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The Take 3 Project
Every month members give a small sum to this project, it supports three causes. The first is the Leprosy Mission, the second the Biblelands Society, and the third is a Lutheran young peoples scheme to improve the lives of severly disabled instituionalised people in Hungary.
The people to whom the Leprosy
Mission send our money live at a school in Vizianagram in India. The money
helps not only with their daily living expences but also helps to train
them in skills which they can use to help earn
a living after they leave
the school. We receive regular news of the school and the progress of its
students.
The Biblelands society
supports children in homes and schools in the middle east and also in Italy.
Our money goes every month to sponsor a small boy who lives in a childrens
home in Naples. We receive school reports and occasionally a letter from
Claudio, which the teachers translate for us. He
always writes to thank
us after his birthday and after Christmas and Easter. The children at the
home are either orphans or from disadvantaged homes.
The Hungarian Lutheran
Youth Project does not receive any money from any outside source but ourselves.
The dedicated young people give all their time freely, many of them are
students studying to enter the church or are at
university.
The project was set up after the changes of the nineties when the church
was asked by the new regime to help with the huge numbers of people who
up until then had lived their whole lives in institutions.
The
money which is taken every year to the leaders of the organisation is handed
over in cash to them so that every penny is spent on the projects and none
on banking exchange charges etc. It is spent on organising camps, often
held in disused church houses, in villages where the blind, the mentally
handicapped , wheel chair bound people and orphaned children who live in
the many institutions which are relics of the old regime can have a respite
from their dreary lives.
Some of the people who are given
a short holiday live with their families, but as most people in Hungary
live in large blocks of flats they rarely get far from their homes.
The money which these camps cost is very small by our standards but
even the few pounds which it costs for each camper is beyond their ability
to pay so the students save from their own meagre resources to pay for the
one person who will be their responsility when they go to camp.
Every disabled person has a young person who looks after them, sleeps beside
them and is their right hand or their eyes for the time they are in camp.
The church is constantly prayed for by the project workers and we feel that our lives are enriched by being involved with this scheme. We feel as a church that giving to these causes is just giving back some of what God has given us in such abundance.