2015 was a great year!  If you haven’t read our Annual Report yet, you can find it here.

Here is a year end letter from our President Milton Jones.

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CRF President Milton Jones

When it is all said and done, CRF is all about the children.

We sponsor children in about 20 different countries and help in nearly 30 countries. We have 86 different CRF works around the world. We sponsor 6,805 children in a full-time capacity but help many thousand more through feeding, disaster relief and providing education.

By the time we reached 2015, bringing clean water became one of the major ministries of CRF. This has happened because of the incredibly generous gift of a rig to drill deep wells, matching funds for wells to reduce the cost by over half (our costs went from $20,000 to $5,000 because of these matches), and the gifts of so many donors to provide water. Our gracious matching donors have pledged to continue to match gifts for water wells in 2016. We are planning to drill a well in Kenya every week in 2016. That will be a few more than we drilled in 2015. My dream is to get to two a week before the year is over. We expanded our drilling in 2015 and began helping in Haiti and Nicaragua also.

We never know where the next disaster will be, but we know we will be there. In 2015 we helped primarily in relief in the Philippines, Nepal and with Syrian refugees. Many needs will continue in these places in the future. But we will be prepared to help any place where there is a need. I have been so impressed with the CRF disaster response team led by Chito Cusi. They arrive quickly and help compassionately with medical needs, counseling, construction and sharing the good news.

We have also been doing the best job ever in monitoring, training and visiting our workers on the field. Bobby Moore has been all over the world in 2015 to personally make sure that all of our CRF works are meeting our core values. If you have been to one of our works, chances are you have been with Bobby.

On the other front, Linda Purdy continues to manage the internal side of CRF and make sure that our operations, finances, and donor relations stay strong. With so many children on the field, you can imagine how difficult it is to manage all the works at home. We are so thankful for her great abilities and commitment.

And if you ever hear anything about CRF or from us—it is because of Andrew Brown. No one could help us stay connected more or in a more beautiful way than Andrew. I don’t know anyone more talented. And he keeps the water ministry flowing from this side of the world too.

What a great staff CRF has in the U.S. and around the world. I can’t mention them all, but I know they bless you. And the reason you might not of heard of some of them is because with CRF staff—It’s all about the children!

Maybe what we do best can be seen through the eyes of one child—even the haunting eyes of Evans. Evans was a war orphan on Mount Elgon in Kenya. He had witnessed his parents executed before his own eyes. He had no one to take care of him. So he wandered on the mountainside with hundreds of other kids—malnourished and deathly ill. But then Evans was sponsored by Shelly Moore when we started a new work on Mt. Elgon near a gigantic Simotweet tree. He started getting good food every day. And we built a new school through the generosity of donors (and even memorials to honor my mother who died—nothing would please her more). We couldn’t drill a well so we piped water from a spring higher up on the mountain. And we even got Evans a place to sleep. A church was planted at the site so Evans now believes in Jesus.

But even all of this wasn’t enough. He needed help with the trauma of seeing his parents killed in front of him. We now provide grief counseling for the children there. But Evans couldn’t get well. So with generous gifts, Evans was hospitalized to deal with his health problems. Penina Kamoet, one of our directors, never left his side during the whole ordeal. What’s the end of the story?

Evans is healthy, a good student, and loves Jesus! Even his countenance has changed as you can see.

Thanks for helping CRF! You gave more money than ever before. You helped more children this year than ever before.

“THANKS A TRILLION TIMES!”  –  Milton Jones

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