Dear friend,

Today’s message is a bit unusual, so please be patient with me.

Our new baby granddaughter, Lyla, just discovered that her hands are part of her own body. That may sound strange, but until this week her hands flailed around a lot, and she couldn’t use them for anything useful. Then one day she looked a little cross-eyed at her own hands in front of her face, and it was as if a light bulb went off. Her recognition of her own hands meant she could start to grab for things and guide things into her mouth. Just imagine if we tried to go through life with no use of our hands? How difficult it would be to get most things done.

Now imagine a world today with no Internet. It almost seems incomprehensible, doesn’t it? I think I would rather lose the use of my hands. Not only would it be more difficult to order a pizza, look at FaceTime photos, or call an Uber to get somewhere, but more important, how would we stay connected to the millions of things that come into our smartphones every day? And during recent times of Covid-19 restrictions, how would children have gotten access to an education?

Well, for almost one third of the people in the world, almost 3 billion people, there is NO internet access, and for them, there never has been. This includes most of the people Five Talents serves, in countries such as Burundi, DR Congo, Myanmar, South Sudan, Uganda, and Tanzania. The divide is prominent in rural parts of these countries, where residents are four times less likely to go online than in urban regions, but it also runs along gender lines, leaving four out of every five women in the least-developed countries offline.

I can only imagine how isolated these families may feel. Until their lives are much better, we will not rest, and we will continue to work in more areas where we are needed.