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The Challenge

The Yao, a tribe of 3 million living in southeastern Africa, live in the valley of death's constant shadow. This may sound dramatic, but it's no exaggeration.  Consider what they face every day:

Health

  • 1 in 8 children die before age 6

  • Only 8% of the population is over age 50

  • Almost half of children under 5 (1.3 million) have their growth stunted due to malnutrition

  • More than 10% of the population of Malawi are orphaned children (one or both parents have died) — that’s more than 1.7 million orphans! Approximately 1 child in 5 is an orphan – that’s hundreds of new orphans a day (about 40% are due to AIDS)

  • 1 in 9 people between 15 and 50 are HIV positive

 

Education

  • Functional literacy is low, including among chiefs and leaders

  • 25% of children drop out of 1st grade

  • Less than a fourth of children who start school complete 8th grade; only a fraction complete high school

 

Social

  • Divorce rate is around 65%

  • 40% of women are physically abused by their husbands

  • Polygamy is legal and common

  • Love and respect between parents and children is in rapid decline.  Parents and chiefs feel they have lost the next generation

  • The unemployment rate is over 85%

  • GDP is around $300 per person per year

  • A people who feel powerless and hopeless – with sayings like “Tomorrow belongs to someone else!” and “Let me eat first” -- meaning “I need to focus on getting what I can today” and “I don’t know anything about the future” and “What will be, will be.”

  • Low value on education; a high percentage of chiefs are not functionally literate

  • A language in decline, and most likely destined to die without intervention

  • A people ashamed of their identity, language and culture; an entire society that feels insecure and depressed

  • A culture and society that is coming unglued due to external pressures (much of it coming from the West directly or indirectly)

  • A tribal leadership disempowered by colonialism and subsequent political-economic events – some of it the result of global powers

  • A people who are losing a sense of their past – where they are from (their history is oral), and who have lost hope for the future – who see no way forward, and so find themselves floundering in an endless and incomprehensible sequence of present moments

  • Toxic social breakdown – diminished respect, almost no cooperation with each other or with their chiefs, profound cynicism and distrust

Our Purpose

New Hope Publishing creates Yao language publications designed to give hope to a tribe desperately in need of hope.  

 

Our work has 3 focus areas:

 

•  The translation and publication of the whole Bible in the Yao language. 

 

•  Research of the Yao language, culture, and oral history that enables the creation of high quality publications and the preservation of the Yao language and culture. 

 

•  The creation of materials that have a Biblical basis, and address relevant social and family issues.

 

We need your help!  Join us through your donations and your prayers.

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