Rev. and Mrs. Maurice Munthali are founders of HopeHome #1--a ministry household of 15 children (3 of their own and the rest taken in after the death of Maurice’s three brothers and their wives from AIDS). Initial funding was provided by Hopegivers, but after two years, funding for HopeHome #1 was depleted. We heard from Mrs. Munthali of how Josie had given her some money to buy some chickens to raise for meat. How the business grew to 50 chickens at a time. After 6 weeks of feeding, she sells them for twice the amount she paid. Minus the price of seed, she still almost doubles her money, enough to put her three remaining children through secondary school. What an inspirational story of how a household can become self-supporting, at least enough to sustain the high cost of secondary school education.
South Central, Los Angeles, was the neighborhood in the city where Communities of Shalom began in 1992. I met Marx Gutierrez from El Salvador who was there attending High School at the time. He remembers what happened at the corner of Florence and Normandy Streets in South Central, LA, when Reginald Denny was pulled out of his truck and beaten while the crowd looked on and the police did nothing; and how the Rodney King beating resulted in a not-guilty verdict for the police and resulted in a major, 3-day uprising in the neighborhood, until the National Guard came in and finally imposed law and order. He can still remember the fires, the bright orange night sky, the mass looting, 45 unsolved killings, the social chaos...And how the United Methodist Churches responded by creating a zone of shalom in 7 neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Today, Marx is a community organizer, and married to Jennifer Gutierrez, Conference Shalom Coordinator in the Calif-Pacific Annual Conference, and Rev. Vilma