Through our HIV/AIDS work we got confronted with many sad stories. While the treatment started to work wonders and many patients recovered, we also saw a large number of them die. Most of our clients were young adults, many of them married with young children. As a result, many children became orphaned.

In Zambian culture children of their deceased relatives are being absorbed into the surviving families. This has worked quite well for quite some time. However, there was a critical point reached in the early 2000th as families became overwhelmed by the many children they had to take care of. One of Chreso’s senior officers had six children of his own, but had to take care of eleven others who in the span of a view years lost their parents and were dependent on their relatives. Many families reached such a saturation point and could just not take in any more children.

Through our work in the rural communities we equally found many children in villages often taken care of by their grandmothers, some of whom were very frail and needed help themselves.

Being in the middle of this sad development, the directors of Chreso Ministries decided to build a Children’s Home.

In 2009 this Home could be opened along Great East Road in the Chongwe area and was named Fountain Gate Children’s Home. The facility had space for about 160 children, but was later expanded. In 2022 we take care of over 200 children, some of them still stay in nearby communities, but are fully absorbed into the program and education of Fountain Gate Children’s Home.

Adjacent to the Children’s Home we build a school as we envisaged the needs of those children for their education. The nearest school was too far away for children to walk to. Initially we erected a primary school which later was expanded into a secondary school.

In 2022 Chreso Ministries has embarked on an expansion program for the school and the surrounding communities to meet the demands of the current situation. The school has grown to almost 600 pupils at present. Therefore twelve new classrooms are to be build in the next 18 months.