Piedra Viva en Honduras: October 2007

Furlough Itinerary

I'm currently on a 6 week furlough to the United States.

My itinerary is available at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~living99/2007furl.htm

The on-line itinerary contains contact information if you would like to reach me while I'm in the States. I will update the few gaps that remain when I have the information.

Community Outreach

Our Ranch community has had a consistent outreach to the local rural community in which we live. We provide jobs for over 15 employees from the community (not counting Hondurans that come from the city). Several of these jobs are house assistant jobs, which bring these employees into close proximity with our house parents and children. These relationships in turn foster interaction with the community and outreach on an as-needed basis to those employees and their families.

In addition, in the past, whenever we hosted construction teams, part of the team experience had been to go into the local community and deliver clothes, toys, food and the gospel message to a selected home. More recently, however, we have had the construction teams go into the city and participate in the WGO medical brigades for one day of their stay. This change has left a small gap in our local outreach. However, two recent projects have more than made up for this gap.

Literacy Program

Oscar, our only Senior in high school, is required to participate in over 100 hours of community service as a government requirement. This requirement sparked our principal, Valerie Schubert, to pursue a long term desire of hers to provide an adult literacy program in the community. Oscar is now playing a major role in providing this literacy program, but the contributions from the ranch do not stop there. One of our Honduran teachers has decided to participate in the program, along with Valerie, and they have also opened up the program to any of our teens who want to participate. I am very excited that Obed has decided to participate.

A local church provides space for the classroom.

Obed works with one of the few men in the program.

Children's Bible Club

Our second outreach that has started recently is a Bible club for small children. This program was the desire of Paul Hosier, our new director of the Children’s Ministry at the ranch. It goes hand in hand with the literacy program, because the Bible club offers a place for the children of the adults participating in the literacy program. Again, several of our teens from the ranch are participating in this program. Brayan, Will and Obed have participated at times.

These types of outreaches are outstanding ways for our children to give to others from the resources they have been given. It helps them to see the richness of God’s blessings to them, what they have that many others are lacking. And it helps us as a ranch community to address the real and pressing needs of those around us.

Soccer Tournament

One of the fundamental principles of WGO’s philosophy of ministry is the raising of children in family units. One of the special aspects of this philosophy is the way in which family gets played out in church life. House parents are allowed the freedom to determine where the family will go to church, and the family participates in church life much as any biological family would participate. Our church, Ministerio La Fuente, recently organized a friendly soccer match with another church in the city, Union Church. The House of Timothy boys were very excited about this event and were counting down the days. It was great to see them play alongside other youth and adults in our church.

As it turned out, the organizer involved from Union Church participates in an orphanage ministry outside of town. He wanted to integrate the boys from the orphanage into the event, and what started as a friendly match became a tournament. He also arranged for the orphanage to provide the venue, as they have a good quality but small grass soccer field on their property. Unfortunately, we were forced to split up our rather formidable team into two teams in order to accommodate the smaller field and the need for two teams. We ended up having 4 matches, with our two MLF teams facing the orphanage and Union Church teams in the first round. In the second round, the winners played and the losers played. Union Church came in 4th place, the two MLF teams came in 2nd and 3rd, and the home team from the orphanage dominated both of their games for 1st place. Everyone had a great time, including the large number of fans who came out to cheer on their teams.

Here are some shots from the games:

Team Photo