Eden Valley Academy With David Asscherick And Hellen Hall

today we're going to show you another short little interview uh by david ashley when he was the senior pastor here we interviews helen hall a friend of our church where she is busy in mission and and as you listen through this she's going to make a call for you to maybe get involved and if you feel the spirit moving you and drawing you we're gonna ask you to get in contact with her or to get in contact with any of the pastors so that we can help you to get in contact with her if you want to help in mission we also have some other mission projects happening at church so if you want to get involved please speak to us come to us our focus at king's cliff church is to be focused on mission the word of god needs to go out into all the world to every person and we want you to be involved in that so please enjoy this interview hello everyone this is pastor david ashrick senior pastor of the kings cliff seventh-day adventist church here in kingscliff australia and i'm sitting down with a friend of mine and a friend of this local churches helen hall helen great to have you here today great to be here in this beautiful place it is a beautiful place isn't it you said the weather was perfect perfect weather well we're going to get to meet helen here in just a little bit we're going to we're going to look at some slides and we're going to learn about her amazing ministry and why don't we just get started right into that helen if if i just met you i was sitting next to you on a plane and i said who's helen hall and what do you do what's the short answer to that um i'm a retired missionary and i'm working in on the burma border with uh myanmar myanmar myanmar thai border so when you say you're a retired minister missionary what exactly does that mean i've never heard that term before well you're supposed to have retired when you're 65 or 60 if you're a lady i'm now 82 81 81 years old and so you're technically retired but you're still this is your whole life you're consumed with this ministry you live there how many months out of the year are you there at the on the border of myanmar all except one month when i'm back here so 11 months and that's what retirement looks like yes being at your job 11 months out of the year and now you're back here on a little furlough in australia yes and uh helen is a great friend of the kings cliff church and we love to not only interview her typically on saturday mornings but this time because we're in the middle of an evangelistic series we're interviewing her and we're super excited so helen the ministry that you run is called why don't you tell us what's it called the school is called eden valley academy and we have about 800 this year we're going to have 880 students maybe more they're still coming so ian valley academy 880 students ages what to what prep which should be about four to a great year 12 which should be some of them are 21 22. wow so that's a big how many teachers in a school with 880 students 52 52 teachers and are they many of them graduates from the school itself we have 16 who are graduates wow that must just be so satisfying we keep them for four years and then they have to leave because they have to get some money for themselves because we can't pay them very much and how long have you been operating here working here doing ministry here at eden valley academy well not in the same place but this is the 36th year what what do you mean not in the same place or when they're fighting and we have they move i move okay well you say when there's fighting sort of orient us here especially those that aren't familiar with the situation in myanmar what do you mean by when there's fighting you have to move well the burmese come up and attack the tribal people and then they flee over to the thai side and then the thai say it's all right now move somewhere else and so we move at the moment it's the chinese building the seoul in dam that's causing a lot of problems okay and so the people that you're ministering to the primary people that are attending your school are who who are these people they are karen people they are tibetan chinese people but we have everybody we have shan we have chin we have many different nationalities we have many religions and are they the the karen people and some of the others are they sort of on the fringes of society and in all of these countries and why why wouldn't any country just be happy to take them in thailand or china or myanmar well everybody seems to be against refugees at the moment but um i mean the people in that we've got who are refugees in thailand have relatives living in thailand who settled on the opposite side of the river so therefore they were thai and these other people who on the upside the river burmese that's incredible i saw a statistic recently that said there are approximately it's roughly one percent of the world right now are estranged from their homeland they are refugees of some stripe or sort yeah they're either refugees or idp's internally displaced okay internally displaced persons um so how many people in the camp if you have 880 students in your school how many people in the camp there are different figures the the figures from the from the ties are 38 000 but the figures from the feeding group are higher than that and the camp population is probably higher still but they don't disclose because they could be sent back to myanmar okay okay and the the number of people is that a is there a reason that they wouldn't want to disclose accurately the total number of people there do they want that number to look smaller or larger they're saying it's quite safe to go back to myanmar so they should all go and we don't know when this is going to happen maybe next year maybe the year after you can't tell do you live in the camp not allowed to you can only come in uh from daylight until dark and then you have to be out so but you there was a while that you did live in the camp uh what was in a different place oh it was when it was in a different location so now when the you come in in the morning and what are you doing you yourself helen at the school are you superintending it are you just there as sort of a mentor figure no i'm teaching you're teaching every day yeah i teach year ten and i teach year eight the advanced group that i'm trying to push through fast wow right to jump do well now you mentioned a moment ago that you have lots of religions what are some of the religions and what are the approximate percentages for the people that are in your school um adventists would be them be the most but close to us as baptists okay and we have some catholics we have our buddhists be the biggest buddhist i was going to say buddhist would be the largest and then we have muslims okay and we have every kind of christian you can think of but we had a girl this year who was baptized who was a catholic really and so when you say baptized a lot of these people after they go through the schooling are actually becoming seventh-day adventists and followers of jesus yes but not as many as usual because any person who's thinking of going back to burma because the buddhists are becoming more radical they don't want to go back with a christian in their family oh okay so they they want to be baptized but their parents won't let them interesting even when they're 17 18 years old or even older the parents just say no no unless they have got a job and they're free then they choose they're on their own they're on their own but um we had this girl who was the catholic she we always have someone give testimony at graduation and she talked about the sabbath the whole time and i thought what's this going to do with all these buddhists and everybody but she was very strong about it and the miracle with her is that her auntie is the person who looks after the catholic priest every time he comes in interesting now you said to me just a moment ago before we were on camera that one of the things that you're discovering now is that many of the people that are becoming seventh-day adventists and getting baptized are actually doing it later after they've left the school yes talk a little bit about that why is that once they have they have their own freedom because they can earn money and look after themselves then they can choose but before that if they choose the parents get really mad pull them out of school send them back to burma and they'll go to places where there aren't any christians they don't have even the opportunity no exposure they'll be sent to these places so that they'll be away from christians okay and i mean 13 and 14 year old cannot stand alone in a situation like that helen what are some of the and i can just imagine my imagination is running wild right now but what are some of the challenges and difficulties that you face in the work that you're doing like what are the things that make running a school in this refugee camp difficult the fact that we've got at the moment a lot of kids who can't speak korean before we only at the moment we're trying to limit it to people who can speak korean language because that they're naughty if they're in a class when they don't understand they muck around and that you know but parents are sitting on our doorstep they were there the day i left and i'm sure they'll be there when i come back wanting to put their kids in school and they say he doesn't know anything put him in any grade we'll be happy grade one doesn't matter they're almost looking for like a babysitter just get them out of uh get them out of here and get them to learn something because the others and the schools are becoming less because there's ngos haven't got money it's been pushed over to the burma side now that they say to me you go back to the burma side it wouldn't help because the border area no one's allowed in there you can visit right but you'd visit maybe two days a month right couldn't run a school year couldn't run a school i mean you could run a school but i wouldn't be at it right so i don't see any purpose in that okay so the students that you're getting if someone were to approach you in this case me and say what's the big goal here what are you really trying to accomplish there at eden valley academy is it primarily education is it primarily primarily evangelism or is it a combination of both or is it humanitarian work what's the what's your real passion what are you trying to do there well what we're trying to do is to train people who know what they believe in a strong seventh day adventist who know health principles so that when they go back they can start running their own little schools or witnessing in villages in many many parts of myanmar where other people can't go excellent and the classes that they're taking are just ordinary classes that you would take like at a school here in australia or in america they're learning to read they're learning maths they're doing everything we're pushing sciences at the moment because we've never had any science people before but every class has to take bible okay okay is it difficult to get teachers to come you can't bring people in that military won't allow not to teach i mean i'm not supposed to be teaching either what do you mean how do you get in there if you're not supposed to be teaching i'm part of the woodwork [Laughter] you're a part of the furniture huh yeah they know i'm teaching but they don't say anything and um i imagine you've been there for 36 years you're a yeah that people just say oh that's helen just just sort of leave her alone they were had putting extra checkpoints in and as we went along this checkpoint this guy comes out and yells out helen helen and he'd been a very young officer when i first came and he said you're still here wow and so every time we go past now they they wave at us and we just go straight through incredible incredible helen i'm just going to click through a few pictures here um i see a picture here with you with some children tell me about this uh tell me about this what am i looking at here this is the this is the down below school you can see the long building behind yeah and actually there's another building you can't see on the other these are students that you're with these students yeah i must say you're looking very dapper there very athletic uh and what is this here school structure this is the top school there's two two uh two buildings in the top so there's not even walls on those schools oh bamboo yeah right but not structural walls what does the bamboo do just basically keep just distractions out stops stops the wind blowing in or the rain a bit doesn't keep bugs out does it no no when you say the rain a bit which depends which direction which direction the rain is going i thought you might say that what am i looking at here this is the when john and naomi came with gateway last year okay that's the top school that they worked with oh true okay excellent and john and naomi are two visitors they come every year they come every year from where um from australia from from gateway melbourne speaking of people that come and visit from australia you had a visitor from our own kings cliff church here recently who was that and tell us a little bit about that we had joel slade and because there were 60 people who wanted bible studies after the baptism he came right at the end of the year we wanted to the teachers to know how to give bible studies and where to start and so he did classes for the teachers oh incredible and he was there for a week or more uh he was there a week uh next picture here says the down school that's this is where i work down below that when you say down below this is at the bottom of the bottom of the mountain and up the top is the other school um eva student body in 2008 this is down below okay this is the lowest this is only the down below school and they had when the king died we had all these celebrations and this was okay the the king of thailand and the the age of these students here is what down below we've got grade one down below this year so it would be from about grade six uh age six to twenty something okay wow okay some of the teachers oh these are gonna be your teachers teachers oh last year's teachers wow you've got fifty how many teachers um how many teachers do you have well we did have 51. 51 wow that's fantastic are you including yourself in that number maybe you probably count for two um boys dormitory here yes we had a bit of trouble with boys dormitory decided to landslide down one side and so they were sort of a landslide sounds like a bad thing when you're talking about a dormitory so we had to get we collected bags of sand and put them up and prop it up okay wow um girls dormitory any landslides there no they were a bit further over they they were all right except that thieves got in through the roof and stole things the thieves came in through the roof i don't think you'll mind me saying that this is not exactly five-star luxury accommodation here that that we have a lot of problems with thieves at the moment during the daytime when the teachers are at school they come to teachers houses and they've taken laptops they've taken phones anything is there any way to prevent that no but it doesn't look like it i mean that would not be an easy building to secure whoa okay so you've had some flooding is this seasonal flooding or is this abnormal abnormal the caves blocked and the water came back and one of our teachers stood in that water out of her house and it was water up to her neck and she just managed to get up the hill in time some people were drowned oh people died in this fight three ah tragic and they lost you say the cave why why did it flood oh it it always does that that the logs and everything from the sawmill come down and block the entrance oh this was giving out things for the for the flood relief okay donation for that what's going on here this is some of the tam people came and uh they were going to teach the teachers how to um understand people on drugs and that okay but they were is dr are drugs a problem huge problem really the biggest one what kind of drugs alcohol heroin um and even even young kids involved in this 10 year old drug addicts killing me terrible news um what am i looking at here looks like a bunch of fresh this is this is the kids listening to the students week of devotion oh really my son just preached we saw him and we showed him oh you sure oh that's so great that's so great this is beautiful so some of the young people actually lead out in the week of devotion wow and did it go well well it did accept that for two days we had no power so we had no microphone and they had power points and they couldn't use them because we had nothing to work with i've had that happen to me before when i go with the expectation that there'll be slides and you can't use them and you're totally disoriented okay bible training for teachers here is that joel and that's just like even from here in that little picture i can tell that's joel joel if you're watching this god bless you brother we love you and we miss you you know he's moved to adelaide yes he told me he was good yeah we're we're not we're not happy about that he's written and he said um when we're ready to build on the other side he'll bring a group ugh god bless him oh a baptism here this is what i like i just did a baptism on sabbath we had a lovely baptism right down here at the at the river what's going on here this was a small group because they weren't allowed to be this girl next to me um was a baptist and she'd been wanting to be baptized for many many years and they wouldn't allow it then finally when she got to year 12 she decided she was going to do it anyhow wow brave but we've had a 10 year old boy who wanted to be baptized and they said no so he's been trying to come to sabbath school he sneaks out and his mother beats him every time she finds out but he's still in school so we we've told him don't try to come yeah don't try to come just come to the school come to school good advice unless we can get him in school uh here giving out bibles we gave out bibles for the people who are baptized just a quick question on that 10 year old boy what is the religion did you say buddhist buddhist okay um so you're giving out bibles here uh to who who are the people picture people who were baptized got the bible saying and that boy at the left there is our former student he's graduated and he's worked and he's still working for us the one in the blue shirt in the left yes on the in the blue show okay it works for you at the school yep brilliant and here we're taking a test who came that they wanted to get their kids into school oh so they're taking in an exam to get into the school what percentage do you maybe percentage is the wrong word but how many students do you have to turn away well we got 300 who came and we've accepted 120. and what about the other 180 what happens we haven't any more room for them so let's talk a little bit about the specific needs that you have there obviously they're all going to be tied to prayer you need prayer people can obviously pray for eden valley and the work that you're doing there um people can come and volunteer it sounds like or is that not really possible not really possible okay we've had people want to come and teach but they won't you're not supposed to be teaching anyhow so then they won't allow if they're karen we can get them in no problem no problem but like if a group from australia or the united states or something said oh we want to come over and help there's really not much you can do because you can't get them on the camp you can't they had a choir recently from america and they wanted to bring them in and they know why is that why are they so the military controls everything and they don't want the people to feel too comfortable or want to stay there you know they don't want them getting settling down they want them to go um so let's talk about so then obviously the great need is going to be prayer and volunteerism is not really an option so financial support is big and here at the kings cliff church we are very passionate about supporting your ministry and there's a lot of people here that just love you love your ministry love what you're doing so i've got some figures here in front of me um for a single teacher it's 780 a year i assume that's australian dollars yeah so if you're looking at our youtube channel here and you're an american that's like six hundred dollars right so it's great so you can a single teacher seven hundred and eighty dollars a year a married teacher uh one thousand six hundred and twenty dollars a year or 135 dollars a month let's talk about sponsoring students day students only a hundred and fifty dollars a year is that true that's right wow 150 australian dollars a year to put a student right through and boarding students 350 a year that's food and everything well we can't charge anymore because um the people in the camp who were paying for their own relatives couldn't afford to pay more than that so we can't charge one for one and one no that's why you say here in addition you'll need to buy other rice and food etc what does the future look like sort of paint the picture here we've bought a block maker we're making blocks we make our own and we had it we bought a tractor so that we can get the sand up from the river and we've got plenty of land they've given us 39 rye wow it's beautiful and we've got on either side of that they've got a forest area that they're not going to build on and you want to build a permanent facility there in this is on the myanmar side because we're going to have to have a dormitory this is a dream of yours yeah i want it i want i want the school to be operating with teachers that we've trained to keep on the lord's work when i can no longer do it do you have any idea what the costing for that would be we haven't got to that stage yet what stage are we at trying to get official papers for the land so we can pray about that is there anything else we can do to sort of forward your vision your dream um no that's what we need at the moment and then at the end of the year if we have to move we'll try and get a flying build to come and build it oh incredible do you have um helen anything like a goal that you're trying to reach i mean i've got these numbers here 780 for a single teacher for a year 16 20 uh for a married teacher for a year 150 for a day students per year 350 for a boarding student per year but do you have some goal in mind that gets you to a certain threshold that's in the lord's hands but we just he keeps applying what we need so that we have enough to finish the year we're going to put up here on the screen the bsb number and the account number and the names for people to make a contribution and just just to reiterate these monies go directly to the school that you're running there at eden valley yeah that's fantastic and people just put on there they just note you know eva as a note or yes we need their name and their address so that we can give receipts because naomi does the receipting in melbourne okay brilliant and do you have a uh um i get a newsletter from you um how does how would somebody get on the newsletter just let me know that they send me on uh send you an email so you want to send an email we'll put this up on the screen as well helenhall gmail.com yeah well that's easy and if it works out that we can get tax deductibility we will tell you how now helen as we prepare to close here um and i know you're here to talk about eva and your real passion is the education and all of that that's happening but you've recently had a cancer diagnosis and yet what's the state of that it sounds like completely clear the lord's finished it all off and he's given me enough energy to keep going they all say you must come home and retire i'd be bored yeah what would you do what would you go play balls club and golf i don't see you i don't see you at the bowls club engulfing um so so you had colon cancer yeah and dr nick the adventist doctor at bah said he he calls me his miracle every time he sees me he said he's never had anybody else who with colon cancer who's recovered with absolutely no sign of it like me and and you just had this surgery for colon cancer a month ago maybe yeah maybe five weeks now five weeks ago and you were told you you couldn't walk for what a week i i know i had to be i had to be in bed for a month but you were walking the second day the second day and you were on an airplane shortly thereafter and so you are a miracle we're all miracles everybody that has come to faith in christ and has been transformed into the new creature that we can be in him is a miracle but helen i don't think you'd mind me saying and i know that our viewers wouldn't mind me saying you're a special kind of miracle well the lord's very special to me because i mean most people of my age don't want to do this sort of thing and yet i feel that that's where i'm going to be they say when are you coming back and you're going to retire i'm going to retire there what does your husband think about all this uh the lord is my husband so you've never been married you've been married to ministry from day one yeah because my well see i'm free my parents died before i was out of my 20s mother died when i was a teenager and so other people are not free but i am maybe the lord's made it like that for that reason yes i understand so i've got huge numbers of family everywhere i love that well you've you've got a lot of family here in kings club well for those of you that are kings cliff members and for those of you that are watching in here on the youtube channel i am here sitting with a living legend still a daughter a daughter of the most high god but in many ways a living legend and somebody that you can support and if you have been absolutely thrilled with what you've heard today every time you come to kings cliff we we give her 20 minutes and she takes 50. just because that's the nature of it we just want to keep hearing more and more and more we've not even gone through some of the individual stories that she has here but they are absolutely incredible and i want to encourage you to get on that mailing list helenhall gmail.com is that right yes and uh thank you all for watching we're gonna put the financial information up one more time and helen if you don't mind and with your permission i'd like to close with prayer father in heaven i want to thank you so much for helen we are humbled at the tremendous expense that heaven has gone to for us for our salvation for our health for our families and father when we compare the price that has been paid the infinite price that heaven expended in our salvation lord when we think about the opportunities to support work like helen's and the work of eden valley academy and all the selfless sacrificial teachers that are there father it is a privilege to give back a small portion and percentage of the infinite price that you paid for us lord as the scriptures say of your own we have given you and we want to pray a special prayer right now for helen for her health her ongoing health it looks like you've given a miracle a breakthrough here um whereby she was diagnosed with colon cancer and now they can't even find where she had had colon cancer it's a miracle and father we pray that you would keep helen going for many many more years to come and not just going physically father but that still that youthful energy and vigor would be in her she's a child of yours and we pray for her health physically spiritually emotionally father help her not to be discouraged with the difficulty of working and the difficult circumstances in which she finds herself there at a refugee camp and please continue to open doors we pray for teachers we pray for those that are there that will remain there we pray that new teachers will come we pray for baptisms we pray for people to give their hearts to christ and father we pray for those that are listening into this interview that they will be moved upon by your spirit to sponsor a teacher or a student or to in some way give to this amazing selfless ministry we love you and we thank you father we know that anything we could ever give or do is a mere reflection of all that you have given and done for us and so we just want to thank you and praise you not just for the ministry of helen and the ministry of the kings cliff church and all the great things that are happening around the world father we want to thank you for jesus for he gave everything for us and made any ministry that we would do possible we love you we thank you and we pray in the name of jesus your son and our savior amen thank you for joining us at kings cliff church online we hope that you had a blessed sabbath and that you'll continue to have a blessed sabbath after this program if you want to get more involved or if you want to more have more news you can check us out on kingsleftchurch.com and get more information about church online as we said in the beginning of the program we'll probably still be on this platform for for a few more weeks until we can move together and and congregate together in church again but until that time we hope that you will tune in and we'll see you next week back here again god bless

Channel: Kingscliff Church

Views: 2,971

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Id: dt21aBWPbqI

Length: 28min 56sec (1736 seconds)

Published: Sat May 30 2020