Miriam

Miriam attended a 5000Plus seminar in Kenya. She is a widow who said "I am so poor I can’t afford a loaf of bread". She went home and prayed about doing a livelihood project and took advice from friends. She decided to raise hybrid chickens for meat. She had no chicken shed so used a bedroom in her house, borrowed equipment and was able to obtain 100 chicks and successfully rear them. At first it was hard to get a market but she persisted, trying hotels and hospitals. When we next saw her six months later she was on the fourth brood and by now people were phoning her to buy her whole batch. Miriam is now a community volunteer for 5000Plus helping others with their livelihood projects. She has assisted relatives with school fees and set aside money for a dedicated chicken house and also has diversified starting other projects. She says "Now I can not only eat bread but a cake if I want too".

Jane

Jane is a widow and school teacher living in a small Kenyan village. After the 5000Plus training she and some friends took a loan for a poultry project. She went to great efforts to repay the loan despite some members of the group being dispersed during Post-Election violence. Jane went on to work with several hundred HIV+ people using the principles learned though 5000Plus. She started a community group of 20 who began doing co-operative livelihood projects as well as individual ones. This experience enabled them to access specialist training in raising dairy goats through an international NGO. She also introduced practical income generation projects into her school where a tree nursery provided a service to the community, raised funds for her science classes and taught the children practical life-skills. Now Jane is a highly valued and respected community volunteer for 5000Plus.

Lamjung Valley

One of our partners in Nepal introduced this lady from the Tamang tribe to the message of 5000Plus. Inspired by what she heard and having moved with her family to a town where the tarmac road finishes and the trekkers start the Annapurna trail, she began a new livelihood project. Together with her husband she secured a small loan to buy a couple of piglets and construct a pig sty. They are able to collect waste food for pig-swill from the tourist hotels nearby. The project has been a great success and they have not only been able to repay the loan but have expanded greatly, building more sties and raising more pigs for sale in the local town. They have built a new home, paid for their children’s education and set aside money for purchasing land for an even bigger enterprise. Seeing their success others now come to learn from them their skills in raising pigs.

Olasi

Rob and Jane were taken to this small Kenyan village to visit a livelihood project started by a young primary school teacher on the advice of our 5000Plus partner Kennedy. In the shade of a tree they introduced the vision to some 12 villagers encouraging them to find their resource however small and begin to use it to start their journey out of poverty. In her diary Jane wrote at that time: "It seems a God forsaken place. It has a dark feel to it and is incredibly dry and underdeveloped...". Six months later they returned to visit a widow with 2 teenagers who having heard of the training, decided to see if she could increase her income. Plister, saving a little money from her cassava harvest, had bought 6 chickens and a cock and now had 70 which she was selling for meat to the local market. In that six months she had increased her income twofold. Today Plister has many different livelihood projects including running the village pharmacy. She has been trained as a 5000Plus community volunteer and has been instrumental in empowering many others to begin their own projects. She says that when she was poor she was looked down on but now she is respected and honoured in her community. Dominic is another who when he met Rob and Jane under that tree on their first visit said in his own words "I had nothing and was doing nothing" but he began something small growing vegetables in his ‘shamba’. He progressed starting a fish farm which has been very successful, so successful that he was copied by his neighbours with the result that today there are seven fish farms with dealers coming with refrigerated lorries to take their produce off to markets. In Olasi and the surrounding villages there are now over 10,000 income generation projects started as a result of the 5000Plus training, over 360 small savings and loan groups and more than  530 local community volunteer trainers. This is truly a community transformed.

Gorkha Valley

In this beautiful Nepali valley, since hearing the 5000Plus vision many pastors have started their own livelihood projects to help sustain their families and enable them to be in Christian ministry. They have passed on the 5000Plus teaching and have fostered a “can-do” attitude in their villages and have encouraged their communities to increase their activities which produce family income. The sharing of skills has enabled people to make things such as the large baskets that are carried on people's backs filled with grain or vegetation for animals. Neighbours have been motivated to work together for marketing their produce and other goods. This enables them to sell in more distant places through shared transport costs. Small shops have been started by home-makers as a sideline to bring needed products closer to customers thereby increasing the local economy.