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The Charis Project Family Crisis Holistic Intervention Model

The Village Savings and Loan Program

Quite often families facing emergencies are forced to borrow money from loan sharks at extremely high interest rates that can cripple a family with debt for years to come. Already, in the villages where the VSLA has been established, three families have been saved from needing to go to loan sharks to borrow money, at 20%/month.

Do You Want My Baby?

Imagine how you would feel, living in a tiny bamboo hut on stilts, above a mosquito infested swamp/sewer, in a crowded village strewn with refuse, where you live at the mercy of the landlord, who is also your boss, barely able to feed the children you already have, to find out you were expecting another.

Supporting Families Keeps Them Together

In another time or place, this mother could have been treated another way; she and her husband may have been pressured to give their child to a home where he might lay on a cot for hours, unattended. This is the worst side of the previous, institutional model of care for families in poverty. This is what The Charis Project seeks to prevent.

How Family is the School of Justice.

When men, women, and children live in families, they are experiencing justice and providing justice to others. This justice spreads, because as they gather in a community and the communities form the state, everyone has a stake in doing what is best for the least powerful among them and giving everyone his due, which is justice.

A Family Almost Destroyed by Sickness

Bringing Hope

This process of supporting families is messy, and hard. Not all stories end well. Often we meet someone in need too late. We can’t undo the damage done to a baby by malnutrition or violence. But we walk with the parents through their current reality and provide support for the present situation. And we keep looking to identify those most at risk, to find them soon enough, to prevent what can so easily be prevented.

The Part You Play

I have the huge honor and privilege of playing my little part in making this possible and it is really working.