Love

Within Manna4life, we strive to have “love” as our guiding principle. 

We want love to be the primary motivation behind everything that we do (or don’t do) within our community. 

We hope that every action; whether installing a new well, building a secure home, or engaging in an encouraging conversation, would be seen as a tangible representation of the love that we have within us.

Relate

We believe that genuine and lasting transformation takes place through relationships. This thinking has motivated us to move into this impoverished community that we are seeking to serve. Some may see this as an unnecessary sacrifice, but we see it rather as a natural and sensible response to the situation before us.

As friendships form with our neighbours the word “compassion” has taken on a much deeper and truer meaning for us. When broken into its Latin roots, compassion, or “com-pati”, literally means “to suffer with,” and this is exactly what we find ourselves doing. We walk alongside our communities through the painful and joyful times, and along the way we’ve noticed that genuine, and mutual relationships form.

Serve

When we love our neighbors, we will naturally want to embody that love through service.  When service is motivated by love, it’s done in a way that is helpful, empowering, and sustainable. Within Manna4Life we do not come in with set agendas and 5-year plans, but rather we allow the community to have direct input into what and how we go about our community projects. A leadership team of men and women from the community was selected by the villagers and we work alongside this committee to bring their visions to reality. 

We have found that by entering as learners (rather than leaders or directors) we have the opportunity to hear the hopes and dreams of our neighbors (rather than them hearing our hopes and dreams!) Their visions are the foundation for any project we undertake.