes, vitamins, bedding, soap and socks — to families in need. The project is a nationwide rollout of a pilot project conducted in 2008, in which 1,378 kits were packed by congregations in three states.
Those kits were delivered to the Baptist Fellowship of Zambia’s human needs program and to Tabitha Ministries, an outreach that provides care to more than 1,300 HIV-
positive children in a district of South Africa that has the highest per capita rate of HIV-positive individuals in the world.
Pleasant Heights Baptist Church, Columbia, Tenn., assembled 50 of the buckets for the 2008 pilot project. The church’s education minister, Peter Sierson, said it thought it was a great hands-on missions experience for its people.
“Not everyone can go overseas, but everyone can say, ‘Here’s $20 towards a kit,’” Sierson said. “By doing that, you’re saying, ‘It’s not about me; it’s about someone else,’ and you’re doing it in the love and compassion of our Lord, Jesus Christ — and that’s why we’re here.”
The kits are a tremendous help to families who must care for terminally ill relatives at home because access to health care is so limited, said Mark Hatfield, who directs work in sub-Saharan Africa for BGR, a Southern Baptist relief and development organization.
“Although there are more than 22.5 million adults and children in sub-Saharan Africa who are living with the HIV virus, the need extends beyond those families,” Hatfield said. “Thousands of people in the region die at home each year from sicknesses like cancer, tuberculosis, malaria and other life-ending diseases. In-home care is all the care they will receive.
“The use of these items by caregivers show the love and compassion Jesus Christ has for the terminally ill,” Hatfield said. “We pray this … will help people come to know the true hope Jesus Christ offers.”
For more information, visit gobgr.org or e-mail bgrbuckets@gobgr.org. (BGR)
Share with others: