Pockets of Change Update
February 24, 2010
It was a year ago this month that Justin and Lorene Keitch, a couple in the Chilliwack-area, quit their graphic design and newspaper editor jobs, respectively, and started working full time on the Pockets of Change project. This photographer-writer team had been working alongside HFL staff for the previous five months to put into motion an initiative with a vision to share a variety of stories of changed lives from around the world. Within the last year, Justin and Lorene have flown thousands of kilometres all over the globe; slept in plenty of beds as well as airplane seats; met countless people of all ages; and experienced numerous styles of church services in many different languages. In January, they arrived back in Chilliwack exhausted from their travels in ten different countries, but excited to start a new phase of their journey. They are tirelessly sorting through the few hundred interviews and thousands of photos they have collected, working toward a photo-story book that is planned to be published later this year.
As one might guess, both Justin and Lorene have been personally impacted by their experience over the last ten months in a significant way. They gave up their rental situation, moved most of their possessions into storage, and, without much previous international experience, traveled to most of the world's continents. They both admit that they have had to trust God in ways they didn't before, but agree that it has been a faith-building time for them-and one they wouldn't trade. Lorene says that although there is lots of devastation, hunger and extreme poverty in all the places they visited, she notes that "there is a lot of hope out there ... and the hope that they have is extraordinary; it comes from their faith." As they have reflected on the people they met, Lorene says that, "every person had an impact on us in some way" and she hopes that those who read the stories and view the photos will be impacted and motivated to be a part of global change.
Justin and Lorene recently put this video together of their Pockets of Change travels in 2009; click here to view the 5-minute video.