Dear friends
Christmas is important in Africa. In many huts and houses, people sing, clean, prepare food for their families and mend clothes. They dress up for the big day.
As every year, our hundred protégés celebrate Christmas in our small village with their mothers and families. Many spend almost the entire Christmas Day with their foster mothers in their church. There they sing, pray, tell the Christmas story, chat, laugh and celebrate togetherness.
In the afternoon, they return to our village, sing, play and prepare the campfire for the evening. Christmas trees are only found in Western shopping malls in Africa.
As soon as the sun begins to set, they gather around the campfire, hold their homemade “snake bread” over it and enjoy the celebration of love, peace and family. It is a blessed day. Peace and community find a happy symbiosis here.
And although many Ugandan families – as I showed you over the past few weekends – cannot even afford the luxury of a bar of soap on Christmas Day, most of them consider this day to be sacred.
Dear friends, for 20 years, with your loyal support, we have been maintaining a wonderful little oasis for children and families in need, several schools in refugee camps and in remote locations. All this cannot change the world, and yet somehow it does. This is where the contradictions and the light of our lives lie, and indeed of the Christmas story.
I wish you a blessed Christmas, a wonderful holiday season and send you warm greetings – also from some of our youngest children – here in this video.
Yours sincerely, Burkhard Varnholt
