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PROFILE |
 Zambia, as many of sub-Saharan African nations, is faced with
a serious problem of orphaned or disadvantaged children,
several of whom are roaming the streets begging for help. It
is estimated that Zambia has between 900,000 to 1,000,000
children who are orphaned and disadvantaged due to difficult
economic problems compounded by the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the
region.
In the year 2000, Pastors George and Beatrice Mbulo, who had
moved to the USA in 1987, visited Zambia, the land of their
birth. Whilst away from their home country, they had heard and
read about the scourge of HIV/AIDS and its impact on the
Zambian families and society. During their visit to Zambia in
2000 they saw for themselves the debilitating and degrading
conditions in which most of the orphaned children were living.
 As they drove around some parts of the city of Lusaka, they
saw the great need among disadvantaged children, as evidenced
by the large numbers of kids begging for help on the streets
of the capital city. They interviewed some of the kids they
met on the street to find out what had brought about such
difficulties in their life. When they asked them were they
lived, one of them pointed up a tree, near to a shopping
centre, where they had made some makeshift hammocks on the
tree branches. Others showed them a large water drainage pipe
were they spent their nights.
The Mbulos could not easily walk away from such devastation
which they had witnessed in their home country, to get back to
their comfortable life in the
 USA where they were pastoring
and had made a home for themselves as permanent residents of
the USA. After much prayer and reflection, they decided to
respond to the Lord's call to come back to Zambia, after 14
years in the USA, to come and make a difference, not only in
the lives of these vulnerable and disadvantaged children, but
also to impact the continent of Africa through a vision that
had so strongly gripped their heart.
Upon returning to the USA, after their short visit to Zambia,
the Mbulos, with the help of few of their friends in the USA,
began to prepare how to rescue these children from the alleys,
back roads and garbage dumps. "Religion that God
 our
Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after
orphans and widows in their distress. (James 1:27).
Who are these kids that the Mbulos could not walk away from?
They are first of all, Gods creation made in his image and
likeness. They are also victims of the HIV/AIDS pandemic (they
themselves are afflicted, infected or orphaned by the
scourge).
Against this background the Mbulos, in July 2001, launched
LifeNet Children's Rescue Mission, which is a humanitarian arm
of Capital Christian Ministries International, a Christian
ministry founded by the Mbulos in 1999 in the USA and later
launched in Zambia in March 2000, and now expanding to other
parts of Africa.
In partnership with a UK-based charity, Friends of Zambian
Orphans (FOZO), a Home for Boys was opened in a farming
community of Makeni on the outskirts of Lusaka in July 2001.
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