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Amber Waves of... Rice?

10/31/2012

And Other Sustainability Projects

In 2012 we've made a lot of progress in working towards self-sustainability. This year we've done several trial and error tests to see what is a good use of our resources.

It's easy to come into a project like this and assume that if we raise all our own food that we'll be saving money. Sometimes it's the contrary. The most obvious example of this is if we were to raise our own beans. Beans are a HUGE staple here. A lot of Hondurans feel that it's not a real meal if there aren't beans on the table. We go through about 400 lbs of beans a year with just our two kid's homes! Now, we have three options for acquiring beans: buy them from the grocery store, buy them locally, or grow our own. In this case buying them locally is by far the best use of our resources. We can buy a 100 lb sack of beans from local farmers for about $25, instead of all the time and land use for us to grow them or instead of paying 3x that price from the city.

There are some projects that we go into totally unsure if it will be a big saver or a one shot project. Take chickens as an example here. We bought some special egg-laying hens and found that we can get our eggs for about 1/3 of the cost compared to the stores. We're looking forward to getting more of these chickens (1 dozen eggs a day doesn't go very far when there's about 30 people living here). After that chicken-egg success story, we bought some chickens to raise for meat. This time we found that after we bought all the feed, etc. for these chickens that it was financially a wash, but took from our time and energy. So, now our plan is to buy chicken from the from the grocery store and collect eggs at home.

Thanks to many donators through last year's Gift Catalog, we now have a small herd of cows that will start giving milk around the end of this year. We will raise up the calves for future food. Cows for milk and meat are big savers for us. We already make our own yogurt, but now that we'll have so much more milk, we're excited to experiment with making cheese too. This video is from several months ago when we bought some new cows.

We are getting ready for our fourth coffee harvest since living in Urraco. This is one agricultural project that really helps us out financially and we hope to sell our coffee on a much larger scale in the future. Every year our harvest has grown, but to increase our production even more, we are going to plant another 2 acres of coffee. This should, over the course of the next three years, increase our production to nearly 1,500 pounds. Next year we want to roll out some specialty coffee based on local, traditional roasting methods. These locally influenced flavors are delicious, so if you're a coffee fan, you'll want to keep posted.

Our newest adventure in agriculture was growing rice. This area of the mountains is perfect for growing field rice (i.e. not grown in water). We were hoping this would be a great way to save money, because we estimate we'll go through about 1500 lbs of rice a year here. So we grew our own rice and drove it a couple hours to a processing plant to get the hulls removed. At that plant we learned that we can buy rice directly from them for half the price as the grocery store. So, will we be growing more rice of our own? Probably not, but if we had never done it once, we never would have learned where to buy it to save us the big bucks.

That's how the process works. We're trying new things all the time. It's been a great learning experience and we're making progress towards supporting ourselves. So, project by project, tree by tree, sheep by sheep, we're learning what things will get us closer to self-sustainability.

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Celebrating One Year of Youth Groups

10/30/2012

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We want to update everyone on our Friday Youth Nights. One year ago we started this youth service for the teenagers and kids in our area. We hoped to have a strong spiritual influence both in the lives of the children we care for, and for the young people in our community.

We are amazed at what God has done in one year. Our average weekly attendance is anywhere between 80-120 young people. We've built great relationships with the youth. Several of them have made a commitment to Christ and many are now more involved in their local churches.

We especially want to thank Kelvin and Monica Johnson who have stepped up and invested a lot of energy into this ministry, by organizing the events, speaking, and more. Kelvin and Monica, we appreciate you!

Please pray for this ministry that it continues to grow in effectiveness and reach even more young people.

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Thanks to the Groups of 2012

10/26/2012

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We want to express our gratitude to the teams that came during the summer and fall of this year. We are blessed to be connected with these churches, as well as the groups who represented and came to work alongside our Give Hope 2 Kids team. We accomplished a lot with their help. Thanks to everyone who came and worked!

Here's a brief synopsis of the projects that we worked on with teams:

Cloverhill came in June as our first large team for the year. They helped us organize our Library and Kid's Home storage, mixed cement for our new Office, and interacted with kids from our Home and our village through our community activities. We always enjoy working with the awesome young people that come from Cloverhill.

Cornerstone brought our youngest group of the year, but they all had great attitudes and were hard workers. This group spent time with the kids in our Home and community through our Library, English Classes, and Youth Night, as well as various work projects.

Faith sent a hard-core construction team. These guys worked so hard and flew through the project list we prepared for them. They put a roof on our Office and on a carport and helped make our Activity Center area better with sidewalks and bleachers, among other things!

Destination was our last group of the year, in September. They helped a lot with the foundation and walls of the Johnson's Apartment, wired our Office, put up more storage shelves for our Library, and more. We enjoyed making lots of new friends from this group. Thanks everyone!

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Pictures of Our Kids

10/23/2012

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Here are some photos of the precious kids we work with. In the short time they've been with us, we've seen so many positive changes in their lives. They've progressed in so many areas, from Junior's increased mobility, to Javier learning to do his homework before he plays. We're proud of the direction these kids are headed. We have big hopes for their futures, because we trust that God is looking out for these little ones.

After years of dreaming about helping kids like these, we can say without hesitation, that we’ve started to see the realization of our dreams. Praise God for making this possible!