How we started

Laurie Kroll's family of six lives in a beautiful rural village in Vermont. This is her story.

"In our town, the postman recognizes our voices on the phone, and our trash is picked up by horse and cart. This was a big adjustment from my suburban Boston upbringing, yet now it would be so hard to give it up! It is a wonderful place to live, and a wonderful place for children to grow up.

In the summer of 2002, a young man from Uganda named James come to live with us. We came to love him deeply, and we have since legally adopted him as our son. James was raised by his father and his father's many wives. They told him that his mother was dead, and only after his father died of AIDS did he find out she was alive and living in another region of the country where they spoke another language. When James finally met her, he couldn't speak her tribal language well, so they only communicated in English. The stories he told me of her living conditions and that of her rural village moved me deeply, and our family, along with the members of our tiny country church, began to send gifts to her and her children.

When they sent back thank you photos, we were stunned...the children were so thin and sad, and the little Christmas presents our church family had sent them were the first gifts of any kind that they had received. We had come face to face with extreme poverty, and these were people with names.

It was personal.

This was the first outreach that our Vermont village sent to theirs. One village to another.

Over time, as James continued to visit this village, he encountered many orphaned children who made James's impoverished family look almost stable economically by comparison. Even though education through seventh grade is free, these children did not go to school. They were often digging in others' gardens all day in exchange for a meager lunch of cassava, millet or sorghum, or eating a mango they could pick off a tree as their only sustenance. He couldn't forget their faces when he left.

James sent me some photos of the children, because he knew my desire to help, but it was the story of one eleven year old girl that broke my heart. She had run to a neighbor's house to borrow some clothing, so that she wouldn't be photographed naked by this young man. Since I had eleven year old daughters at the time, I could imagine her shame. Once he sent me names and ages and descriptions of several children who needed care, it was irresistible.

I had thought to organize everything perfectly first, and then begin...and yet God seemed to have another plan! When I told a friend how difficult it was to look at these names and know that they weren't eating and were without help or hope while I did paperwork, she encouraged me to just begin and became our first sponsor."

From there, our fledgling program was born. It didn't even have a name until a year later. Through FBC Bristol, whose members have been very active in caring for James and his family since 2002, all donations are tax-deductible. We now have partners in fourteen countries, reaching out from their "villages" into rural Africa to serve some of the world's most desperate children. Would you help us reach out from your "village", too?