Who We Are
Hands at Work in Africa (Canada) Society was incorporated in February 2008 as an independent society, registered in the Province of Alberta, Canada. The Society has qualified for tax-exempt status and was registered as a Canadian Charity effective October 29, 2009. Hands at Work in Africa (Canada) Society's Charitable Number in Canada is 848314225 RR0001. Tax receipts are issued on an annual basis after the end of the calendar year, for all donations in excess of $20.00.
The objectives of the Society are
- to relieve poverty by providing basic supplies such as food to persons in need
- to advance the education of students in Africa by providing tutoring and scholarship programs
- to benefit the community by promoting health in Africa by educating and instructing the public on the prevention of, and curative measures for health problems, and by providing health care services for people affected by debilitating diseases, illnesses and conditions
We envision the local Church in Canada effectively caring for the dying, orphans and widows, and to be unified in this mission as partners with Hands at Work in Africa and the Church inside of Africa.
Our mission is to, through relationship with Hands at Work in Africa and the Church inside of Africa, challenge, encourage, develop and support the ministry of servant hood among those in need in their community.
We believe the biblical mandate to care for the dying, widows and orphans is not only for the Church in Africa, but also elsewhere, and Hands at Work in Africa (Canada) Society will be a prophetic voice to the Churches inside Canada, challenging them to fulfill their mandate
Recent News
When you look at a picture like this, how do you respond?
TUESDAY, JULY 13 2010
We asked ourselves this question every day when we were on the Hands at Work in Africa (Canada) mission trip to Zimbabwe, in April 2010. We saw children like this everywhere we went: big smiles, joyful spirits, hungry, and destitute, often alone in dealing with crushing poverty without parents around to help them navigate their way.
Eleven volunteers left Canada March 26 to spend two weeks working in the Hands at Work project in Mutare, Zimbabwe. Sakubva is the name of the slum area in Mutare , and it houses the poorest of the poor in the city. Thousands are orphans. Those living there struggle with HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria. Challenges are everywhere and for our Canadian team, it was an eye-opener of heartbreaking proportions that faced us every day with this question.
Our first morning in Mutare we met with the local Hands team of Farai Gunhe, Barbra Teiwa and Marc Damour as well as Emily Dinhira from the Hands at Work Hub in South Africa, who was in Zimbabwe to provide training to a new group of community volunteers. They told us of the long term strategic direction for Hands at Work in Africa. How Hands at Work was committed to helping local African leaders equip local African volunteers to help African people find ways of dealing with the challenges in their lives that wouldn’t create vulnerable dependencies on outside agencies or groups. The goal is to equip individuals and groups to care for one another through their own creative ideas, hard work, and personal resilience. They are to be the hands and feet of Jesus. It is a tall order, given the magnitude of health, political and economic challenges facing the people. But, despite the overwhelming difficulties, we saw this approach bearing fruit.
In Mutare, Hands at Work partners with local community based volunteer organizationer called Tafara. They advocate on behalf of orphans and vulnerable children they ‘adopt as their own - God's children they call them’. These volunteers face the same poverty and barriers as those they care for yet they work as a group to solve problems for others by employing solutions involving self-sacrifice, ingenuity and the belief that it’s the right thing to help one another. Stuart, their leader, would often remind them they needed to find solutions that didn’t involve money; they needed to think harder and deeper than money as the cure-all. They visibly model Christ’s imperative to feed the hungry and care for the widows and orphans. We were humbled by their example, hard work, and generosity.
Our group of Canadian volunteers participated alongside Tafara and Hands in three ways: we cleared ground, planted a garden to harvest food for the feeding centre, and provided tools and fertilizer .
Our work was physically demanding and the Tafara volunteers worked right along with us to get the fertile ground ready, but it was also rewarding as we saw straight rows of sprouting vegetables replace what was once an overgrown dump.
Tafara volunteers go into the tiny and crowded homes of those in Sakubva they care for, and we accompanied them into these homes. We visited and prayed with people who were recovering from illness, dying of HIV/AIDS, children facing life alone, and those alienated from their families because of dissension. Some were alive with faith that the Lord God would see them through; others were despondent and weary. With all, we prayed for mercy and healing and where we could we performed helping activities. For some this meant taking them to the hospital and paying for treatment. For others it meant providing rental income for a short period to tide them through impending difficulties. For each person we struggled with the question - How do we respond? Money was often our first response to the situations we witnessed, but it was not always the best response as we learned it could create an unwitting dependency counterproductive to their long term sustainability.
We also supported the local volunteers at the feeding centre and its completely outdoor ‘kitchen’ (with bonfire used for cooking) and the 125 orphaned children who come for food. Through Hands at Work sponsors, each child receives 1 meal a day, 5 days a week. It is a place that connects them to each other, with older ones watching out for younger ones, and to the Tafara volunteers who know them and advocate for them in the community. It is a home, and a ‘touch-point’ for orphans who have no other place to turn. We helped with the cooking, serving and playing. In the children we saw the full range of emotions from sullenness to joy, from sharing to hoarding, from reasonable health to HIV/AIDS. We heard their daily struggles to survive alongside their hopes for a better future. We watched them come and go from the feeding centre, through rough and dangerous parts of town, bare-footed, often raggedly clothed, and asked ourselves, “how should we respond?. It wasn’t easy to know the answers to the question, but we did respond by committing resources towards the planned new Hands at Work feeding centre in Sakubva and the sponsorship of more children in the feeding program.
Of lasting impact in Sakubva and, in our own lives, were the dedicated, selfless Tafara volunteers we worked alongside in the community. Guided and encouraged by Pastor Stuart, these women are truly remarkable in their service to the orphans and vulnerable children. To help them provide for their own family needs, our Team chose to help support their business initiative of developing a chicken farm. Their goal in seeking support is three-fold: financial resources from the farm to support their needs as volunteers, provision of reasonably priced chicken for the feeding centre and sales to the broader community to meet a market need. We look forward to progress reports on this important, locally-proposed initiative.
Arriving back in Canada does not mean Zimbabwe is behind us as a distant memory as it is still present with us every day. Having seen and experienced the vulnerability and self-sacrifice of local volunteers living in poverty and difficult circumstances BUT reaching out to help others, and now with our Team back in the comfort of our Canadian lives, the compelling question seems even more important: How do we respond?
The picture at the beginning of this writing is of a family in the Honde Valley. The eldest child is 10. Occasionally, when their grandmother isn’t too ill with HIV/AIDS she comes to stay with them. Mostly she is absent and they care for themselves under the watchful eye of Hands at Work volunteers in the area. Look at them. They are just children and they must feed, clothe, and keep themselves safe. What is so beautiful in this picture is that in posing for it, they all held each other’s hands. I can’t help but think that on some level, that is the answer to the question. It is in linking hands, ideas, commitment, determination and financial resources that we can bring the future into these children’s lives that they long for. They must know they aren’t alone and forgotten by the world. Hands at Work, and partner organizations like Tafara, do this on the ground. We can all share in this by volunteering with them, and then finding ways when we return home to spread the word of their need, the work being done and the work yet to come. We must draw on our faith, just as our brothers and sisters in Zimbabwe do, to each find our answer to the question. Wherever we can we must continue to provide resources that bring food, adult guidance, faith and hope.
Friday, April 17, 2009 at 11:33AM
“We are together!” This phrase rang constantly through the weeks of March 18th-29th, when Hands at Work in Africa hosted its 2009 Africa and International Conferences. Representatives journeyed from seven of the African countries the organization currently works in to gather together for their only annual meeting as a Hands family. Representatives from the international offices partnered with Hands and many other donors, church partners, friends and volunteers of the organization were also present.
Because the entire Hands family can only gather together once a year, the conferences are an important time for the organization—to bring everyone up to speed on the inner and outer workings of the organization, to remind everyone of the standards and goals we are working for, but mostly to remind those who have devoted their lives to serving others in their African communities that they are not alone in their efforts.
Sunday
15Feb
Better Learning in Zambia
Sunday, February 15, 2009 at 07:53AM
The 277 students of Shekinah Glory community school are enjoying a new roof and toilet thanks to funding from Visionledd in Canada. Shekinah Glory is one of 12 community schools operating in Kabwe, Zambia. The school has been running without a roof for many years. Funding was secured to construct a new roof in mid-2008, but shortly after it was completed a big storm blew it off. The recent repairs funded by Visionledd provide a classroom setting that is conducive to better learning and, so, aid the children.
Sunday
15Feb
Food Security in Swaziland
Sunday, February 15, 2009 at 07:34AM
Orphans have food security for six months in Kaphunga, Swaziland due to a successful maize crop grown at the homesteads of the volunteers. With the blessings of seed and fertilizer donated by WOW, ample rainfall and timely planting, the Asondle Sive Bomake volunteers were able to harvest 100% of the maize crop they planted at their homesteads.
To tell the story of this successful crop is not only to highlight an excellent planting year. It is a benchmark in the story of a group of volunteers, mobilized by one volunteer, a woman, Nomsa Lukhele. To know Nomsa, the founder and head of Asondle Sive Bomake Home-Based Care, is to know a woman after God’s own heart.
Wednesday
04Feb
Thuthukani (SA)
Wednesday, February 4, 2009 at 01:00PM
Louise Carroll, a 25-year-old teacher from Saskatoon in Saskatchewan, Canada, arrived in South Africa in mid-January 2009 to assist in education programs for six months. She attends Lakeview Free Methodist Church in Saskatoon.
After just two days in South Africa, still jet legged and groggy, I made my first venture into the communities surrounding the picturesque Mount Legogote. Meighan, another recently arrived Canadian volunteer, snapped pictures furiously as our heavily laden vehicle made its way through the winding dirt roads of rural Mpumalanga. Huts and people sprang up unexpectedly between lush mango trees sagging under the burden of their ripening fruit; every person and plant asserting her place in the majestic scene.
Upon entering the community of Daantjie, we encountered a sea of uniform clad children returning home from school. Somehow Kristal, a long-term volunteer, avoided hitting any of them while simultaneously weaving her way up hills, each one more treacherous and impassible than the last. Finally we rounded a corner and discovered the Home-Based Care center Mandlesive – which Vusi, the logistics coordinator for Hands at Work, translated for me to mean The Power of the Nation. Here we found a large group of community volunteers who cheerfully greeted us and helped unload the food parcels that would be distributed to the children coming later that afternoon.I had the privilege of trying out my 3 words of SiSwati which inspired uproarious laughter. At least if they did not serve their intended purpose: to greet, I still got good mileage out of them.
Friday
09Jan
A Chance at Life (MOZ)
Friday, January 9, 2009 at 09:58AM
Laura Eliason, from Canada, and Dara Hillstrom, from the US, are nurses who have been volunteering with Rubatano Home-Based Care in Mozambique since May 2008.
While doing Home-Based Care a couple weeks ago we walked upon a visit where there was a small child who was VERY malnourished. I had never seen a child in this state before. I was with a volunteer who speaks no English so I struggled to communicate in this situation. Despite that, I knew in my heart that I could not leave this child in the state she was in. The mother’s eyes were desperate and shamed. Not knowing what to do exactly I called one of the nurses from the baby clinic at Maforga Mission. With her advisement I did all I could to talk to the volunteers and family about bringing the baby immediately to the hospital. After some planning and discussion, we were able to take the Vovo (grandmother in Shona, the local language) and baby Lucia to the hospital. Thankfully, because of the great relationship between Rubatano and the government hospital, we were able to see the nurse immediately and they admitted the baby.
A week later we returned to visit Lucia. She was a different baby. The previously listless, lethargic child now sat by herself, without crying, with a twinkle in her eye. She was to be discharged later that day. From the hospital, we advised the Vovo to bring Lucia to the baby clinic at Maforga. The wonderful nurses at Maforga have now admitted her to stay at the mission and continue to monitor her nutritional intake and status.
In meeting this child it was clear to me that God has hopes and dreams for this young heart. He was allowing her to live far longer than I would have thought her little body could hang on. I believe she has a role and a part to play in enlarging His kingdom and through Rubatano’s HBC visits they’ve given Lucia a chance at life. A chance she may not have otherwise had.
Tuesday
09Dec
Hope & Heartbreak (SWZ)
Tuesday, December 9, 2008 at 07:57AM
Lacey Shurmer is a volunteer from Calgary, Canada. She has been with Hands at Work since February this year.
I was recently in Kaphunga, Swaziland for three weeks to build capacity into the office administrator of Asondle Sive Bomake Home Based Care. It has been five days since my return and part of me is still unable to comprehend all that has happened. Looking back over my journal entries, I see that each experience falls into one of two categories: hope or heartbreak. It is impossible to rank the significance of either of these feelings. Which should I tell about first? Hope or heartbreak, hope or heartbreak....
Hope: November 5th: This morning Nomsa Lukhele, the woman in her late sixties with whom I am staying and who started the Swaziland project and coordinates the Home Based Care, came and got me for breakfast. She said that some of the volunteers had already arrived for the HBC meeting. The volunteers were so cute, all bundled up in their blankets and jackets because it was plus 8 and they were freezing!
As the meeting started, one of the ladies began singing and as I watched them I choked back tears.These ladies are so beautiful and I can’t imagine the pride God has in them. Three of the ladies are easily as old as my grandmother and use canes, yet they walk extreme and mountainous distances, carrying food parcels and loving the orphans like Jesus would have—using the little that they have to take care of children that aren’t theirs. I was humbled to be with them.
Monday
13Oct
Watch us online this week! (SA) (MOZ)
Monday, October 13, 2008 at 02:05PMThe TV broadcast Living Truth recorded stories of the work that we are doing in South Africa and aired it across Canada and the States this past Sunday. If you were unable to watch it you can view it online for this week only. Click here to watch stories from South Africa, Mozambique and Malawi of hope and need and learn more about Hands at Work along the way.
Tuesday
30Sep
TV Telethon Airing in Canada
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 at 02:03PMIn July, Peoples Church (Canada) filmed two TV programs on Hands at Work’s activities in South Africa and Mozambique. The programs will air as part of the Living Truth broadcast October 12, 19 and 26. For information on times and stations see a braodcast schedule here.
Wednesday
30Jul
George in Canada
Wednesday, July 30, 2008 at 11:32PMHands at Work founder George Snyman will be in Western Canada Aug 9 to 19 speaking to churches and other organisations. The following key events are open to the general public:
Sunday, August 10 – Westside King’s Church, Calgary, AB – 9:29am, 11:11am, and 6:46pm
Tuesday, August 12 – Lakeview Church, Saskatoon, SK – 7:00pm
Sunday, August 17 – First Assembly Church, Calgary, AB – 9:00am and 11:00am
For more information on these events or to arrange a meeting with George, please contact: deb@manbiz.com.
Update on Wednesday, October 1, 2008 at 10:22AM by 
Hands at Work
Hands at Work
It is wonderful news that we have just completed a week long visit from Hands at Work in Africa founder George Snyman and co-worker Lynn Chotowetz, who came all the way from Masoyi, South Africa, to help us consolidate our new partnerships and forge the way forward.
Through the generosity and assistance of Westside Kings Church in Calgary, a number of joint events and strategy sessions were scheduled to keep George and Lynn fully engaged with the work at hand.
This trip was essential to help Hands Canada define our role, and establish partnerships with key organizations. We now have a renewed sense of commitment that with the support of the church and community, ordinary folks like us can make a difference, and that we can positively affect change in Africa.
George began his mission in Canada by speaking... (read on)
Wednesday
30Jul
facelessbook
Wednesday, July 30, 2008 at 03:31PM
"Statistics turn people into a number... A quantity... A thing... But AIDS doesn't happen to 20 million people in the same way. It happens 20 million different ways one person at a time.
Each story is different. Each story deserves to be told by itself."
Check out facelessbook.com. There are currently 4 profiles up there now, all stories from orphans, caregivers and volunteers of Hands at Work projects. Courtesy of Dave Zak.
Monday
02Jun
“8 little kids and a dying neighbor”
Monday, June 2, 2008 at 07:46PM
Last week on home-based care in Masoyi, South Africa I met a lady named Helena. She was about 50 and dying of AIDS. I've never seen anyone so skinny. Just bones. A neighbour lady would check in on her everyday—but this neighbour was an old granny who was looking after 8 orphans (some were her own grandkids, some were from the community). 8 little kids and a dying neighbour.
We got to wash this lady, and talk and sing with her. She wanted us to sing the South African national anthem—I'm afraid I wasn't much help. We washed all her clothes and blankets—African style, in the river. I was so happy to be there, to help this dear woman who was suffering so much. Helena died a few days later, but we were able to get her into a hospice for her remaining days so she could die comfortably.
Tuesday
13May
A Church Partner Working in Luanshya, Zambia
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 05:41PM
In March, long-time Hands at Work in Africa partner Westside King’s Church sent a team of congregation members to work with the Hands at Work Luanshya Service Centre supporting the launch of a new home-based care (HBC) organization in the community of Mulenga.
Below is the team’s report of their activities training HBC volunteers, mentoring youth, and generally participating in Zambian life.
Thursday
10Apr
On Tour
Thursday, April 10, 2008 at 03:26PM
George Snyman, founder of Hands at Work in Africa, is touring North America and the UK over the next month and a half. If you are interested in a more detailed itinerary with all the locations that George will be speaking at please email: lynn@handsatwork.org.
Thursday
04Oct
Construction Continues
Thursday, October 4, 2007 at 04:22PM
Construction of the ground-breaking Hands at Work village continues! A large crew of local workers overseen by volunteer Michael Kaufman and construction manager Sal Hunziker have sweated out 10-hour days getting to roof level of the Footprints training and accommodation center and have also started the staff accommodation. A strong boost is expected on October 17 when a construction team from Westside King’s Church in Calgary arrives to lend a hand.
In a previous post it was written that Hands at Work “needs to be off ASM by the end of the year.” This was incorrecly taken by some readers to mean ASM was throwing us into the street on a whim. That is not the case. ASM is also a growing ministry, and a phased transfer over the next few months to the new property will be done in line with the expansion of both ministries. It was, in fact, ASM who generously provided the land for the new Hands at Work village. And the incredible opportunity to move together as a family of staff, footprints, and visitors to our own land far outweighs the challenges!