Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: All right, you're good. Thank you.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Hello, everyone.
Thank you so much for being here today. We are so excited to welcome Liz Heinzel Nelson this morning.
The founder and direct executive director of Villages and Partnership, which works with villages in Malawi, Africa.
Liz and her family spent a year living and serving in Malawi. And then returning in 2009, she founded VIP.
And since she has dedicated her life to inviting others to walk alongside the poor and most vulnerable, she leads teams to Malawi several times a year, which I know some folks in Nassau have gotten to go on these friendship trips and some on the medical trips and is passionate about connecting people and resources from the developed world with villagers in Malawi to lift both out of their respective poverties.
So, Liz, welcome. We're so glad you're here.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: And I'm going to pray for us. Before we begin, let's pray God, who sent Jesus as the ultimate act of solidarity, to live as one of us in this broken world.
Help us explore how we can be in solidarity with those who are marginalized in our day.
May we weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice.
Amen.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: Amen.
Thank you, Len.
I want to just thank Emma and Len for showing hospitality to me this morning.
They were here early to help me get set up and plugged in. So thank you, Len and Emma.
My name is Liz Heinzel Nelson. I happen to be the sister of Loretta Wells. I don't know how many of you know Loretta. She's my sister.
And we grew up right outside of Princeton at Our lady of Princeton Convent.
That is the Boys Academy now, or maybe it was recently sold. My father was the caretaker of the grounds there.
And so we both grew up Catholic and we both married Presbyterians.
So my husband is the pastor at Allentown Presbyterian Church in Allentown, New Jersey, not Pennsylvania.
So I'm happy to be here with you.
We have had a partnership with Nassau for many years now, since 19.
Not 19, 20, 13.
And we've had many of your members come over with us.
Stephanie Patterson, Kim Cleeson, Carla Tuan, Loretta and Bob Wells, Karen Brown, Joyce McKeegan Walker and Sarah Ringer.
So we've had this wonderful partnership. Oh, and of course, Dr. Barbara Edwards. And she's been over multiple times with our medical team.
So we've just really appreciated the partnership. Is there a way to. Because I'm going to be on the screen so much. Is there a way to bring down the lights?
So, as Len mentioned, probably it started in 2006. My husband and I were Feeling a call to do mission work.
And we felt like we had been at the church for 10 years at Allentown, and we approached them and asked them to take a year's leave, unpaid leave.
And as we started exploring where we were feeling called to go, doors opened, doors closed, doors opened, opened, opened. And we ended up in Malawi, Africa.
So this is the day we left.
We have four children. Two were in university and two came with us. And as you can see, not everybody was excited.
Tara was 12, going on 13, and Jordan was 9.
But it changed all of our lives dramatically.
Tara currently works with people who are coming out of incarceration and helps them get settled into a new life, trying to prevent recitativism. And Jordan, a number of years ago, you supported her with her yav year in Scotland.
And then she felt while she was over in Scotland and watching the deterioration of the church in Scotland, she felt really convicted.
And she is now at the Duke University School of Divinity, and she wants to become a pastor.
So she loves talking theology and what she's learning.
And she recently opened my eyes to a new word in this passage from Luke.
This is the story of where Luke goes into the village of Nain, and as he's going through the streets, there's a funeral procession coming forward.
Soon afterward, Jesus went to a town called Nain and his disciples, and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out.
He was his mother's only son, and she was a widow.
And with her was a large crowd from the town.
When the Lord saw her, he was moved with compassion for her and said, do not cry. Then he came forward and he touched the man, and he raises the man. He resurrects the man.
The word that Jordan called me and told me about was this word that we translate into the English as compassion. But in the Greek, the word is splenknon.
And splenknon is a much more visceral word.
It means that Jesus innards. His guts were turned. He was having such a visceral reaction to this woman's suffering.
And I found myself wondering, like, how often do we have that visceral reaction when we hear of others sufferings?
Have we become dull to what we hear going on in other places?
So Jordan told me that when she heard this reading in her class and was understanding that word splanknon, she felt like weeping. And she remembered this little boy whom we had recently visited this past summer.
His name is Heswick.
Heswick is an Orphan. And he was being raised by his grandmother and they were identified by their community as a very vulnerable family. And they received a goat from vip.
But when we were there visiting, we realized that Heswick did not speak.
And his grandma told us that about a year ago he had been crawling under a table and a kerosene lamp spilled on him and caught him on fire.
And he stopped speaking after that.
So after that we would regularly visit him.
From the burn that he received on his leg, the scar tissue started to contract his leg where he couldn't walk properly or run. And so there's a hospital in Blantyre that does orthopedic surgery on children for free. And so we brought him there and they worked on his leg so that he can use it properly now.
And so there it shows the scar tissue on his leg.
But a couple years ago his grandmother died and so now he lives alone. And this summer we went to visit him and he's not doing well.
He has this terrible infection on his eye.
He's HIV positive since birth.
And when he doesn't, when he can't get meds, or when he can't stay on his meds, he has these infections break out.
And, you know, children like this, they're part of the population we serve in Malawi. But Jordan told me that when she was reading that scripture and thinking about Heswick, she experienced that splanknon where her guts were just wrenched in compassion for him.
So while they were there, they treated him. We sent him to the hospital to get on medications and we gave him a sweatshirt.
But people like that are really suffering.
So I just want to show everybody where Malawi is because many of you may not know. We didn't know before we went to Malawi, we had never heard of the country. It's a very small country in sub Saharan Africa.
It's a landlocked country that is ranked among the five poorest countries in the world.
It has no natural resources where outsiders have come in and developed the country.
It's a democracy.
It is very peaceful.
It prides itself on its peaceful transitions from being a British protectorate to a republic to a dictatorship to a multiparty system.
So Villages in Partnership currently works in 29 villages in rural Malawi. And we are hoping within the next three years to expand our borders into 15 more villages.
So. Oh, darn it.
Emma, can you help me for a second? I forgot to check the sound.
See, does hdmi, I think, or should it?
Okay.
[00:12:34] Speaker B: Great.
[00:12:38] Speaker A: So this is a video, like a two minute video that shows you the kind of poverty that we are experiencing in Malawi. It's a kind of poverty that we do not have here in the United States.
Did the tower.
You know, Satir, this kind of poverty is a kind of poverty where if you don't harvest enough, your children starve, you can't afford to send your children to school.
That's considered a luxury because you need your children in the fields working or working for someone else to earn money so that you can go and buy food.
The level of poverty is something that we do not know here in the United States.
And so this is our mission statement.
We believe, and we have experience that when we offer the people the right resources, they can lift themselves out of extreme poverty.
And that's what we aim to do, is to provide people resources that they lift themselves out of extreme poverty. Not that we're lifting them out of extreme poverty. That's not sustainable.
They're lifting themselves out of extreme poverty. And so the way that we are doing this is we've been very influenced by a book. I don't know if any of you have read this. It's called Factfulness by Hans Rosling.
Hans Rosling suggests that in probably the 50s, we saw the world in binary terms as the developed and the undeveloped world. But he said, in the last hundred years, things have really changed. And now it's much more helpful to look at the world in four levels of income. Level one being extreme poverty, where we're working where Malawi is, and level four being where the United States is.
So in level one, people draw from contaminated water sources. They walk everywhere, they sleep on the ground, they eat the same porridge every day.
What our mission is seeking to do is to bring the people with whom we work to level two.
So level two is where they're still drawing water, but it's from a protected source.
Their mode of transportation has increased to a bicycle. Their diet has changed somewhat. Maybe they can afford to buy a mattress. Their roof has gone from a grass thatched roof to iron sheets.
So the way that we do this is through our staff.
So in the United states, there are six of us, three full time, three part time. And in Malawi, we have 22 staff members.
And what we do is our staff in Malawi goes out and works with the communities to identify what are the things, what are the resources that they need to enable themselves to lift out of extreme poverty.
What resources do you think that they might be?
Water?
Yes.
Education?
Yes. Food security.
What else was said?
Health care infrastructure.
Infrastructure and economic empowerment.
Liz Beasley does a lot of volunteer work with villages in partnerships. So she knows everything about us.
So I wanted to tell you one of the ways where Nassau has recently had a huge impact on the communities where we work. In 2024, Sub Saharan Africa experienced one of its most severe heat waves and drought.
For over 10 days. They experienced temperatures that were running 105 to 113 degrees and no rain. And this was during the rainy season.
And so that caused a lot of crops to fail and people didn't harvest anything.
And so your church, through your emergency funds, you provided three groups, three villages with solar irrigation systems. Now, we can't provide every village with this because this demands that they have a water source, a river or a pond or a lake or something near them.
And so here they are trying it out, but it has made a huge difference for them.
And so I'm going to show this video of this woman, Beatrice, who was one of the groups who received the, that irrigation system.
One of the things that we've found recently is that families with whom we're working who receive three or more of our interventions, access to water, an irrigation system, livestock, when they receive three or more, we see them really moving towards level two.
So this is one of these women who just embraces everything that VIP has to offer. Our trainings, our teachings, becoming involved in the irrigation club. And she talks about how her life has changed.
[00:21:06] Speaker C: Level one, in definition is a mud hut, a thatch roof, a mud floor, no indoor plumbing, retrieving water from a river or a creek. And the worst part of level one is when we have a, a drought, people starve, people die.
[00:22:16] Speaker D: Above.
So there's your.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: Business.
[00:22:56] Speaker C: In level two. I have enough resource in order to provide for myself in a drought and that my life becomes sustainable. And VIP's mission is to move the villages that they serve from level one to level.
[00:23:53] Speaker A: So thank you, NASA. That was huge for those families. In each of you provided for three groups in, in each of those groups, there are 20 families who use the irrigation, the solar irrigation systems.
We're working to not lift people up to middle income. We just want to make sure that families have enough, enough to feed their families enough that they can send their children to school, enough that they can access health care.
So we thank you so much for your partnership.
I want to encourage you. We have about 20 minutes. I want to encourage you that as I'm moving along, that you just ask questions along the way.
I'm much better at a dialogue than lecture. And so just feel free to, or to comment or share anything that you know about vip.
So the six resources that we work with on communities, they identify what they want to work on with vip, they prioritize, they come together as a village, they prioritize their challenges, they talk about what resources they have, what they can do and then what they can't do and how VIP can partner with them. So almost always the number one request is access to clean water.
You have participated in the water walk and some of the families, some of your families have provided wells to communities in Malawi. This shows the number of our households and how many minutes it takes to walk for water.
So over the years we have done so much in water that 85% of our households walk less than 10 minutes for water, compared to the national average where 37% are walking over an hour, 30 minutes to an hour for water. Can you imagine what that does especially for women and girls to have that time now in their day where they can go to school, they can start a small business.
It's life changing.
So when we're there drilling, you can imagine the joy that comes with a well.
It's so beautiful to be there.
Another thing that we do connected with water is sanitation.
So you see here we teach them that there's a bottle there that's for hand washing. So we teach them that after you use the pit latrine, you come out and you wash your hands. This is not a pit latrine. A pit latrine is ground level and you dig a hole into the ground. This is called a skylue toilet. It's one of our newer interventions that we're introducing. It has two sides that are divided and the family agrees that they're only going to use the, the one side for a season until it gets full and then they allow it to decompose and they use it for fertilizer and then they use the other side while one side is decomposing.
So it's really just not that much resources and it really provides a lot for the family.
So in food security, to address access to clean water, has a very direct solution. We go in and we drill wells.
But food security, because it's so related, it's weather dependent and so it's much more challenging.
So besides those small scale irrigation systems, we also have put in some large scale irrigations where several villages are all participating in it.
And we have taught them business skills and to grow cash crops. So here they're harvesting, they grew a cash crop of onions. They call a vendor to come in and buy the onions. You can see Everybody, everybody is expected to help.
And that's part of something we've lost that is so beautiful about being in Malawi.
So I just wanted to show you some of the things. When they sold their cash crops and they were making pretty decent produce profit for them, I was saying to our staff, we should take them now to a bank and have them open up bank accounts. And they said, no, my, the banks are too far and they don't trust institutions.
And so what they do is they take their money and they make asset investments.
She bought a goat, she bought a bicycle for her son to use as a bike tank, taxi.
He bought a fishing boat so that now he can, instead of renting, he has his own boat. And he bought a pump because he also lives near a river and wanted to pump water out to irrigate. He became so convinced of irrigation.
So this shows you how the families are thinking about how they can be sustainable, how, how they can continue to earn money themselves.
We also have a training farm where we are teaching families about the best technologies to use in agriculture.
So one of our partners is Michael Graves, Architect Associates. So they worked with us to design the campus of the farm and drew the architectural designs for it. And so we have just started putting up the farm.
That's the warehouse.
And we built the warehouse. This shows it's 55 acres.
That is under part of the acres we want to expand the solar irrigation. Part of it is under solar irrigation. And we also just brought in electricity.
One of the things that this farm is doing is experiments and they bring the farmers in to teach them about the experiments. So, for instance, China put out a very inexpensive fertilizer on the market in Malawi, which. Well, our farm manager took that fertilizer and did a crop using that fertilizer versus the traditional fertilizers versus conservation agriculture to show the farmers what's working the best. The fertilizer that was so inexpensive from China was not working at all. And so the risk is now on our farm and not on the farmers because if they take that risk and it fails, their family suffers. And so it's great because we can invite the farmers in to learn about these different things.
We're building schools. This one area where some of the brightest kids were passing the national exams. They had no place to go for high school. And so they asked us if we would work with them to build a high school.
I just have to show you this little clip when we were bringing electricity into that school.
It shows how labor intensive everything is to do in Malawi of Course, I've speeded it up here so that you can see, but it just gives you insight into how long things take and how they do things there.
I'm not sure Osha would approve of this, but that's how things get done in Malawi.
This is a little video that I took.
I happened to be there for their first graduation.
Very different from a high school graduation here in the United States.
Here are the graduates proceeding in.
They each made their paths.
So it's just really beautiful to be a part of things like that. And you know, a high school degree means so much to them. They do not take that for granted.
So we also provide students from the villages who make it, who are able to compete and make it into the university with scholarships.
So when you meet these scholars kids, they speak beautiful English, they're dressed hip, you know, wearing the jeans low and.
And you think that they're from like a middle income family. And then you go to their house and you see what humble beginnings they come from. And you're realizing these kids are the cream of the crop because they're competing with kids in their own country who have electricity every day, who have running water in their house, who are on laptops since they're five years old. And these kids have none of that.
And yet they make it into university.
So here's one of our graduates, he's now back at our high school teaching.
And so we also have value. Sustainability is one of our core values. Another one is reciprocity and paying it forward.
So he came back and is teaching now at our school.
Economic development.
Women mostly all come together.
They put in shares from their own money and then they make loans to each other and they charge interest and then at a certain time all the loans are due back. But it enables women to start up small businesses. So this woman is a part of one of those village savings and loans. She was living in a house like this. She started up a small business of selling popcorn and over time she was able to rebuild her house with her husband.
Then she opened up another small business and they were able to buy a motorcycle. Now we might think, wow, that's luxury. But for them a motorcycle is their transportation to get to the market, to get to health services, to get places.
We also do a lot of beekeeping with our farmers. We have had the New Jersey State apiarists go over with a group of beekeepers and work with our farmers year after year on beekeeping and honey production. And so they have now formed a cooperative where they bottle label, market their Honey out to different areas.
In health, we do preventative work as well.
Sorry, clinical work as well as preventative work. Here we're offering a training to women. This was during COVID As you can see, some of them are wearing masks. And we were offering a training on malaria and also family planning.
And then a couple years ago now we just opened up health center, Conda health center in a very remote area. So this shows you just how remote it is.
There's a big lake back there. So this is a high mosquito infested area. Malaria is very high.
And so it was one of the things that this community requested villages in partnership to work with them on.
It's so remote, there is no electricity there. We do everything via solar.
But that's the campus. And then over here you can't see them all. But we also had to build houses for the staff and we're continuing to build houses.
So those are some of the resources. Just a glimpse into some of the many, many resources that we've been developing.
These are our dreams and villages for the next couple of years. As I mentioned, we want to expand into 15 villages. And these are some of the things. And it gives you an idea of what things cost and how affordable things are. You know, a scholarship for a year for a kid is a thousand bucks to go to college.
Yes.
[00:38:28] Speaker B: How has the.
[00:38:30] Speaker A: Hi, Mr. Hi.
[00:38:32] Speaker E: How has the decline in USAID activity affected Malawi?
[00:38:37] Speaker A: It's had a very hard hit on it.
A lot of it increased the unemployment rate, but even more so access to medications.
So USAID was providing HIV medications and they've tried, turned around now and they've come back and they're providing that, but they're not providing the medications that prevent HIV from being passed on to the fetus.
And so that's what happened to Haswick.
And so malaria medications, they're not readily available anymore like they were now. Other countries have started to pick up support where USAID dropped off. But it's had a really dramatic effect. Mainly like what other country has come in?
I think the Netherlands have.
Yeah. Supported.
Gotten more involved. Yeah.
Any other questions or comments? Yeah, has been able to talk after the treatment.
The young man. The young man who could not talk. Oh, yes. Whether he's now able to talk. Yes. It took him several years, but now he. He can speak. Yes.
Yeah. Thanks for thinking about him.
Yes.
I'm just curious, of all the places in Africa, how was that?
Oh, did they need the mic?
[00:40:16] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:40:17] Speaker A: Okay.
Okay.
I'm curious. There must be a story behind how of all the places in Africa, you found Malawi as the source of your mission?
Yeah, it was the Holy Spirit.
That's what I meant about when doors opened and doors closed. When we were first beginning to look, we heard my husband brought home a DVD where Bono was interviewing some church leaders and he was really challenging them that the church. Bono was from U2 and he. He was really challenging the church that you have neglected Africa, that Africa is one of the poorest places in the world.
And so when we saw that, we felt really convicted to go to Africa.
And then we were offered a paid position in the Kabiri slums.
But we met some Kenyans who said, if you have children, it is far too dangerous to go to Nairobi with children. Do not go. And so that closed that door. And at the same time, people said, we just heard of a pastor from Pittsburgh who came back from Malawi and he and his family served there and it changed their lives. And so we got in touch with them. They helped us make connections and doors opened. So Stephen, my husband, taught at the Zomba Theological College because the Presbyterian Church is exploding in Malawi and they can't keep up with the demand for pastors.
And so while he was doing that, I was going around and looking at what's going on in the country and how can we form a lasting partnership.
Yeah, Pat, do you have a question?
[00:42:14] Speaker D: Yeah, just a technical question. On the water, when you said that system with water, I wonder how that controls for cholera to use.
[00:42:28] Speaker A: We have all our water.
[00:42:30] Speaker D: Yeah. Okay, so there's like E. Coli or. Well, I'm just think that, I mean, what little I know of cholera outbreaks, I mean, the knowledge of what was the source was water, contaminated water. So I wondered about that. And then the other thing was, what other groups do you work with? There are other groups that are charity based, that are Christian and that are non Christian. And do you use them for information to help get to level two and level three and beyond?
[00:43:10] Speaker A: Yeah, so I'll answer that question and then we'll go back to the water question. If you can just remind me.
So, yes, we have partnerships with, with other NGOs in Malawi. So we just had.
There's an NGO called Biketown Africa that distributes bikes.
So we invited them into our area. They visited One Heart Secondary School and they visited Conda Health Center. They were so taken by the staff, their commitment at these different facilities and the beauty of the facilities that they distributed bikes to all the staff there and to the students at One Heart.
Another one is Engineers Without Borders.
So Engineers without Borders comes in and works with us on water and on building bridges.
And so those are just a couple of them, but we have a number of them. But Engineers Without Borders has gone around and tested all our water sources. So when we drill a well, we test the quality of the water right away. But then over time, you know, and use. So they came in and also tested our water quality.
So there are outbreaks of cholera.
You know, the government gets it out right away and where is the outbreak happening?
And so, like one time I was over there when there was an outbreak and they were like, usually I'll buy food on the roadside, but they were saying, you know, am I don't buy any food because the flies have been on them.
And so anyway, it's.
It's ongoing. Yes. Yes. Yeah, definitely.
[00:45:10] Speaker B: We have time for just two more quick questions. Because I saw two questions.
[00:45:15] Speaker E: If we have quick questions, I have one very quick.
Thank you for providing them resources and educating them. I want to know, how do you help them to integrate Christian faith into their lives?
Because I was born in the similar environment. Environment when I was in China. So there's no running water, no electricity, no, you know, paved way, all those things. I think I probably kn even more poor, probably even poorer than other conditions. So, you know, for me, walk out, come to United States, become faithful. It's extraordinary experience for me. But, you know, I know how difficult it is. I just want to know, how do you help them to integrate the Christian faith into their lives?
[00:46:00] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you.
So one of the things that is really amazing about Malawi is that it's 80% Christian.
So the same Scots who brought Christianity to the United States when we were. When they were being persecuted, the Scots also brought Christianity to Malawi.
And so what we experience.
So we have staff who offer Bible studies in the communities and marriage encounters, and we hand out Bibles in Chichewa.
But one of the other beauties that we never intended, one of the biggest mission areas in the world right now is the United States.
Right.
And so when we bring people from the United States over to Malawi and they experience the faith of the people in Malawi and how in their circumstances, how faithful they are and the joy that they have and the community that they have, their faith becomes so impacted and they return back to the United States with a newfound faith.
So it's very different than from China.
Yeah, I just met a Chinese couple yesterday too, who said the same thing to me, that they were raised in that kind of poverty.
Yeah. Praise God that you're here.
Yeah.
[00:47:48] Speaker E: Is the Malawi government itself functional enough to be a significant help in this whole process?
[00:47:54] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, they are our main partner.
So we don't do anything without them. We let them know every place we drill a borehole. We let them, before we break ground on a stage school, we talk to them about does it make sense to build a secondary school in this area or the health clinic? Because then we have them sign and we sign a memorandum of understanding that they are going to, after this is built, they are going to come in and operate it, provide the curriculum at the school, the staff, the faculty, so that it becomes a school run by them.
And that way we're sustainable. The clinic is run by their nurses, their doctors, their lab physicians, and that way it's sustainable.
So, yeah, they're one of our major partners.
[00:48:55] Speaker B: Thank you so much, Liz. And I know you have many more stories that you'd be willing to share and there's more information in the back of the room. So during fellowship time, please continue these conversations with Liz and get involved in other ways at. Liz Beasley is an advocate for villages and partnership here within the congregation. So she's a great person to talk to as well. Whether it's this week or another week.
[00:49:21] Speaker A: Yeah. I. I just want to say thank you to Nessa for your continued partnership.
The funds that you send over, the people that you send over. We have friendship trips going this year and if any of you are feeling a nudge to come over, we would love to have you come with us.
So thank you. Yeah.
[00:49:46] Speaker B: Quick question.
[00:49:47] Speaker A: On the friendship trips, all things being equal, would you rather that folks went.
[00:49:52] Speaker D: In person or use the resources they.
[00:49:54] Speaker A: Would spend on the trip to support projects?
That is a great question.
I think we can do both. And I would rather have you come because you will feel convicted then that you will want to come home and support so. And you will become a witness.
It's 1500 ground fees, so once you hit the ground, everything is covered. Flights, depending on what time of year you go, can range from 1800 to 2200.
[00:50:30] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks, Liz. And next week we will have youth join us for stories from the Camino this summer. So please come back for that next week. And I also want to say thank you for sharing our soundscape today with Joyful Noise who is next door for the next few weeks while the new members class is in the chapel.
[00:50:57] Speaker A: So, yeah, thank you.
Put this in the back table.
