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A Place to Call Home
Each year the girls who live in Elwyn Parekh Home in Anand seem to say about their month-long vacation: “I do not want to go home for the holiday. I want to stay behind with Uncle and Aunty.” These 16 girls, ranging in age from 6 to 16 years, have been brought to the home primarily because of the extreme poverty conditions of their families.
In almost all the cases, the parents are daily wage workers who seek to work in farms and eke out a meager existence. For them it is a task to manage to put food on the table. Beyond this they cannot afford to even think about anything else. So in a culture and society that already has a negative bias to female children, there is no hope for the girls in such families to expect anything in life. It is this need that caused Samson and Rina Parekh to begin the Jeevan Anand Trust, which seeks to provide a home and future for girls who otherwise had none.
Samson and Rina tragically lost their firstborn son at the age of three, which served as their catalyst for creating the ‘Elwyn Parekh Home,’ aptly named in the memory of their son. Samson was an active leader of the Methodist Church in the state of Gujarat, and besides pastoring a local Methodist church in Anand, he also was the principal of a nearby Bible college that was run by the Methodist Church. Given his active role in the church, Samson encountered opposition from the Methodist church leadership when he and Rina began the Elwyn Parekh Home and an independent ministry in Jeevan Anand. Given this scenario, they prayed and sought to wait on the Lord to lead them to the right people to whom they could pass on the vision of the home and to carry forward their ministry goals.
Mainesh and Snehlata Parmar, who worked actively on the mission field with India Every Home Crusade, were the ones the Lord brought to the Parekh. After much prayer they took on the task in 2002, and for the past five years Mainesh tirelessly has operated the home by raising support.
Today the couple looks back and recognizes how the Lord has been faithful to them this far, helping them to provide the children with much needed care and education. While talking of the ministry, they share plans and dreams they have for the girls, but at the same time they regret that much of it remains a dream. There is only so much they can do to mobilize local support.
At this time God has led Orphan Outreach to join their efforts. Specifically Orphan Outreach seeks to help this couple move from running a home to increasing not only the number of girls who can be ministered to, but also to expanding the scope of the ministry and fulfilling some of the dreams they have nurtured. As a couple they are eager to implement these goals and the vision of Orphan Outreach.
As the girls returned from vacations this year, they discovered their home had been both renovated and expanded, and the excitement and joy broke across their faces. They now have beds and lockers of their own and more rooms—a sharp contrast to the one large room they used for studying, eating, and sleeping. For Mainesh and Snehlata Parmar as well as Orphan Outreach, this has been a fulfilling start to its partnership.
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