For widows in many countries, life is hard enough, but now that COVID has been thrown into the mix, it’s become harder. Still, God is providing for these dear ladies in incredible ways.

World Challenge partners in Uganda are working to help those who have escaped Kony’s reign of terror find healing and new life in Christ.

Esther was abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army in 1994. Three years before, Joseph Kony had launched his brutal campaign supposedly to defend Acholi tribal rights in Northern Uganda, leaving a wake of thousands murdered or mutilated.

God is working through the church in Burundi to help widows and orphans survive great emotional and economic hardship.

“My husband abandoned me and our two children,” one woman in Burundi shared with a World Challenge partner. “He’s a ‘pastor’ and now on his third wife.”

In a culture that traditionally views Christianity as a cult, one church’s work to overcome this has taken the form of food packages.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is wrestling with freedom from the Russian Orthodox Church—which has often been an accessory to Russian political leaders—and trying to transfer its authority to a new archbishop.

World Challenge partners help widows in Latin America receive back their sight. 

Rosa feels along the brick wall of her kitchen. Only the size of a living room in many Americans’ houses, her home is simple and clean. At least, she hopes it’s clean. She’s swept like always, bumping the broom between the table and chairs’ legs.

Something clatters cross the floor, and she pauses, trying to squint through grainy gloom at whatever’s fallen.

In Kenya’s grittiest and most impoverished sector, God is bringing incredible change to people’s hearts and lives.

As the sun rises on the eastern part of Kenya’s capital, it brings to light one of the world largest slums: Mathare.

The third largest in Africa, this slum is home to some 500,000 people scraping together a living in grinding poverty.

Major challenges are facing the church in Peru as they look for ways to serve their society’s most vulnerable. 

This spring, Director of Mercy Ministries Mark Buzzetta traveled to Cusco, Peru to connect with a local church doing great work caring for widows.

The trip was eye-opening to Peru’s great natural beauty and local struggles, coming almost as often from floods of global tourists to their region as well as stifling animist traditions.

Syria is now the questionable home to mothers and children who are either forgotten, ignored or condemned.

“There’s only one exit,” our guide tells us at the place where we’re staying. “If you need to evacuate, don’t turn left outside. That part of the street belongs to Assad.”

One woman refused to allow tradition to separate her and her grandchildren, and God made a way for them.

A woman in Kenya who has just lost her husband is immediately faced with a terrible choice: To be “cleansed” or not.