FINISHING TOUCHES

These are pictures from Feb. of '09 where they are starting to put the finishing touches on the classrooms and finishing up things such as plumbing, electrical, and floors.

Right now the dedication of the school is scheduled for July 26, 2009. It will be a very exciting day for the town and for the congregation of Resurrection Church. Their school year begins in January, so this will give them time to prepare for the school year. Trinity Roselle's Mission Ministry is looking forward to this date too. Hopefully several people will be able to attend the dedication and share in the joy and see the results of God's faithfulness to us.

Check out this floor. Doesn't it look great?!

JUNE '08--FUNDRAISING EFFORTS

Our fundraising efforts began in earnest, and we had several garage sales that turned out well. In addition to that, we sold Guatemalan souvenirs at church and at the Roselle Market. These are some of the types of things we were selling.

In the above picture, several of us are looking at the musical instrument "tun", which is an ancient Mayan instrument that is similar to a drum. They are made of wood and are beautifully carved. We also had flutes that were carved with the Guatemalan national bird, the "quetzal".

This market in Guatemalan City had all kinds of fun stuff!

We did several other things for fundraising, but it's pretty difficult to find a niche, as so many people are trying to raise funds for their organizations too. God was with us though and proved his faithfulness!

MORE FUNDRAISING ITEMS...

So many things to buy -- so much color! It's hard to see on the t-shirts, but a lot of them have colorful dolls in yarn sewn on to the shirts. Prices seemed reasonable to us, and bargaining is part of the procedure. I've outgrown the bargaining thing but will do it every now and then if I'm buying in a large quantity. Of course the big decision is to pick things that we will be able to resell at our market booth -- so much guess work! :)

4/10/08 PLANNING BEGINS FOR OUR NOV. '08 VBS

I'm getting a little out of sequence here, mainly because there was just so much going on between mission trips, fundraising for the school, construction updates, and decisions to make regarding the upcoming Nov. '08 VBS.

After returning from our '07 construction mission trips, several of us started talking about how much fun it would be to do a VBS with the congregation of Resurrection Church. Pastor Jasinto commited to doing a VBS with us in November of '08, and plans began in earnest to use Concordia Publishing's VBS program, Sea Odysseys, for our week long VBS. This is a very unique program in that it is written originally in Spanish FOR Spanish speakers and is not just a translation of a program that is already written in English.

The American team agreed that we wanted to do more than just a morning session at Resurrection Church, and we proposed to Pastor Jasinto that we go to a nearby community called Los Limones to do a scaled down version of the VBS. Los Limones is near the church but is light years away in terms of development. The people are very, very poor there and live without running water or electricity. In both places, Resurrection was responsible for teaching the songs and Bible stories, and our team would be responsible for the crafts, games, and snacks. We also wanted to give a hygiene talk and distribute hygiene kits. Pastor Jasinto is a big proponent of health education and gave us the green light for this.

MORE CONSTRUCTION PHOTOS

It's very difficult to get pictures of the construction, no matter what angle you use! But many pictures have been taken at varying stages, and it is starting to look like a real school! These first 2 photos were taken in November of '08.

Here they are getting ready to pour the stairs that lead from a raised area to the lower area. Everything is done by hand, and the structure is very, very sound. To the left (in the blue shirt) is Don Francisco, the foreman for the project. He really knows what he is doing and has supervised a good project.

These photos of the stairs were taken in January of '09.

There have been many skilled and unskilled laborers involved in the construction. We felt bad when we learned that some of the unskilled laborers were earning $5 a day for their work -- and it is HARD work as you can well imagine. Lugging everything around in the 100+ degree temperatures requires much more stamina than I have!

THE DELICIOUS COFFEE!

This is the coffee that we brought back from Guatemala to sell as a fundraising item. I'm not a coffee drinker myself, but everyone says it's great and describes it as very mellow. It's a little hard to read the label, but it says "Cafe Chorti". I think what makes it really good is that it is SO fresh. Although we didn't do it overnight, we eventually sold 500 bags of the coffee. It's a win-win situation -- the coffee plantation gets to sell a lot of their product, we sell great coffee for a great price and have happy customers, and all the profits go back to Guatemala in support of the school. It comes in both bean and ground form and is $8.00 a bag. Yum!!!!