Following 2 years of initial outreach work, we are delighted to announce that our Proptisht programme in Lower Mokra is now officially up-and-running! As lockdown restrictions following the Coronavirus pandemic began to ease, the first group of children and widows were registered for sponsorship and so our 5th programme in Albania is now a reality!
Lower Mokra is far from our kitchen facilities in Pogradec where hot meals are cooked for our other 4 programmes. Therefore the practical help in this village is given as a monthly food parcel which provides an average family with 8 meals.
To put this in context, families which are eligible for government help due to unemployment receive around €25 per month. The monthly food parcels we provide have a value of around €20 so this is a huge blessing to these families.
We are working with the government and two clinics in Tirana to provide free medical care for these families, and dental care for the children will be provided by our own clinic at Kotodesh. Our partnership with Christianity Explored has provided materials in the Albanian language and we hold regular bible study and small group meetings for the men and women in the village, as well as the children’s activities. Once this programme is well established we hope to provide further input, both social and educational. The Proptisht activities run twice a week, the same as our other programmes, and we hope to soon open sponsorship programmes in a further 3 villages in Upper Mokra.
Following the successful launch of our Women In Need (WIN) programme in Guatemala last year, we have now begun registering widows for sponsorship in Albania! The very young and the very old are the most vulnerable in society so we are pleased to be able to begin to offer widows for sponsorship. These precious ladies receive the same support, love and spiritual care as the children on our programmes and we look forward to being able to help more women, and possibly men too, as this exciting project develops.
