Greetings!

Welcome to my blog! 

God has been doing some cool things in my life and I want you to be a part of the adventures He has prepared for me this coming year. 

Chene Street, Detroit

In late September (or maybe October depending on support) I will be heading off to Bangui, Central African Republic to begin an internship with Project Hope and Charité. I have decided to devote this year to service and learning about ministry. In the next couple months before leaving I am interning with the youth ministry team at Huron Hills Church. I have already learned so much and I have enjoyed helping to lead the two summer mission trips (to Tijuana, Mexico and inner-city Detroit).

I genuinely appreciate your support as I begin this ministry in Central Africa. It wouldn’t be possible without all of you! To learn about how you can play a part in the ministry of Project Hope Charité and partner with me in my African adventure, you can read the post below. You can also read the long story about how I decided to intern in Africa as well as read about what is involved in my internship, the ministry of Project Hope Charité, and Central African Republic in my previous blog posts.

Thank you so much for your support and prayers and thanks for taking the time to join me in my African Adventure!

In Christ,

Amy Kuhl

Join the Adventure!

James 1:27 says, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress.”  Project Hope & Charité is an orphan and widow care program committed to doing just that. I am excited to be able to play a part in caring for the orphans of Central African Republic but I can’t do it alone!

God is calling me to spend nine months serving and showing Christ’s love to those in need in Africa. I need people to partner with me in this ministry through prayer and financial support to make a difference in the lives of the orphans and widows of CAR.

Ways to join the adventure:

1) Pray for me and the ministry of Project Hope & Charité.

If you would like to receive email updates and prayer requests, please send me an email at kuhlae@gmail.com to get on my email list.

2) Partner with me financially.

I need to raise a total of about $17,000 to fund my internship. This may seem like a big number but I know that God will provide the funds I need to cover travel, living expenses, and ministry costs through the support of people willing to participate in this ministry with me.

You can give a one-time gift or you can pledge to support me on a monthly basis during the months I’m serving (September 2010-June 2011). All donations are tax-deductible and non-refundable.

Checks or cash

If you are sending checks, please make checks payable to Grace Brethren International Missions (GBIM) MEMO: Amy Kuhl and then send the check to:

Grace Brethren International Missions

PO Box 80065

City of Industry CA 91716-8065

Online donating

Go to http://www.gbim.org/give/give-to-a-missionary.

Find “Amy Kuhl” on the drop-down menu and continue through the online donation process. If you submit your email address, an email will be sent to you with an option of having a monthly donation go directly from your account.

Direct deposit donations can also be set up by clicking “Ways to Give” from the menu on the webpage and downloading a form for Electronic Funds Transfer. Send that form, along with a voided check, to GBIM. 

Who, what, when, where...

From late September to early June 2011 I will be a GBIM intern with PHC in CAR. Who? What? Where?! haha yeah I figured I should do some explaining…

Grace Brethren International Missions (GBIM)

GBIM is a missions agency dedicated glorifying God and making his name known throughout the world. They currently work with 216 different people groups across the globe (http://gbim.org/about-us). GBIM and Grace College, where I went to school, are both associated with the fellowship of Grace Brethren Churches. Throughout my four years at Grace I had several missions classes with former GBIM missionaries. I personally became involved with the agency during my last semester at Grace through volunteering at the GBIM headquarters in Winona Lake, Indiana.

Project Hope and Charité (PHC)

Project Hope & Charité is GBIM’s orphan care ministry in the Central African Republic (http://www.ph-c.com). PHC is providing help for close to 2,500 African orphans through individual orphan sponsorships and through rural, church-based Christian schools for orphans.  PHC also serves widows who provide surrogate homes for PHC orphans.

PHC is not an orphanage. In African culture it is common for orphans to be adopted into the family of a relative. Community is very important when raising a child. What PHC has done is to develop Hand-in-Hand Orphan Schools in the regions around Bangui where children can get an education, individual attention, and learn about Jesus. The orphan sponsor program of PHC supports orphans whose relatives cannot adequately provide for them.

Central African Republic (CAR)

I will be living in Bangui, Central African Republic. Covered in rainforests and savanna, CAR is a little smaller than Texas and is almost always hot and humid. The national languages are French and Songo.

CAR is one of the world’s poorest countries  with 67 percent of its population living on less than a dollar a day. It has been greatly affected by AIDS, a disease contributing to the large number of orphans in CAR (unicef.org). Of the 4.4 million people in CAR, about 240,000 are HIV/AIDS orphans.

On-field Ministry Plan

What exactly will I be doing as a GBIM intern with PHC in CAR? Here is a list of my roles and responsibilities as an intern:

1)    Learn Songo during the first three months of ministry to help with orphan-to-sponsor communication.

2)    Collect photos and video footage of Hand-in-Hand schools to be used in the USA to produce updated videos.

3)    Collect photos for Editions Cle’ and the African youth magazine.

4)    Use soccer skills to bond with teen girls in the PHC orphan program.

5)    Figure out how Africans learn music and use music to develop relationship and teach.

6)    Help the African PHC staff to develop a systematic approach to orphan-sponsor correspondence.

The Start of my African Adventure

“We have no right to decide where we should be placed, or to have preconceived ideas as to what God is preparing us to do, God engineers everything; and wherever He places us, our one supreme goal should be to pour out our lives in wholehearted devotion to Him in that particular work. ‘Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might…’ (Eccl. 9:10).”

–Oswald Chamber from his book My Utmost for His Highest

So, many of you reading this might be wondering what led me to accept an internship in Africa. To be honest, Africa has never been a place that I’ve had any particular interest in visiting. Let me rewind and tell you the story.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010. I sat across from Barb in the Tree of Life coffee shop, drinking my iced chai tea wondering what God was doing! A few weeks earlier, in my pursuit of post-grad jobs and internships, I had contacted Grace Brethren International Missions (GBIM) about possible missions internships. I wasn’t exactly sure what sort of an internship I was looking for but I have a passion for missions and I had been volunteering with GBIM already. Well, I may not have had a specific internship in mind but when the GBIM internship coordinator suggested I pray about filling an internship need in Central African Republic (CAR) I knew that was definitely not what I had in mind.

I was going to be graduating with a degree in classical piano and history and when I think of Africa, art and history are not the first things that pop into my mind. I had been praying, though, that God would send me someplace where He could use me to make a difference. So that is how I ended up sitting across from Barb, the stateside director of Project Hope and Charité. I had prayed and decided to schedule a meeting with her to hear about what the internship in CAR with Project Hope and Charité was all about, hoping that it would be nothing I was interested in. As Barb explained over our coffee date the ministry needs in CAR and the type of work God was doing there, I knew I couldn’t just ignore this opportunity.

            I did try to ignore the internship for a while. There are a lot of things I’d like to do in life and spending a year in Africa didn’t fit into my picture of how I thought my life should go. Recently I’ve had a desire to study culture, do social justice work, and learn more about how to give a voice to the voiceless and underprivileged. Over the past couple years I have traveled quite a bit and seen so much need, especially among indigenous groups of people. My well-thought-out plan was to go to Hawaii University this fall to begin a graduate program in international cultural studies where I would learn how to study culture, ethnomusicology, policy making, and Polynesian history and culture. I was accepted to Hawaii University but God seemed to be telling me to take a break from studying and start using the skills I’ve already developed to serve Him now. I kept looking into different jobs and other ministry internships but the more I thought and prayed about my future the more certain I was that God really did want me to go to Africa.

The question I had to answer for myself was this: whether I was going to make the plans for my life and then ask God to bless those plans, or whether I would be willing to give my dreams over to God and let him write my life story. I decided to trust God, the master storywriter, with the plans for my life. Though I still can’t see the bigger picture and I don’t know exactly what’s in store for me in Africa, I’m willing to give my all and serve wholeheartedly wherever and however God wants to use me.

While Africa may not be my first choice of places to intern, God has opened up my eyes to a very real need there and given me a cool opportunity to go share Christ’s love. I am saying, “Here I am. Send me (Isaiah 6:8)!” This is just the start of the story God is writing for my life and I am so excited to see what God has in store for me. I can’t wait to share with you more stories of my African adventure!

Please pray for me!

• Pray that God would continue to give me a willing and optimistic spirit and a passion to serve the orphans in CAR.
• Pray for all the preparation going into my trip. I leave in less than two months and I have a lot to do raising support, applying for visas, filling out paperwork, getting travel arranged, packing, etc.
• Pray for the ministry of Project Hope and Charité that God would use it in a powerful way to transform the country of CAR and bring many people to faith in Him.