Stewardship is an easy word to print. It is a harder one to live. This issue is about making it real.
In Kenya and Ethiopia, the people who carry Lalmba’s work – the clinical staff, the teams who find a struggling family and put its children back in school, the accountants who steward every dollar, shilling, and birr – turn what you give into more than what it looks like on paper. People outside Lalmba keep noticing. We thought you should see it up close.
What follows are three short stories about what your gift becomes by the time it reaches the end of the road.
Boys at the Chiri Children’s Home, Ethiopia
A mother and her baby at the Ochuna Dispensary, Kenya, where nurse Moreen keeps the records
Volume 62. No. 3
April – June 2026
In Othora village, near Lalmba’s Matoso clinic on the shore of Lake Victoria, Caroline Anyango Awino is raising six children on her own. Her husband Joseph, a fisherman, died in 2023. Caroline was often ill. There was rarely money for school uniforms, so the children stayed home. When they fell sick, the family treated them with local herbs. The older children went into the village to beg for food.
None of that was solved from across an ocean. It was a Lalmba area advisory committee – local people
who know these families and these communities – who noticed the household and brought it to our Reaching Children At Risk (RCAR) team. The team sat with Caroline, walked through her home, and enrolled the family in RCAR.
What changed is plain. All six children are back in school, from the eldest in grade 8 to the youngest in grade 2. They have uniforms. When they are sick, they are seen and treated. Caroline is still unwell, and the family’s life is not easy. But the
children are in their classrooms, and that is no small thing for a mother Caroline (right) with her children near Othora, Kenya. All six who, a year ago, watched them go are back in school. without.
The committee that found them is Kenyan. The team that enrolled them is Kenyan. What you send is what lets them act. Six children back in their classrooms. Uniforms that fit. A clinic visit instead of a handful of herbs. They are among more than a thousand the teams in Kenya and Ethiopia keep in school.
Thank You! This spring donors like you met the match and funded eight things our teams in Kenya and Ethiopia asked for, from a water tank to a maternity bed. There is still a long way to go this year. Scan the code to fund the next item, or use the enclosed envelope.
In a small office in Kenya, Marcy counts out a stack of shilling notes by hand, a calculator and a row of ledgers at her elbow. It is payroll day. Every figure has to be right, because the people waiting on it are the clinicians, field staff, and even the groundskeepers who carry the work. She keeps the books for
everything Lalmba does in Kenya, on her own.
She is one of three accountants. In Ethiopia, Tsiyon keeps the books for the clinic at Agaro Bushi, where she serves as both accountant and newly promoted general manager. Ayelech keeps the accounts for the RCAR program in Ethiopia. All three have been with Lalmba for years, and all three carry the trait that marks a good accountant anywhere in the world: they take real pride in getting it exactly right.
Their work is quiet and constant. Every month they reconcile what came in against what went out, line by line, and close the books before any report crosses an ocean. Payroll alone is one of the largest and most exacting responsibilities they hold, paying the staff who run the clinics and stand with families. They help ensure your gift does what it is supposed to do once it reaches Kenya or Ethiopia. In a typical month, that adds up to around 3,000 patients seen at the clinics in Kenya and Ethiopia and more than two dozen babies safely delivered.
Tsiyon
Atinafu, Lalmba’s Ethiopia country director, has watched other organizations arrive in Ethiopia, spend large sums on something that changes little, and leave. Lalmba, he says, is not that. Lalmba stays, builds with local hands, and is still there decades later.
Stewardship does not come by chance. It is three people who treat your gift the way you would: count it, record it, make it travel as far as it can go.
Stewardship, in practice, has names. Marcy. Tsiyon.Ayelech.
Join us in welcoming a new voice behind our social media posts. Alea Hoskins is the daughter of two Lalmba Volunteers and lived at the Chiri Children’s Home from ages two to six. She knows Lalmba’s work well.
Follow Lalmba on Facebook and Instagram to see her new perspectives.
Ayelech, who keeps lalmba’s RCAR accounts in Ethiopia, with her son
For more than sixty years, Lalmba has worked in rural communities in Kenya and Ethiopia, supporting clinics, caring for children, and standing with families at the end of the road. The people doing that work are Kenyan and Ethiopian, and many of you have walked beside them for a long time. Some of you for decades.
That kind of faithfulness raises a quiet question: how do we make sure the work goes on, for the children not yet born into these communities?
It is the question behind the Legacy of Hope Society, a new way for supporters of Lalmba to be part of this mission beyond their own lifetime. For some that means remembering Lalmba in a will or a tribute in a dear friend’s memory. For others it is a gift from a retirement account, a transfer of stock, or a donor advised fund. The method matters less than the heart behind it, and the desire that good care keep reaching these communities long after we are gone.
Legacy giving is not really about money. It is about the children not yet born into these communities, and the wish that good care be waiting for them. A legacy gift helps steady the work for the long run, the clinics and children’s programs the Kenyan and Ethiopian teams lead day after day. A four-star rating from Charity Navigator says the work is handled well, and that it will still be here to receive what you leave it.
If you would like to learn more, we would welcome the conversation, knowing it often happens alongside a spouse, a family, or an attorney. There is never any pressure here, only gratitude for the partnership that makes this work possible. To talk it through, write to give-hope@lalmba.org or call the number below. Whatever faith moves you, it meets ours in one belief: that every life carries dignity and worth, and deserves care that outlasts us.