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BARBARA DECKER, Agricultural
Missionary |
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Barbara Decker, Agricultural Missionary to Venezuela, has a college degree in Biological Sciences. She was employed on dairy and swine farms for almost 20 years before going to the mission field. Following her experience of farms, she traveled to El Salvador as a missionary and served in a children’s home there for five years. Her time there was spent raising cows, pigs, goats, and rabbits for food and profit to help with the care of 29 children in the home. She taught the boys of the home about raising crops as well as caring for animals, and the boys milked both the cows and goats, tended the swine and raised the rabbits. Everything raised went to a culinary destination.
When her term finished in El Salvador, God called her to the Children of Promise International mission field where she began providing the same type of assistance in Venezuela in a children’s home for adolescent boys run by Children of Promise partners, ABANSA. She has been serving here for six years on a farm setting teaching the boys how to raise various tropical fruit, corn, cassava root, chickens and rabbits. Future plans are to add two cows to the project.
Now, in 2006, classes are offered from kindergarten through sixth grade. There are 90 to 100 students attending. The majority of the students are Colombians who have fled Colombia from the war or for other reasons, and are unable to attend schools in Venezuela.
Barbara has helped where she is needed in the school. She has taught the second grade, mostly as a substitute teacher when needed and is also teaching English on a regular basis to grades 2 through 6.
Mission School Project
In addition to Barbara’s work with the Urenya children’s home of 9 adolescent boys and The Way, The Truth and The Life school, she also is involved with a third project of the ABANSA program which is an international school for missionaries called Moriah. The Moriah project is in the beginning stages and is established for the purposes of bringing in people from all parts of the world to learn what it is to sacrifice “self,” as Abraham was ready to sacrifice Isaac, and train for missions.
Jezreel House Project (Click Here)
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The
home is located on the Colombian border in a community where 80% of the
people are Colombian refugees. A “day camp” was conducted in October of
2000 to meet the neighborhood kids. Over the course of three days, 47
children came and only two of them were going to school. As a result, a
makeshift free school was established to provide the children the
opportunity for an education. First through fourth grade classes were
conducted in makeshift classrooms under various trees growing on the
property. Shortly after funds were sought to construct a school building.
By God’s grace and for His glory, classes were held within the unfinished,
yet roofed, building of the rural school, The Way, The Truth and The Life on
March 17, 2003.