Dr. David Palacios - Zimbabwe Orphanage Feature

http://regeneratepdx.com Dr. David Palacios and Linda Palacios Support Orphanage In Zimbabwe, Africa

Transcript:

My name is Henry Zihove, a pastor, and I work with the vulnerable children in Zimbabwe, especially orphans. So basically, we are working with children who do not have their parents, who passed away. Our support is basically for food, education, housing.

For a number of years, we have been working with the Palacios family, David and Linda. They've been helping a lot in supporting our orphanage, in Zimbabwe. To date, they've helped us to build our sustainability. We'll look at it later. They also help us to acquire the house that we are seeing here, in this suburb, Westgate, where we are keeping and fostering children. Also, they've been helping in building some greenhouses, and they've been also helping in supporting our educational system for vulnerable children in Zimbabwe.

This is a miracle house. One of the things with orphans is, when they grow up, if they stay at an orphanage they must move out, because that's the place of the government in Zimbabwe. So talking to David and Linda, we discovered that, when you start taking care of children, they need to have a home where they belong, and that's the reason why we buy this house.

If you look at it, the set-up of this house, it's set up in a way that it's able to accommodate boys and girls, young children and adults. The place where it's set up is a very good environment, where there is more security. So at present moment, we are taking children from as early as birth, because sometimes we are called by our government if there is a child who is dumped. So we take any child up to the age of 18, and after 18, they will be considered as grown-up.

For us, that's when we start taking care of them here, at this place, as children who will be looking into their future, getting to work, and do whatever they intend to do in their life, but this one remains their home. When they get married or they start their own life, they will always come here as part of their home.

So this house is very unique. If you look at the way it is structured and built, the boys stay in the upstairs. There's a nice view, where they... There is a big balcony. They can go up there, watch whatever they want. The girls have their own place. If you check at it, it's separated in a way that boys and girls are not close together. They will only meet at places like the dining set-up, when we eat food, or when we are watching some television in the sitting room. So it's a nice house. There's power, there's water. The place is just good.

We have been very passionate about horticulture and agriculture, and then we have been helped with greenhouses and three of them constructed in the church. Also, they've helped us with a big project that we are running at all of our farms outside Harare. So basically, the greenhouse is a special way of horticulture, where you grow your crops in sheds, in houses. The advantage of these houses is that they protect crops from disease and weather, and they grow very well and in good quality when they are grown in greenhouses. Actually, the quality and the price of crops in greenhouses are very good. So generally, we are focusing on tomatoes, general vegetables, cabbages, cucumbers, watermelons, and these are the crops that we are basically focusing on.

During weekdays, we feed, Monday to Friday, our children. We are also running a bridging school at our church, which has an average of 30 children, and this bridging school is helping orphans who have never been to school. Our purpose is to help them to read and write, so that when they grow up, they will be able at least read something, to alert them. So this bridging school has been helping a lot of children, because some of these children, we can't send them to our public schools, because of funds, money, school fees and whatever. We have decided to set up a school at our church, where we are teaching them literacy and numeracy.

So this house has the ability to accommodate up to 20 people: 2 parents, 18 children. This is what we do here. This is our farming, our horticulture. The crops that you are seeing here are the cabbages. We have recently, in October, harvested the tomatoes, and as part of rotation, we have put up some cabbages. If you look at the size of this place, it is almost an acre. It has the capacity of accommodating about 10,000 cabbages, which are going to be ready in January 2021.

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