Samuel's House offers hope room to grow

PRINCETON — Jennifer Hall has two of her own children, but she prays every day for 32 more that she’s working to offer a refuge, hope and a future.

The young mother, wife and volunteer director of girls’ ministries for the local district of the Assemblies of God met the children she grew to love in October, when she visited Samuel’s House in Lemon, Venezuela.

Samuel’s House, which translates to La Casa de Samuel in Spanish, is a faith-based orphanage designed to offer some of Venezuela’s orphaned or abandoned children a safe place to live, learn and believe in Jesus’ love. Hall and the girls’ ministry she serves have chosen Samuel’s House as their 2013 Coins for Kids project. The local district has set a $10,000 goal to help Samuel’s House build a school to serve the children and house parents who make their home amid the lush mountains not far from Caracas.

“It was really important to us to visit Samuel’s House to get a hands-on experience to help us raise funds here, in the United States,” Hall explained. “It was such a sweet experience. The kids were so looking forward to us coming there, that they ran to meet us as if we were their own parents. They met us with hugs and kisses, and they were so easy to love.”

Samuel’s House sits on a 150-acre farm run by evangelical missionaries and house parents to serve as many of the country’s orphaned children as possible. Although the children might one day be adopted by Venezuelan families, President Hugo Chavez’s administration prohibits them from leaving the nation where they were born. Therefore, many of the children will grow to adulthood in an orphanage or facility.

Although there were 32 children living at Samuel’s House when Hall and the team with which she traveled arrived, the farm could house as many as 80.

Her job, during the trip, was to paint, but Hall said there are many more pressing needs.

“They’ve had a really hard time getting house parents to commit to working at the orphanage, which is not a challenge organizers expected,” Hall explained.

The house parents earn a wage and housing, in exchange for loving the children who, too often, have never felt compassion.

“They don’t want people who are just looking for a place to live. They people at Samuel’s House need people who will genuinely love these kids, to help educate them and to help them work through whatever problems they may have,” Hall said.

While Samuel’s House currently has homes for the children and a multifunctional building where the students eat and take part in group activities, she said the orphanage is in desperate need of a school and a retreat building to make it more self-sustaining and all-inclusive for the children.

“Because of the situations that have put them into an orphanage in the first place, many of the children have fallen behind in their classes. They need extra help so that they can catch up and build a future for themselves, but the Venezuelan school system is really not equipped to offer that help,” she said.

With enough funds to build a school, Samuel’s House hopes to attract teachers who will dedicate their careers to serving the orphans who live there.

Hall is quick to emphasize that the children are capable of learning; the paths their lives have taken have simply kept them from getting the resources they needed.

“The children are very smart at the orphanage. They’re intelligent. They just need some help,” she said.

Chavez, who has ruled Venezuela since 1999, has established a socialist form of government that provides some services free, but it also stifles business and ensures that poverty rates remain high. Drug dealing and other high crimes soar, and as a result, many children lose their parents early or are born to families that cannot financially support them.

Hall and her group of missionaries experienced the harsh realities of life in Venezuela firsthand.

“We were actually held at gunpoint at one point in the trip,” she said.

A group of mission workers had ventured away from Samuel’s House to do some shopping, and darkness fell. They were attempting to return to the orphanage in a SUV, with the bags carrying their purchases at their feet.

A group of approximately six men, armed with guns, stopped their vehicle and demanded to search the bags and the SUV for an unknown person. Once the assailants were satisfied the person had not sought refuge with the missionaries, the visitors were released, but the experience made the challenges the children at Samuel’s House will face more real.

“People just disappear there, and nobody really ever knows what happened to them,” she said.

The children at Samuel’s House range from 6 to 18, and the evangelical missionaries who started the organization hope to provide a college education and endless possibilities for the children they love.

The kids fortunate enough to find a safe haven at Samuel’s House know they are lucky in many ways.

“They feel very well taken care of,” Hall said.

She grew close to some of the children at Samuel’s House. Referring to a list one of the girls gave her, to check spelling of names, Hall smiled as she mentioned young ladies named Ana Karina, Bianglis, Naekellis, Orlando and Maria Jose.

“Ana Karina, she was absolutely beautiful. She knows a pretty good amount of English, and she would really love to come study in the United States,” Hall said.

Whether Ana Karina can realize that dream remains to be seen, but Hall and the founders of Samuel’s House are committed to doing everything possible to provide for the children with no biological families left.

“They really want to give the kids a quality life,” Hall said. “They don’t want to see them just survive. They want to see them succeed.”

While Hall’s district goal is to raise $10,000 throughout the coming year to help Samuel’s House build its school and retreat center, which can create a revenue stream for the facility, the Assemblies of God nationwide hope to bring in $250,000.

Then, they’ll need teachers willing to make the commitment to serve the students at Samuel’s House.

“We would definitely be looking for people that would want to go down there to teach. Being bilingual would help,” she said.

And, Samuel’s House accepts sponsors, allowing people who wish to contributed to sponsor an individual child and play a crucial role in offering hope.

“Going there, meeting the children and getting to know the missionaries who have established this program was such a blessing and a beautiful thing. I hope that our younger generation will step up and keep the commitment that these missionaries have made going,” Hall said. “Any able-bodied person can go and serve in a situation like this. All I did was paint. Loving the kids was very, very easy.”

In addition to her job as a painter, Hall and her group also conducted a nightly Kids Crusade program, similar to Vacation Bible School.

“If anyone, ever, would like to learn more about Samuel’s House or visit, I’d be happy to help them find out how,” she said.

For information on Samuel’s House, call Jennifer or Aaron Hall at 304-787-3916.

— Contact Tammie Toler at ttoler@ptonline.net.

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