A Year in Review​ - 2022
December 1, 2022
2022 has been an amazing year for Blessman International. The year has been full of challenges and blessings. Dustin, Alexandra, Beth, and I all faced significant health challenges that have been good for our prayer lives. We learned to depend upon our God who is always faithful and helps us through troubled waters.
Our ministry has grown in size and spiritual depth every year for 21 years now. Our child feeding program has grown tremendously. We currently have 8 hubs distributing food out to 60,000 children. In the coming year, we will add another 2 or 3 hubs and additional children. Our main focus this year will be improving the quality and quantity of food that each child receives.
Our Celebrate Recovery program has been amazing at helping to heal hurting souls in over 200 high school youth. In the coming year, we will be leading Celebrate Recovery for youth in three large local high schools and also in our Lighthouse Church. We are training and assisting two other large churches starting Celebrate Recovery programs for adults. Our plan is to take Celebrate Recovery to our provincial prison in about 6 months with one of these new churches and their trained volunteer staff.
We have enjoyed hosting several short-term mission teams now that the fear of Covid has calmed down. This past month we hosted a team from Convoy of Hope that included all of their African missionaries for a training and motivational conference.
Our water and sanitation programs have stayed busy with us recently drilling 5 new wells for preschools and helping them to also start gardens with drip irrigation to assist them in feeding their children. Our sanitation division continues to construct new Enviro Loo toilets every month. Beginning next year, we will also be starting a new company to service each of these toilets to keep them functioning properly. We were recently blessed with two large grants from Hy Vee and Rotary to fund these projects.
We continue to develop our training and research farm to supplement our feeding program and have planted many new gardens. We just finished planting a large garden for Mokopane Hospital and gardens in 5 preschools. Early next year we will be planting a large new garden at our Del Cramer Children’s Campus.
This year we also finished construction on our beautiful Sports 4 Christ athletic field for soccer and netball. We have hired men’s and women’s coaches and have established a sports league with area churches. In February we hope to sign an MOU with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes which will lead to many American coaches and athletes coming to our campus for sports clinics.
Prayer request for this month: I will be having open heart surgery at the Cleveland Clinic to repair my mitral valve on December 12th. I appreciate your prayers to help me safely through this surgery and recovery.
Doc