Thanshok and Tammi Kamkra: Love for Abandoned Orphans In India

About Thanshok and Tammi

Thanshok and Tammi

While teaching Spiritually Healthy Leader workshops for 300+ leaders in India, we met Thanshok and Tammi Kamkra, founders and directors of Tabitha Children’s Home, an orphanage in northeast India dedicated to caring for children and teenagers with HIV/AIDS.

Thanshok and Tammi provide a home, schooling, health care, love and family for 19 orphans in various stages of treatment for HIV/AIDS. Each child was an outcast until the Kamkras found them, took them into their home in Mantripukhri (on the outskirts of the city of Imphal), and made them family.

The orphanage is located next door to the workshop’s location. We woke up every morning to the sound of the children singing. One morning we walked over and joined them as they recited scripture, sang, and prayed before heading off to school. We were invited to a special dinner where the children honored us with scripture recitations, performed interpretive dances, and sang. Tammi, a nationally- renowned professional vocalist, guides their artistic training.

Tabitha’s Home children

Early in 2015 Tabitha Home was featured on national Indian TV Channel 2 News, and has been distinguished as the best facility providing HIV/AIDS care-services to orphan children in all of India. Thanshok and Tammi use their personal income to support the home. They live a life of selfless service as they love and care for these children and youth that normally would be cast off and rejected in society.

In all our travels to date, we have not seen such love as is expressed at Tabitha Home. You will be blessed to by this story, too. We pray if God puts on your heart to help them financially that you will.

Read more about Tabitha Home on their Facebook page.
Learn more about Tabitha Home here.
If you are interested in helping support the children of Tabitha Home, click here.

Thanshok and Tammi’s Story

I (Thankshok) work as a conference speaker for Rongmei Naga Baptist Association and other churches in northeast India and Tammi is a well-known performer for All-India Radio and DDK, India’s public television company. As we looked at the increasing population of little ones in our region who are affected by HIV/AIDS we heard the Lord say, “You can do something, even if no one else will.” Because we believe that by serving humanity we show our love and service to God, we decided to respond. In 2001 we established Tabitha Children’s Home as a charitable non-profit organization. It is a place that symbolizes hope, love, courage, long suffering, sacrificial service and kindness.

Besides receiving shelter, the children are provided health care, nutrition, education and most importantly love. We have lost only one child to AIDS so far. With the care and support at Tabitha Children’s Home, the children are thriving. Many have excelled in their studies. We have learned that with proper care and support, people infected by HIV/AIDS can and will live healthy and normal lives.

Tabitha Home receives no government funding. We live by faith. In addition to donations, we generate income through flower production and sales, raising hogs for meat, catering, construction, and even cleaning and polishing shoes at people’s homes.

My wife Tammi and I along with our two children consider it a great blessing to run Tabitha Children’s Home and be a channel of hope to the suffering people in Manipur state, where there 2,578 HIV positive children. The numbers are growing at an alarming rate. Nearly 8% (38,016 cases) of India’s total HIV positive cases are in Manipur state.

If you asked me what I consider my greatest achievement over the past few years, I can joyfully say my family celebrates the fact that we are sending back home many who came to us in desperate need of support — and they are returning home healthier and hopeful, not in coffins.

Our prayer continues to be that God makes us a channel of His blessing to others.

Lord….Make me a channel of your blessing to vulnerable and destitute children.

Make me an eye to the blind.

Make me a voice to the dumb.

Make me an ear to the deaf.

Make me a leg and a hand for the handicapped.

Make me a channel of your hope for the hopeless.

Make me to proclaim your gospel of peace, where there is hatred and wars.

Make me an Ambassador for the under-privileged people.

Make my heart generous and rich that always reaches out to the poor and the needy.

Make me remain on my knees, praying with tears for the sin-sick world.

Make me please my Maker, for I have only a generation to serve You and your people.

Read more about Tabitha Home on their Facebook page.
Learn more about Tabitha Home here.
If you are interested in helping support the children of Tabitha Home, click here.

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