If any of you have been waiting anxiously to hear from a mission team member by either phone or e-mail message, everyone here is healthy and safe. We just are having great difficulty sending e-mail messages through most ISP connections. Cell phones are nearly useless unless someone has arranged with their carrier before leaving home, notifying them that the cell phone can be found in Honduras–or something like that. But I just want to assure everybody that things are going well here.

Allen

Hola! This is Allen again, Monday afternoon. Things have been hectic here. Good, but hectic. We have lots of photos to be resized for transfer through the dial-up connection, so it will take a little time. But they will come.

Yesterday and today we were all busy at Vacation Bible School at four different schools in the area. We had rain all night Saturday, and periodically Sunday, so getting to the schools on the wet clay roads offered some excitement. But everybody survived and we had a great time with the kids.

Most of us were able to get to Los Hornos school for their celebration of completing the bathroom project. The school now has six new toilets and two showers for the students. The head of the school and one of the teachers had lunch for us, and as the different pickups drove up to the school with mission team members in the back, a three-man marimba band began their music. We had a ribbon-cutting ceremony by Pastor Rene Jerezano and Michael Norton, with lots of good words all around.

Vacation Bible School experiences have been terrific. The school I went to yesterday (Jicaro) had about 35 students in the one-room cinder block school, with about half that many parents hanging onto the window sills and smiling. The 16-year old teacher (Vilma Maria, a church member) was a bundle of energy who captivated the children with her enthusiastic teaching. The kids memorized several Bible verses emphasizing how “Jesus is the friend of all the children.” Sounds sort of like “Jesus loves the little children–all the little children of the world” doesn´t it? And they got the message. I spent a lot of my time taking photographs of the kids. Each time I photographed one, I showed them how they looked in the digital camera. Their fascination confirmed that kids are kids all over the world. I told the teacher I will send back some of the photographs so she can post them on the walls of the school room.

Eye testing and eyeglass fitting continues today after a break on Sunday. Word is getting around the neighborhood, and the clinic is overflowing with people of all ages coming for that, as well as for an opportunity to talk with the nurse or the doctor.

Tomorrow we will have lunch with all the Agape Promises students, giving the sponsors a chance to meet their students. I believe we will also send a few team members back to the Jicaro school to continue construction on a bathroom/shower building there.

The weather has been good except for the rain. Fortunately, the rain brought some cooler weather, making things more pleasant.

Michael and Jerry left this morning. Unfortunately, Charles also left with them, needing to return home to take care of medical emergencies in his family. So we are left with thirteen team members for now.

Now I need to spend some time working up some of the pictures. I´ll be back later.

Allen

This morning we started with a devotion and a typical Honduran breakfast of pancakes, eggs, refried beans, pinapple coffee and orange juice. Afterwards Michael and I inspected the bathrooms at the school and clinic. They now have seven installed at the the classrooms and they all were in good working order and clean. We bought trash cans for each bathroom. There are two operating bathrooms in the clinic. One needed repair. We bought parts and Celvin fixed the toilet in the bathroom.

The water system filters were clean and showed obvious signs that the filters have been cleaned regularly. They are getting a bit rough around the edges, but that is expected and they are due for change in early February. Celvin poijnted out to me without being asked that they and the UV light are to be changed on February 1st. I am very happy with the condition of the facilities.

We also bought parts and put up some shower curtains for the missionaries. Modesty and all that…

In the afternoon we went to look at the Hicaro school project. The parents of the school are putting stucco on the outside wall and have built a small kitchen behind the school. We also examined the building and property to discover future opportunities for additional projects. We plan to work at Hicaro tommorrow. It has been a very good first day.

Hola les escribo de Quimistan, estamos felices de tener nuestros hermanos norteamericanos aqui

Greetings from the sunny south! Thirteen of us arrived safely yesterday afternoon, and the remaining three come in this afternoon. We were bundled up for the cold rain in Atlanta, and arrived in San Pedro Sula early afternoon to be greeted by sunshine and 90 degrees.

This morning a group of us are setting up and completing training for eye testing and eyeglass fitting beginning this afternoon. They are sorting hundreds of pair of glasses donated by Lions clubs. June, Charles, Vanna, Brittany, and Shirley are practicing how to say in Spanish, ¨Rest your chin on this, and put your forehead here, I will adjust and focus the instrument. Blink twice and hold still.¨

Jerry and Michael are checking on the needs for minor maintenance on bathroom facilities around the school and clinic, and taking care of what needs to be done. They plan to go to Jicaro school this afternoon to check the status of project work underway there.

Earlier this morning, Sam visited the home of some young people whose mother died recently, to determine their needs. Right now he is talking with the director of the local school to determine progress the local community leaders have made toward funding their part of a proposed higher education project here.

Ken is setting up our schedule with local leaders, discussing what needs to be done during this trip, and exchanging thoughts about several projects they are proposing for the next few years.

Then there´s Roxanne. Unfortunately, when we arrived in Quimistan and unloaded the bus, we realized that her luggage which was sitting outside the bus when we loaded at the airport didn´t get on the bus. A trip back to the airport didn´t locate a missing bag. So today she is in San Pedro Sula, wearing borrowed clothes while she shops for essentials.

I´ve encouraged everybody on the team to use their cameras and to post their own notes to this blog. I think there may be a slight delay until we figure out how to use the system here. But look for more notes and pictures as the days go on.

Ken and I just now talked with Maynor Castillo (with the great help of a translator), the administrative assistant here. We have asked him to begin using this blog site to transmit his own messages and photos. His English is about as good as my Spanish, so we will need to locate a good English-Espanol-Inglais translation program we can all access on the internet and be able to understand each other. This could be a terrific way to keep people informed about what´s going on here.

Stay tuned. We´ll be back online sometime! Pray for us to be sensitive to God´s leading and to be good ambassadors for Christ.

Allen

Right -2.25 SPH, -2.00 CYL, 146 AX
Left -1.75 SPH, -1.50 CYL, 148 AX
So which pair do you go with?

What is that all about? It’s all about a group of mission team members who were trained Monday evening on how to use an Auto-Refractor. Chris Thaxton, Licensed Optician from Physician’s Eye Center in Aiken, is shown here watching over Roxanne to be sure she understands all the nuances of measuring Kathy’s vision with the instrument. Rita Sewell, in the background, was able to locate the instrument and arrange for its loan so it will be taken to Quimistan this week. The team also will take many, many pairs of glasses donated by Lions Clubs, as well as many that were purchased and donated locally. People in Quimistan and surrounding communities will come to the clinic for vision testing by the trained team members, and will be fitted with appropriate corrective glasses.

While this is going on in the next couple of weeks, other team members can be helping in a community Vacation Bible School. Others may be installing bathroom fixtures in a nearby school. Others will probably assist in administering fluoridation treatments to hundreds of students. Still others will be talking with community leaders about how they are progressing on a program to identify and help support community scholars who need assistance to continue their education beyond high school. It’s all part of living out our faith, trying to bring help, hope, and God’s love to some folks who need a helping hand.

Passports. Anti-malaria pills. Antibiotic prescriptions. mosquito repellant. Last-minute preparations are underway for fifteen mission team members from South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Canada who will converge in Quimistan, Honduras next Thursday, January 17.

One of the preparations is to start this blog as a way to provide real-time news from the mission field. If our efforts are successful, a member of the mission team will send periodic updates with maybe a photograph or two. We’re hoping this will allow you to share in some of the experiences we encounter as we interact with the people there and work on various projects. It will allow you to see in some small way how your donations are being used to improve the health, education, or housing of the people there.

The photo here shows three of more than a thousand students who were provided fluoride treatments last year to improve their dental health.