In light of all the recent Raising Awareness statuses I want to raise awareness for STEP centre for Academics in Myanmar! We are a school working with low income children (which compared to American standards means verrrry low). I challenge you to help us pass this letter along till we find someone who can help! Help us share Jesus Christ in Myanmar. Im not trying to be tacky by raising awareness for the ministry we work for, but why not let Christians know that there are organizations that need their help. Here is our story if you feel challenged to pass it on! Ear Friends in Christ, Greetings in the name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Firstly, we need to explain our situation here in Myanmar (Burma). For the last 9 years we have been operating a school for the low middle class Burmese children. There are quite a few private schools nowadays that provide education for the extremely wealthy but we want to reach those families which by sending their child to our school we can help to change all the future economic dynamics for this family. The other important fact about our school is that our students are about 85-87% Buddhist children. Of course, we could fill our classrooms with Christian families but we really want to target the Buddhist children since education is a very important thing in our culture and it is a great way to present the Gospel to a child every day for 180 days a year, 8 hours a day for about 15 years. We feel this is a very effective way to bring the Gospel to Buddhist people since Buddhism is such a hard religion to influence with “street preaching”, distributing Gospel tracts etc. When we started the school in Dec. 2005, we had 5 Kindergartners. Presently, we have just under 300 students in grades Nursery (3 yrs) to 8thgrade and we plan to continue the pattern of adding one grade each year until we complete 12th grade. Our students use a Christian Curriculum and all 38 of our teachers are young Believers with strong testimonies for the Lord and participate with us in believing that this is a ministry for themselves not only employment! We also have about 10 staff working that are a mixture of Christians and a couple Buddhist. Our academic level is very high and our school now has developed a very strong reputation within Yangon itself for being very strict, our children our well-behaved and well-mannered, their English level is one of the very top in the city and each of our students Kindergarten through 8th grade is required to take the SAT tests each year and they all score on target for their grade level counterparts in the US. In 2005, when our school started, we asked the elders at our Assembly in Wichita, Kansas if they would participate with us for the first 5 years to help us financially. If they would pay the rent for our buildings then we would try to be self-providing for teacher salary and all other expenses. After 2 years however, we were more than able to do this! We had enough students to cover our expenses. We don’t have any problems getting students. In fact, the last 2 years we’ve only had 40 openings for the upcoming school year and on the first day of application we get so many applications that our waiting list is over 150 students. What we have to do at that point is go through the applications and we chose those which are 1st, Buddhist and secondly, have low monthly incomes. Sadly, this means the children from the Christian homes are way at the bottom of the list. Politically in Myanmar, when we started the school things were really rough. We had to be very careful about being outspoken. We have never advertised our school in anyway and frankly, haven’t even sent many letters out about what we do.We just felt the need to be very very cautious and fell feel that G ods work,done Gods way will always have Gods provision. Economically, when we started the school, Myanmar was one of the cheapest places in the world to live. We could go to the market and easily survive on 30-40$/week for groceries. Rent was cheap too. When we started the school we were only paying about 800$/month to rent the building and our home was 800$/month. In 2011, this all changed! Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Myanmar and some of our sanctions were lifted. In 2012, President Obama came and most of the sanctions were lifted. This caused immediate chaos in the country along with a lot of greed! We have close to 300 students in 2 two-storey houses and our house is right beside these (with our guest room used for classes all day as well). We have desperately wanted to buy land and build for several years and had our eye on a piece of land for about 6 years. This land was 1.78 acres and a million dollars. It was 200 yds from our present school and we just thought it to be a great solution. But, where were we going to get a million dollars????? After President Obama came, that same piece of land is 16 million dollars! Obviously we put buying land out of the question. Rent was no different. The houses on our street jumped from 800$/month to 7000$/month…and we rent 3 of these houses! Our house owner and school building owner have been very gracious to us so far and not charged us those astronomical amounts….yet! But, we are now up to 10,000$/month! Our house jumped this year from 800$/month to 3300$/month!!! This puts us in a very unpleasant position. We must move next year…we must find a place for 340 Students and all the faculty/staff and a place for our family to live as well. We are saving for this a little each month and checking all over the city to find such a big facility at under 10,000$/month. But, we are back to our original conviction that we must buy land and build instead of continuing to be at the mercy of whatever a landowner will raise the rent to from year to year. It is not easy to move this many students year by year and to find a facility big enough to house them all is equally challenging. We absolutely know and understand that we cannot buy and build within the city limits of Yangon. The newspaper said about 2 weeks ago that land prices within the city are higher than Tokyo and NYC! So, we have looked outside of the city. Even at a 30 minute drive outside of town the land is about 2 million$/acre. We have however found a beautiful piece of land about 50 minutes from our present location that is just short of 4 acres for 500,000$. This land is absolutely beautiful and the miracle of it is that the gentleman who owns it is a land surveyor so he took his rice paddy land and filed all the papers and has prepared it already for building. This saves months of paperwork and thousands of dollars. The land has 2 electric poles on it…which is another amazing thing in Myanmar and is on a dead end street with an orphanage run by Korean Christians. The way that we found the land is also a miracle. We had let it be known among the school families that we must move next year because of rent prices and that we really have a desire to buy land. One of the very strict Buddhist families came to us and said that in the small village where they live there was possibly some land available if we were interested. We went to see it and WE ARE INTERESTED. The land actually was not for sale, they were just hanging on to it for their own children but since they love our school so much and the school has really turned around their 8th grade son they are offering it to the school. The reason we are writing this letter to you is to explain the last aspect of our situation. Myanmar is a “cash only” society. We cannot go to a bank and get a loan to buy this land. We can’t get a loan from a bank in the States to buy land in Myanmar. What we are wanting to know is if anyone knows of any Christian organization that would be willing to loan us the money on a 7-10 year loan so that we could purchase this land. At the present, we are putting out 120,000$/year for rent and we would much rather be putting those monies into a property which we own ourselves. In Myanmar, we must have all the cash at one time to pay for anything. This is very difficult (this is why we didnt even have a car for the first 7 years of our marriage because it took us that long to save up that much cash to buy a car).When we compare this to families in the States its probably about the same. The bank loans you money to buy a car and it may take around 7 years to pay them back. In the case of land though, this is very difficult because the land price keeps rising and so we need to search farther and farther away from the city. We already feel that this land will be about the limit for our students to ride in the back of pickup trucks to school. Some of them are coming in from villages 2 hours away. We really don’t want to let this opportunity pass us by. If there would be any people willing to loan us monies we would be so grateful. We are happy to have any questions asked to us about the situation or have any one visit us that would be interested in what we are doing. We still want to be careful within Myanmar itself for advertising etc… but are at the point that we welcome people to know what we are participating in here as things are financially becoming so inflated. Any advice and direction for our situation would be so much appreciated. We have been diligently praying for so many years to have this opportunity and we really can’t afford to pass it up. Therefore, we offer for you to pass on our information to whomever you feel would be appropriate. Thank you so much for personally praying for our family this past year. It has been a rough year for us with Pams emergency hysterectomy is October then her 2 retinal surgeries in April and May. Even with all these trials we are so blessed to see so much growth among the Believers on our staff, our Sunday School and our students. As we get into the higher grades it has been a sheer delight to see so many of them come to know the Lord after then years of Spiritual influence being poured into them and that they have the desire to go on and live in the teen years for the Lord as well. Thank you for your continued prayers and love for the people here. With much love to you all, Zama and Pam Lindsted Zakaria and Kyron Yangon, Myanmar Philippians 4:6-7English Standard Version (ESV) 6 do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Stepzp@gmail
Posted on: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 04:56:41 +0000
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