How we started?
"For me it started over two decades ago when my father took me to West Africa. We spent time travelling the country and visiting the Mbwengi Blind and Handicap centre in the Cameroon. There are images from this Centre that will never leave me. As a young impressionable teenager, this African experience had a profound and lasting effect that has influenced nearly every major decision in my life since. Over the past decade, work assignments have allowed me to share the lives and experiences of people from over 40 countries around the world. These experiences have led to a deep desire to do something about the needless suffering experienced by so many families in developing countries and share the good news of the Kingdom..."
For my wife Deb, that same desire was kindled after working in Guyana at the Ruimveldt Children’s Aid Centre for underprivileged children and doing mission work in various countries. After we were married, we spent a year in India with the CBM. Our time and work in India was such a positive experience for us. The kids were so radiant, so bright, so thirsty for knowledge. The families were warm and hospitable. We were continually moved by their generosity; despite being so poor, whatever little they did have they cheerfully shared with us.
Then there was Kenya. I was working on a polio eradication and measles elimination campaign with the World Health Organization and Deb and my father were over on mission work. When in Kenya, we had a lot to do with one family and enjoyed frequent correspondence with them after we left. They had one son and an adopted daughter and were expecting another child at around the same time as we were having our first. There were complications in the delivery and they later lost their son at 9 months of age. Two years later, they were again expecting, and so were we. Their precious little daughter Ruth passed away of pneumonia; she was just 6 weeks old. As new parents ourselves, we felt with them deeply and mourned their loss. It is impossible to truly understand the depth of pain this family was experiencing. Yet despite their own abject poverty, they decided to take into their care two more orphaned children. They struggled from day to day with their own chronic health conditions, unemployment and poverty, yet they found it within themselves to care for others even more needy than themselves.
When the mother of these newly adopted children became extremely sick, we decided it was time to respond and provide the help that was so desperately needed; yet never asked for. We provided medical help and sought sponsors for the children. That was the start of Agape in Action. Since that time we have come across many other inspirational examples of mothers and fathers caring for several, and sometimes dozens of children at great sacrifice to themselves. We have been overwhelmed with the enthusiastic response to support the work of Agape in Action. There has been, and continues to be, an enormous willingness to help; and we pray that Agape in Action may provide one avenue to channel this desire to help those in need.
James Flint