Over the past six months Eagles Wings has been developing a foster care program that will enable children to move from an institutional based model of care (which is currently used throughout Zambia) to a family based model of care. That can be incorporated into any local church ministry and/or other non government organisations.
Sharon Daka, a Zambian national staff member of Eagles Wings has been heading up the research and development of this new model, with three Australians, Karyn, Kirsty-Lee and Sally forming the team. Currently Sally, from Brisbane is in Zambia working with Sharon on the final stages of the foster care model. Particularly looking at the training aspects for careers.
This is such a new area that from what the Zambian government are saying, no other non government organisation are using such a model. As such there has had to be a lot of work go into the preparation to make sure all aspects have been covered in the policies and procedures.
We are now getting very close to launching this program whereby over the next 6 months careers will be trained and children who currently have no existing family will be placed within these families. It’s exciting, but we would really value your prayers as we look at moving from development to implementation stages. If we can achieve good results in this area it will have a massive impact on children who have no existing family to care for them, or at present cannot be reunified for various reasons e.g. abuse and extreme neglect back into their existing family.
