A home is more than somewhere to sleep. It is a place to cook, eat, relax, and feel secure. Many mud-brick huts in Burundi lack security. With little more than a curtain across the doorway, thieves can easily get inside, or when bad weather strikes, people have to pray it won’t lead to their walls or roof collapsing. 

It can be said that a secure home is a foundation for whole-life transformation. That is the case for Estella, 48 years old. When her husband died nine years ago from an illness, she faced the challenge of raising her nine children as a single mother. She struggled to feed them, take them to school and put a roof on their heads.  

Igniting Communities for Jesus work in Estella’s community. Their focus if holistic transformation – that means supporting every aspect of a person’s needs – physically, mentally and spiritually. Instead of working in lots of communities, they focus their efforts on just three impoverished villages – focusing on building long-term, trusting relationships. They aim to work alongside the people to bring sustainable change. Over time they see beautiful transformation, as people see life expectancy increase, solid housing built, and crop yields grow.

The ICJ team could see Estella’s situation was bleak, but they admired her determination and resilience. Providing Estella with a plot of land, they constructed a stable house, with a door that could be locked. They also gave her a goat, and access to communal lands to grow corn and beans to provide for her big family. 

Estella seized the opportunity with both hands – the goat gave birth to kids, and the land yielded crops. Furthermore, she joined a local savings group, and made use of their small loans to increase her capital for business projects.

She is now able to keep her family together under one roof, feed them well and send them to school. Her story is a beautiful vignette of how targeted assistance and community support can transform lives.