Commendations (being worked on)

COMMENDATION ON MARINA HURN: Our biggest donor is Marina who is originally from Africa and owns 13 Dental offices in California and lives on Lake Michigan on her own farm where she has chickens and other animals and lots of bee hives!!

I met Marina very soon after I started this Crusade to create Self Sustaining villages in 2021. She is the Patron of our orphans.

In 2021 there was a terrible head on car accident near the village where I had this crusade and it resulted in 10 orphaned children. The two volunteers of ours killed in the accident were single Mums.

Out of that tragedy an orphanage soon appeared as if by magic for those 10 kids and now 120 kids. But it wasn’t magic, it was because Marina stepped forward INSTANTLY and helped support the orphan population. My partner in the Crusade has a sister named Agnes who lives now in the village and she raises 12 orphaned grandkids, two of who were only 3 years old when I met her three years ago. She had lost her husband and all of her children and was raising the grandkids herself. I already knew about those orphans but they had a Grandma to help. They were OK.

My attention was suddenly on orphans, how many orphans were there? How were they doing? So my partner Martin in Uganda investigated and found about 200 orphans and about 130 of them were OK and living with relatives, but 70 were not OK. These 70 were lucky if they ate once a day. So I decided to open an orphanage and told my friend Kimberly my decision. She was the first person I told. She told me to contact her friend Marina as Marina had a lifelong dream to have an orphanage.

I looked at my facebook friends and Marina was one of them and so I told her what was going on and she INSTANTLY agreed to be the Patron of this orphanage and sent money right away for mattresses, bedding, clothes, shoes, backbacks, hygiene supplies, food, giant pots and pans, cups, plates and cutlery.

Soon after she put them all in school with school uniforms, school supplies and school books. She paid to open a nursery school for the 30 orphans that were 5 years old. This school then self sustained by taking in paying students too and we were able to pay a teacher who lived in there!!

Marina paid for professional soccer goal posts to go along with our 8 soccer balls, a volleyball set up, netball set up. She bought headlamps for the kids to be able to read after dark, supplies to make liquid soap and beading materials so the kids could make jewelry. She bought a cinema screen and projector for educational purposes. She bought 2 pregnant pigs and a male pig and chickens that then multiplied and we now have 42 pigs and over 700 chickens and we are in the middle of an expansion on the poultry business to fully self sustain the orphanage. Currently we get over 500 eggs a day which feeds all the kids protein and gives an income to buy chicken feed. We want it to grow into a business that pays everything for the orphans.

Marina paid to feed all the kids for months and months while we planted food for them. She bought for example $900 of rice seeds when I told her about the 15 acres of marshland that had nothing growing in it. Marina jumped at the opportunity to create a massive amount of food and those rice fields were so abundant in rice we were able to feed the orphans in the subcounty of 26 villages in total. She bought seeds for sweet potatoes and cassava and vegetables and goats. We now have 11 goats as several recently gave birth. She bought irrigation equipment with long hoses so we didn’t lose our crops in a drought that happened.

She paid for seeds to plant food for the subcounty orphans and jackets and blankets for them. Her donations paid to put 50 more orphans into school. We rescued 60 people from the mountains of mount elgon when they were in danger of losing their lives to floods and mudslides. I rented a bus and moved them all to Wanga where Martin immediately agreed they could stay forever.

Marina’s donations have put all those kids in school this year for the first time in their lives. So 120 kids are being paid to go to school because of Marina and her 13 Dental offices.

She helped open up an NGO in Uganda where each of her 13 Dental offices have sent $300 a month for over two years now. We have used this money for helping more and more kids in the subcounty.

All these kids in Wanga are excelling in school. They are happy, they are loved, they are not hungry, they have a future. They are a big family.

Many of the orphans want to be Doctors and Nurses because their parents didn’t get medical help and died. So its a big purpose for many of these kids to save people from malaria and typhoid…the big killer diseases where they live. Marina helped get clean and safe drinking water and so we don’t have so much illness any more.

Marina has jumped in when we did have malaria and typhoid outbreaks and provided the funds for medicine in both Wanga, Bubliabi and Liberia.

I just remembered something else Marina helped with. This village in the mountains of Mount Elgon had about 60 orphans and so I got villagers to permanently adopt 25 of the kids and Marina bought them all clothes, mattresses and bedding so they could take these things to their new home as well as food.

Marina also has helped hugely in our Liberian projects with their orphans and destitute kids. She paid to rent a second building for six months for our Liberian leader who had a school for destitute kids sinced 2007. This new building allowed them to double the number of students they put in school. We then self sustained that school with computer classes to take in paying kids. That idea worked!!

Liberia has about 23,000 orphans due largely to the ebola outbreak that killed so many people including many doctors and nurses trying to save people. There is a HUGE orphan situation in many African countries and Marina has made it possible to set an example of a model way to look after orphans, by self sustaining an orphanage with crops and livestock and educating the kids.

Marina also helped self sustain a storm ravaged village in the Mountains of Mount Elgon. She bought them seeds, pregnant pigs and financed saving people a year later after a huge flooding where she bought mattresses and blankets and food and jackets for displaced people and orphans.

Marina has helped Arthur in Uganda to attend University to become a civil engineer to come back and handle the situations in his area that keep going wrong such as bridges that don’t survive the rainy season and crops that getting flooded continuously. We need civil engineering expertise to divert water and create little lakes and rivers so water doesn’t flood across homes. This will open up fish farming and swimming too. He is recruiting fellow students at the University to join us in this crusade. He has some very interested students already wanting to join in. Thank you so much Marina, I can’t even think of all the things you helped make possible. I’ll keep adding things as I remember them!!! You are an Angel to these people and they love you for your constant help. Love, Karin

COMMEND ON DON MOONEY: I would like to commend Don for the help he has given over the past year mainly in our Liberian orphanage/school project. Don was facebook friends with one of my friends so he saw all my postings and he fell in love with the Liberian orphanage project and helped fund so many projects that are going to impact the lives of 52 orphans that live in the orphanage and the 300 village kids that show up every day for school. Some of the things he funded are: 1. medicine for the recent malaria/typhoid outbreak that killed 19 villagers in the eight villages near the orphanage since December. Most of the deaths were children. Malaria is the biggest killer of children in African countries. 2. Paid for the ceilings in most of the rooms in the orphanage. 3. Paid for plastering inside and outside of the orphanage building 4. Paid to screen all the windows of the orphanage to keep the mosquitos out. 4. he bought 30 soccer uniforms and 4 soccer balls for the orphans for Christmas 5. Paid $600 for seeds 6. He bought about $7000 worth of building supplies for the orphanage. Love, Karin

COMMENDATION ON BARBARA MAH: Barbara is one of my biggest donators and most consistent for a long time, for three years now. She has financed our Volunteer Minister leader in Liberia, Joseph Barjona to do seminars on the Tools for Life courses many times!!! She paid for about ten events. How I first met Barbara is I posted a fundraising post on a facebook page called “Help a Mere Stranger”. In the post I talked about how we had just opened up an orphanage in Wanga Parish Uganda and that we chose 70 of the worst off orphans that were lucky to eat once a day. The other 130 orphans that lived in those 6 villages of Wanga Parish Uganda were being looked after better and didn’t need to be in an orphanage, they lived with relatives. So we chose 70 destitute kids and opened the orphanage.

So in all the photos taken outside of the orphanage where orphans played, I suddenly noticed little faces peering into the playground, about 25 little faces that you couldn’t notice right away. So I asked Martin to investigate who owned those little faces and it was 25 friends of the orphans who many were orphans themselves but were being looked after much more than these 70 kids. So they told Martin they were very happy for their friends who now had mattresses, bedding, clothing, shoes, backpacks, storybooks, headlamps to read at night and lots of food three times a day and they were happy their friends were ALL in school. However, they were sad for themselves….they were not in school and had very little.

So I posted about this and said I wanted to finance these kids to have what their friends had and for them to be able to go to school. THE NEXT DAY Barbara reached out to me and soon after funded those kids with $2500 and they got everything their friends got and were ALL put in school. I WAS SO THRILLED AND ASTOUNDED!!! THE KIDS WERE OVERJOYED!!! Our 70 orphans WERE THRILLED.

After that Barbara has helped enormously to buy warm coats for about 70 orphans in Uganda, pay for most of the 5 quarter acre lots that the Liberian orphanage was then built on, many times she bought medicine, she financed the sewing business at the orphanage by purchasing 4 treadle sewing machines. NOW there are 12 people, mostly orphans, who can sew and they got 4 schools last year to order all their school uniforms…this year TWELVE SCHOOLS are wanting to order uniforms and we need to buy 8 more sewing machines at $250 each to be able to fullfill those orders, but once we buy those, this orphanage sewing business will skyrocket and support the entire orphanage and give those 12 people a livelihood in the future!!

Barbara also financed 6 villages in Uganda to get safe drinking water for $160 a village, drinking water being piped into their village from a water treatment plant in Uganda. This was the first time these people had clean and safe water EVER and the result was no more typhoid and chronic diarrhoea of its people.

Barbara helped when all the NGO bank accounts in Uganda got frozen by the government during a heated election and it effected us sending Arthur to civil engineering school and he would have had to wait another year as the NGO account was paying for everything for him as he was going to use his civil engineering degree to help our Crusade. I called Barbara and she immediately helped!

Barbara has helped also in Liberia last year when they were starving because the price of rice quadrupled OVER NIGHT. She immediately sent money when that happened. She helped finance the building of the orphanage and so many projects that I can’t even remember them all. Barbara lived in Africa as a child, she saw first hand all the poverty and she has a lifelong desire to help African people and so this Crusade to create self sustaining villages and orphanages aligned with a purpose she already had since childhood….our crusade resonates with people like Barbara who have lived in Africa and loved its people and want to see them thrive. They DO NOT have social services feeding the starving in Africa, its a brutal life much of the time but the people are truly so beautiful and deserving of our help. Its a human right to be educated, to eat three times a day, to have a warm bed and clean water. Its everybody’s business to help.

OH!!! I just remembered something else Barbara did, she helped double the size of a school for 200 destitute kids that was created and run by our Volunteer Minister I/C Joseph. She helped pay 6 months rent on a new building that allowed 100 more kids to attend and she helped to self sustain the school by donating money for 10 computer stations to teach computer classes so they could pull in paying students. Joseph went on the radio and the school almost overnight self sustained from the new paying students!!! Love, Karin

COMMENDATION ON ANN THOMAS: I really want to commend my friend Ann Thomas on her heartfelt help and support at a time I least expected it. I never asked for her help. She is my friend Deb’s Mum and her and I were staying at Deb’s house when Deb was in the UK. Ann became my facebook friend and was reading all the things I was posting and one day she came into the living room and was almost in tears and told me that she wanted to help, she wanted to make a difference. She told me she had tried many times in the past to help in Africa only to have been taken advantage of and she told me that she has been paying attention to me and notices that I do exactly as I say I am going to do with the donations and that she noticed I would pay mynown money when I didn’t get what I needed on certain projects. So Ann started donating to various projects such as she bought 6 goats for the Liberian orphanage, 130 chickens for them, paid for part of the foundation of the orphanage building, for some of the walls, part of the roof, paid for some towards the property the orphanage bought, paid for the Ugandan Church to be completed with doors, windows, floors, plastering, latrines and church benches. The benches and the plastering are still ongoing. She also told her friends about what this crusade is doing and four of her friends donated money too, one of them donates quite regularly. She told me that she knows what we are doing is going to change the world if it continues to grow and she felt certain it would. At the time Ann started to help me I was running out of steam and the beautiful validations and donations inspired me to keep at it and expand. I am forever grateful for her help at that moment in time, I really needed a big boost in my spirits!!!

COMMENDATION DEBORAH MAREYNA: I want to thank Deborah Mareyna for her support and kind words to how she feels about our crusade to create self sustaining orphanages and villages. She sent me this message over a year ago “A friend sent me your recent newsletter and the changes made to these villages is really heartwarming. Would you please let me know how I can make a donation? Thank you and sending prayers for abundance for continuing this valuable work”. Its just really made my day to wake up to that email one morning. Soon after she sent her donation I got another beautiful email from her “I just provided the information you sent to me in our email conversations to two friends of Ann to make their donations. There are five of us and we stay connected pretty much daily via email. We are happy to support the efforts of this wonderful organization Karin. Many blessings, Deborah I

t is so uplifting to receive Deborahs emails, always so positive and honest. She commented after she saw what she sent the money became. She said “Thank you so much for sharing! The structure looks beautiful and it is wonderful that 130 more kids will have a safe place to sleep. I look forward to receiving more photos when you have them’.

Later Deborah and her friends sent a gift to me of pens and pads of paper. She said also “My women’s group (their are 5 of us) meets monthly and at Christmas we give a donation of $250 each year. For the past several years we have donated to the World vision for the purchase of hens, roosters and pigs. This year our donation will be sent to VM Wanga Parish. I collected the money yesterday.”

Thank you Deborah for keeping me inspired!! Karin