Our Communities
Visiting people in the community was the first step in developing now what is Home of the Open Heart. When Penny first moved to Chiang Rai with her family, she often visited families affected by HIV/AIDS. From there, the people she was visiting would often ask her to go with them to visit someone else. Some of the early fruits of these community visits was a fish and duck farm as income-generation projects and the construction of a home for a single mother with triplets.
Years later, Home of the Open Heart still has a vision for families in our local communities whose lives have been impacted by HIV. We currently have several staff members who go out visiting families each week. We are finding families to disciple & support, that would be willing to care for an HIV orphan if there should be one in the community.
We also desire to continually be involved in health/ HIV/AIDS education; training people in communities that have HIV how to care for themselves and possible other family that have the disease.
We are currently praying and hoping to form a team to be used by God to see this vision fulfilled. If you would like to know more and/or are interested in being a part of this work, please contact us.
Our hearts desire is to wherever possible keep families together, one way we can do this is if a child is orphaned due to AIDS, in other words both parents have died already there may be situations whereby a relative can and is willing to care for this child. So we want to help that family to do so, if they need help.
Part of our community work is helping a family who do want to care for an orphaned relative to do so, thus enabling the family to stay together and for the child to be in their own community. However if this family needs support we will help them by matching an income generating project with their skills, it may be fish farm or sewing project, or some type of handicraft that ‘works’ for them according to their skills or duck farming, something that suits them and matches their skills.
Of course we recognise we are able to teach them skills too and this is part of the whole picture. We will assist with the development of this project, we will continue visiting the family enabling us to: 1. check how the project is doing, 2. how the child is doing with their ‘new’ family, plus, 3. building friendship with this family, 4. providing opportunity for education about HIV/AIDS and 5. ensuring that funds from the project are indeed being used for the benefit of the orphaned child. Test
We also want to offer support to people of all ages (children, adolescents and adults) in our community who are caring for a family member at home who is HIV+. Our goal is to offer practical assistance, education and friendship. If you are interested in supporting our community visits work in caring for families affected by HIV/AIDS please indicate your interest by contacting us.
If you are interested in assisting us to begin an income-generation project with a family who are caring for an HIV orphan or a family who are caring for a family member who is HIV+, please contact us.
