What do chickens have to do with caring for vulnerable children?
This can be best explained as you take a tour of our Vocational Ranch in Fondfrede, Haiti with Ernso. He’ll show you the flock we’re continuing to grow, explain the process of raising chicks through the molting process and finally landing them in the main laying house. He would show you how they collect and clean the eggs and send them off to markets in the local areas. But what he’d really explain is why.
We believe that as we bring vulnerable children into a permanent family and provide for their physical, emotional, educational and spiritual needs, that we can also go deeper still. We don’t want to stop with the immediate needs of raising a child in a safe place. We want them to flourish, to become everything God wants them to be.
Chickens are a small part of that. Combine that with agricultural and life-skills training – all of which will all be a part of these children’s experiences when they come to the Ranch. After graduating secondary school, our children will have an opportunity to learn from talented men like Ernso and other educated Haitians. These new skills will not only add value to them personally, but will also help them continue to think creatively, develop business skills and plan for the future.
Those are incredibly valuable skills for a country where problem solving, skills training and critical thinking is generally never taught.
Chickens leads to corn too – and the more hungry beaks that need filled, the more corn we need to produce. And so more skills are born as students will learn how to grow crops and dry feed so it can be stored without spoiling later.
Reaching vulnerable children takes all of us – whether we’re good with chickens or we are farmers or teachers or creatives. If you’d walk around the Ranch with Ernso, you would see that. And maybe when you stop to look at the chickens, take a moment to think about how God might want to use you to change the lives of vulnerable children.