What’s News – October 2022
Update from Richard, Entrust CEO.
I recently sat with Gebelyn in her bamboo shack in a small Filipino village. She told me about her six children, and is pregnant with her seventh – a victim of a drunk abusive husband who decided to desert the family. “He sends about $4 per week for food – when he remembers, or hasn’t spent it on alcohol,” she told me through her tears. Our local partners are supporting Gebelyn and her family throughout her pregnancy. She is receiving extra help because some of the children are malnourished. Fresh hope and support have seen Gebelyn take the opportunity to begin a livelihood project with the aim of starting a small business, enabling her to feed her family with a more regular income. It is changing her life, giving her hope for the future!
A few weeks ago, our project manager Jenny and I were on Idjwi Island in the middle of Lake Kivu in the DR Congo with three local partners to see the impact of providing clean, safe water to 18,000 people. Desperately poor, they expressed their gratitude that we had visited them. “We know you care about us,” the locals told us, “because you came here all the way from Australia. No foreigners ever come to our island!”
All of us at Entrust are passionate about helping the world’s poorest people. The challenge for me is that we know so many of the poor and we want to help in ways that will change their lives forever. We cannot do that without you. Our role is to simply to connect generous people to those in greatest need.
Visiting squatter communities subsisting in remote, poor, under resourced villages scattered across the globe, has significantly changed the way I see the world. The ‘bubbles’ in which we all live have been shrunk by the pandemic. Are we more obsessed with our own lives and world, forgetting the way most of the world live?
As I consider how Entrust spends the funds entrusted to us, and the impact it will have amongst those who are not in our bubble, I am grateful for the opportunity to tell you about the impact we are making. The funds donated are not for us to run our organisation – they go directly to the Gebelyn’s of our world.
Generosity in the right hands, will change the lives of the poor forever!
Thank you for your love, care, and kindness to those who you will never meet. The unseen, the unknown, the pregnant mums, the malnourished children, the squatter dwellers, the uneducated – but each one directly connected to Entrust and our local partners.
For the Entrust team – and the world’s poorest,
Richard.
