Hope Community Center

Menno Simmons wrote: True evangelical faith cannot lie dormant.  It cloths the naked, it comforts the sorrowful,  It shelters the destitute... This quotation kept coming to me as I thought about the Hope Community Center and Lucy, the woman who created it. Like Utooni, this a local solution to a local problem. It started with Lucy bringing home one street boy that she found. He then brought all his friends home too and it quickly began to grow. Once it hit twenty children, Lucy finally decided she couldn't do it in her home anymore and since that time the center has slowly grown from living in a church, to plastic tents, to wood huts all the way to the multiple cement buildings she now has that house more than the official 173 children she has. She now runs schools for all the children and shepards them all the way to a job.  It is remarkable to look over a sea of happy, healthy faces singing together and realize that they would be on the street or worse if it were not for Lucy.   It is inspiring to meet someone who when faced with the suffering of others, did not complain or ask why no one was doing anything about it, but instead just started to help.  -Cara