2025-08-12 - Bravehearts
A proper day for us at Home of Hope includes playing with the children. Even though it's winter here in the southern hemisphere, Malawi's colonial past means that August is the long school holiday, and almost all children are back in villages with one or more parents or relatives. Most of those who remain during our visit are children who have no safe context to return to. They live here all year round. Lucy Chipeta (daughter to Reverend & Mrs Chipeta who had the vision to found this place) always used to tell us, "You don't realize how much it means to these children that you spend time with them. They have no-one outside. You make them know they are noticed and loved."
Hannah Applegarth, pictured above, is Youth Minister at our home church in Bedford, UK. She's heard a lot about Home of Hope over the last while and is here with us for her first time in Africa. "It was nice today to be able to see the site I've seen so many times in photos, and to meet everyone."
"The site" is hard to describe: Forty acres on the edge of a National Forest Reserve, given by the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian for the Chipetas’ vision to take root and grow. In term time it’s home to around 1,000 people: the 700+ children in the schools here (including local day pupils in the Secondary School), the “mothers” who care for small groups of children, the teachers, cooks, builders, security guards, groundskeepers, and the leadership team – along with their own families. It’s truly a village in its own right.
Home of Hope from above
Many of the staff look after their own small parcels of land here, on which they grow crops and rear animals.
It's quite an environment to grow up in. Since its inception over 25 years ago conditions in Malawi have improved. Fewer and fewer orphaned infants arrive at its doors - a measure of the success of interventions against HIV Aids in the country, and improvements in pre-and post natal care. National social workers do still sometimes bring young children here - abandoned, or from circumstances so poor as to be critically unsafe - even from long distances. A growing number of children now join Home of Hope as Secondary School students, recommended by leaders of near-by villages both as being in genuine need, and as having good academic ability and motivation.
A place here is precious. When the First Lady of Malawi visited Home of Hope last year, she said, "Malawi needs ten more like this." It begs the question: how has this been achieved, and could it be repeated elsewhere? Physical sites might be found – land enough for an “education village” – but the harder thing to replicate is lives of sacrifice.
This morning we all visited Rev and Mrs Chipeta (or "Agogo-akazi" - "Grandmother") at their dwelling within Home of Hope. Her first words: "Lucy has gone." Lucy Chipeta, her last surviving child of seven, died late last year after a long illness. We sat quietly in their sitting room as Rev Chipeta spoke of Lucy's devotion since the early days of Home of Hope - not only leaving a career to serve the growing number of children in their care, but then leaving her own house at the Home to live in two small courtyard rooms behind her parents, to care for them more closely as they aged. All the while she served as Home of Hope's Executive Director - a role she carried with such tenderness that the children called her "Mainini" ("Auntie"). We listened, we prayed, and when words failed, Agogo-akazi began to sing a Chichewa song of faith and thanksgiving. "We have to accept it, when God takes people back to himself," Rev. Chipeta said quietly.
During our gathering we heard from Linda Chilundu-Mwale - Lucy's former Deputy, and now the appointed Executive Director in her place. "I will walk as she walked." We already see that in her.
As we walked back to the guest house, Phil and I found ourselves asking: Who are these people? Who are we to know them?
"Our last child has gone. But through her we have 700 grand-children - all these children of Home of Hope."
Seven hundred… and more. I’ve never seen an estimate of how many young lives have been transformed here. Perhaps we’ll try to work it out.
We’re thankful that our 21 donated laptops, more than a dozen new mobile phones, a case of clinic supplies (yes – Home of Hope has its own clinic), and other items arrived safely in our overstuffed luggage. The 12 students about to start university will be thrilled – and perhaps overwhelmed – to leave with a laptop and phone, things so commonplace back home but life-changing here.
Yet this place is not about things. When you support Home of Hope, you are backing Bravehearts.
Alex
Lucy Chipeta, 1958 - 2024
#ZeroAI
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