Children's Village Details

Construction of the Banta Children’s Village began in early 2006. This village will eventually include formal school buildings, a feeding center with kitchen, a chapel, dormitories, offices, and more.

Chapel
The Chapel will serve as our children’s place of spiritual growth and community. They will have chapel once weekly with a variety of speakers sharing the truth of God’s word. The chapel will also benefit our visiting teams and interns and provide a place of church ministry outreach for our children to host VBS and other child evangelism events.

Soccer Field
Soccer is the central form of recreation for children in Sierra Leone. This field will make it possible for our kids to get out and play, as well as serve as an outreach venue for hosting games, leagues, and tournaments.

Basketball / Tennis Court
Recreation is part of the physical aspect of our children’s care. Physical exercise is vital to their overall growth and development. This facility will also serve for our teams and interns to enjoy and give clinics to our children and those of the surrounding area.

Warehouse
The warehouse facility is vital to our ministry. Here we will have a place that is secure for our shipments to arrive, to be stored, and distributed with proper organization at no additional costs for storage, etc.

Garden
The Garden will serve as the entrance to the village as well as an opportunity for our children, teams, and interns to experience the joy of tending the ground and making things grow— for both food and enjoyment. As the garden and agriculture programs expand in our village, this may provide an opportunity for additional enterprise as healthy food plants and flowers may be grown and sold for profit.

Administration Offices
Administration and organization are essential for any endeavor to be successful. Without order, there is only chaos. This is why COTN places a high value on administration. This building will allow us to maintain our village in proper working order. We will problem solve, plan and implement, manage inventory resources, report on the status and growth of our individual children, etc. The COTN staff working in these offices will be the central hub of operations for our village and for hosting our on-going flow of visiting short-term teams and interns.

Child Housing
These are the new residences for our orphan children. These buildings will replace the existing orphanage at Marjay Town. Our kids will move into new houses built especially for them! They will have carefully selected and screened house parents—uncles and aunties—who will form their COTN Sierra Leone national families. They will grow up in these homes as part of a family of believers in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. They will learn all the things children learn as part of a healthy growing family—from sharing, doing chores, resolving conflict, and forgiving, to loving one another and praying together. They will be encouraged to reach for future opportunities that previously, perhaps, were only part of their longed-for but unattainable dreams. These houses will be unlike any other place in the world to our children—they will be their homes.

School House
The School is one of the essential and most important buildings we will include in our village. The school will be the daily meeting place for our children to be educated and to receive nourishment—physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional. The school gives us the freedom to educate our children in an excellent scholastic manner, centered in the spiritual truths found in the Bible. The school is vital to the “raising the whole child” concept, which COTN embraces in all our work with orphan and destitute children. Our interns and short-term teams will visit the school and work with our children to further their learning and help them become the leaders of the future in their country.

Generator
This will keep our village supplied with consistent electrical power for all services necessary for our kids and visiting short-term teams and interns, including providing Internet service locally, which will facilitate and greatly improve our ability to communicate with our staff and visitors.

Land Development
This is the first step in our grand Banta Mokelleh plan. In order to accomplish all of the above, we must first develop the land to the point of construction ability. As our village grows and we follow our comprehensive plan for developing this land into a thriving village, many, many opportunities will exist to give our children life-growth experience and enterprise. In addition, our plan will create useful opportunities for employment of locals, thus elevating their economy, and will create projects for visiting short-term teams and interns that will foster long lasting, gratifying relationships with our COTN family in the USA.