15/03/2025
I’m holding an afternoon tea ( as I may have already mentioned once or twice 🤣) on Saturday March 29th at 1pm at Rhydymwyn Valley Nature Reserve. Any donations and profit made will be given to Elizabeth House in Uganda. There’ll be table cloths, tea pots, tea cups and saucers, (coffees also available) sandwiches, cakes and so on.
Free facials will be available plus a chance to see which colours of clothes compliment your beauty best. Should be great fun, hope you can come xx
Background to Elizabeth House
Elizabeth House
In Uganda children with disabilities are often rejected by society and their families.
At Elizabeth House they find love, care, encouragement and a sense of identity and purpose. As these young people discover themselvesand their potential, joy replaces misery and hope overcomes despair.
Elizabeth House opened as a day centre in 2000 by Valerie and David Crowhurst in response to witnessing the needs of disabled children and their mothers.
It became clear that their needs were greater, and the Lord showed Val that they should set up a residential centre.
In 2008 the first house was opened.
Children at Elizabeth House deal with autism, downs syndrome, cerebral palsy, malaria induced palsy, mental retardation, or other severe handicaps. Some walk, some talk and others do neither.
When they first come to Elizabeth House, many have not learned things like going to the bathroom, no one has helped them.
Many of them are left alone all day in the house on a couch or mat whilst their parents’ work. Sometimes the parents are unable to show them love as they think that they could be bewitched and want nothing to do with them.
Children come to Elizabeth House and are treated as valued individuals and learn life skills. They are fed with nutritious food and receive medical help. We seek to enable them to live life to their full potential.
We try to change attitudes by helping families to understand the values of these precious children and to accept they have much to offer; also, to change attitudes in society enabling them to accept and value disabled children and for them to find a place for them in the future.
Fear Grips your Heart
You are lying on a dirt floor. You can see nothing in the pitch blackness and the smells are rancid. Fear keeps you from calling out. There is a scuffle of feet, and you hear your mother`s strained but cheerful greetings as a stranger with an odd way of speaking enters your home. You must remain rigid and silent. This isn`t so hard since hunger has made you lethargic – you and your siblings have been abandoned by your father and the church. Your mother must have a demon to give your father a less than perfect daughter (two strokes against her)
Curiosity gets the better of your fear and you slowly move a corner of the dirty rag that covers your face and useless body. Your mother has stopped crying, well the tears are still running down her face, but she smiles through them. The strange lady has brought your mother a small bar of soap. This lady looks odd too. Her skin is very pale, and her eyes are not big and brown like your mother`s. They are blue like the sky. Her hair curls but loosely and it is light too.
The woman seems to be on her guard, wary but friendly, watching, listening for something.
Your slight movement has caught her attention. Fear grips your heart as she rises from her place and slowly approaches you.
Gentle hands reach down and lift you up into the light. Your mother moans, her shame and rejection spilling out through closed eyes and lips. You feel strong reassuring arms cradle your emaciated body and the warmth and security of this pale woman`s embrace fills your empty heart with hope.
Soon you discover that the woman is Val Crowhurst, and she speaks with an English accent. Her commission is to tell the Ugandans of the love of Jesus. She and her husband Dave live in Mukono where she will take you tolive in Elizabeth House. It is a residential centre for disabled children. You will be given food, and the opportunity to reach your full potential,a warm soft bed in a clean environment and all the TLC God’s people can lavish on you. There will be many surprised faces as you are brought out into the light and loved. Slowly the disgust will be overcome as the good news of Jesus Christ is taught in the villages. It doesn’t seem to matter that you are a Muslim. Val and her friend Elizabeth seem to love everybody.
Composed by Olive Peters
