Extreme Makeover: Peruvian Home Edition

Ok...so we're not exactly Tye and his crew, but we try. After
visiting some of the most devastated regions of Pisco, we quickly
figured out that we were not equipped to go into those areas and just
start building. We were pretty sure that we would have either been
mobbed or had our tools stolen.

We did, however, meet Jimmy. Jimmy was the man who sold us our tour to
the islands. He lived with his wife and 3 daughters in a single room.
One of the things that stuck out to us about Jimmy was that he was an
extremely hard worker. He would get up at 5am and drive his toot-toot
(a motorcycle-ish taxi vehicle). He would work in the tour company
from 10am to 5pm and then after eating dinner and putting the girls to
bed, he would go out and drive the toot toot again.

Thanks to the help of many donors, we were able to build them a
bathroom, a new kitchen, and renovate their back room so that for the
first time Jimmy and his wife had a room separate from their 3 girls.
We also built bunk beds (and bought mattresses and pillows) for the
girls. (The bunk bed had more wood than their entire house. The family
joked that if there was another earthquake, they were all getting in
the bunk bed!).

The opportunity to see the looks on the girls faces as they went into
their (still unpainted) room was absolutely priceless. They climbed
all over the beds and seemed so joyful to have a place that they could
call their own. We bought the girls pink paint so they could paint
everything. They will be sending pictures in a week or so.

It didn't seem right to build a kitchen and not fill it with food, so
we went to the grocery store and got all the food that the four of us
could carry. It was very cool. We bought everything from big
quantities of staples like rice and beans and milk and chicken to
luxuries such as cereal and cookies. Of all the gifts that were given
to this family, it was the food that made them cry.

The icing on the cake was meeting the people from Pisco sin Fronteras
(Pisco without Borders). It's an organization where 20 and 30
somethings from around the world come and donate their time and skills
to take on projects in the community. It was an amazing place. I wish
we could have done more with them. They have done so many cool things
with so few resources. We were able to donate the drill, circular
saw, jig saw, hammers, and all the hardware and other miscellaneous
tools that we had leftover from the project to them.

As a town, Pisco was far from our favorite, but the relationships we
built and the things that were accomplished in just a few short days
will stick with us forever. We also want to thank Jen, Amanda, the
Mackeys, Debby, Annie, Ruth, Rebecca, Sandy, Courtnay, Mary, and some
other people who gave anonymously for contributing towards this
project. Your donations had a huge impact on this family.

The Benefits of Smoking

Ok this is important enough that I'm going to post it as my blog and the good deeds blog. It's long and complicated, so follow along. :)

 

We arrived in Loja after a 5 hour bus ride and had a quick meeting that we had hoped would land us some opportunities...it didn't. So we had a 5:30 meeting that our host was 30 mins late for and then she had to bail and reschedule for 9:30pm. She was an hour and 45 mins late for that meeting, only to take us to a loud, hot, smoke filled club. She has been incredibly helpful to us, but this atmosphere just wasn't working.

 

If you know me, you know that I can't stand smoke. It makes me angry. After about 20 people blew smoke in my direction, I felt like I wanted to punch someone, so we just took a cab and went back to our hostel.

 

We were supposed to meet with some orphanages the next day, but after the previous night, we were just ready to go in our own direction and find some places by ourselves. We heard about an orphanage, but the directions we had lead us to a Catholic home for seniors.

 

The nuns who run the place were less than enthused with our presence. They must not have read our blog about taking the other nuns to the mall, so there was no Sister Act 2. After a hasty tour of the place we were heading towards the gate, this woman screamed out in English (who are my peers?).

 

I should back up for a moment. When you're backpacking, you're limited to 5-7 days worth of clothes max, so every item is important. I had made fun of Cory for wearing an old First Baptist Youth shirt that had listed a bunch of people from the bible as our peers on the back. It's not that it's a bad shirt, it just wasn't very cool either.

 

So this lady asked us to come in and explain the shirt...and that's where we met Sarah. She was totally isolated from the rest of the population on the other side of the home and she is a phenomenal woman. Born in Austria, she speaks 17 languages fluently and has visited 127 countries and yet she was all alone.  Not being Catholic (or even a Christian) she was isolated from everyone...unable to move. She literally had no hip after receiving a bad operation 4 years ago.

 

She has been in movies with Elizabeth Taylor and even Shakira!  Craziness. During the Cuban revolution, Che Guavara hid some defectors at her farm in Jamaica on their way to the US. I would have absolutely thought she was crazy if I hadn't seen pictures of some of these things with my own eyes.

 

I was amazed that she immediately recognized that Jordan was Persian without him even saying his last name. She had lived in Iran for 3 years and said that it was her favorite country. She actually cried and sang him some songs in Farsi. She was so happy to be able to speak it one last time.

 

The moment she found out I was a pastor, she began to cry. She knew that her life was almost over and that she had lived it for herself. She had been asking the people at the home for THREE years to bring a pastor to her to tell her about Jesus, but they wouldn't do it. So, she asked me to tell her and I did. Today she decided to give her heart to Jesus and to try to live the rest of her days being a light in that dark place. And the only reason we were in that room was because I hate cigarette smoke, Elias asked our front desk clerk to give us (yet another) set of bad directions, and Cory wore that stupid shirt.

One of the other cool things is that we were able to go into town and find a pastor of a local church who was willing to start visiting her.  She had been suicidal and felt like there was no hope for this life or the life to come, so we felt like it would be really important to have someone follow up.  I have to admit that I was a little scared that we would leave the country and that she wouldn´t ever have another visitor again, but the pastor actually called her BEFORE we made it back to the nursing hime and agreed to start meeting with her regularly. I thought that was pretty amazing.

 

Thanks to gifts from Mercedes, Philip, and Donna, we were able to buy her prescription glasses (she had none and couldn't read anything), a large print bible, some groceries and hygiene items. I think the icing on the cake was a bouquet of fresh cut flowers for her room. Their gifts also went to buy medicine for a woman with muscular dystrophy, and food for her, her daughter (who is a single mom) and her young grandson (who also got a sweet soccer ball). We were trying to buy some medicine for the daughter, but we couldn't, so we bought tons of food so they could use their own money to buy the medicine.

 

So what started out as a terrible night followed by a lousy morning turned into the best day of the trip so far.

To see all of the other good deeds blog entries, visit http://yourfundsatwork.blogspot.com

Good deed pic 10/15

Letting (Their) Light Shine

A few days ago I really felt like I should buy some electrical tools. I think we are going to do a lot of electrical work for good deeds because it's something we can do with relatively few tools and the results can not only help someone, but save lives.

We met a Baptist Pastor today (if you want the whole story, check out Dan's recent blog). We are going to be doing more ministry with him tomorrow, but since we had the rest of today off, we asked if there was anything we could do.

It turns out that most of the lights in their sanctuary either didn't work at all or didn't work fully. We were able to buy the parts to repair all of the lights (except one) and also do some other repairs around the church that helped with some electrical safety issues.

It's actually pretty amazing how a little tape and some wire nuts and outlet covers can make something that was potentially lethal, relatively safe.

For ALL of the good deeds, visit http://yourfundsatwork.blogspot.com

A Deed and an Opportunity for Someone

We left the Quito to get out of the city and go to the small town of Baños, Ecuador. It's actually a pretty cool town. After eating some breakfast we talked to the owner of the little cafe who told us that the closest thing they had to an orphanage was a city-run daycare for low income mothers. We weren't really excited about the prospects, but it seemed like an open door, so we tried to go through it. Unfortunately, several taxi drivers didn't know where the place was.

 

So, we thought about how in our conversation with the cafe owner had told us that she had given jobs to several moms with young children to help them out. We spent some time talking to the moms and found out a few of their needs. We were able to buy 100 diapers for each of the babies and some soccer balls for the older kids. It was actually pretty amazing but when we asked the moms what they wanted for their non-infant kids and they all said pretty emphatically that they wanted vitamins. They said that their kids were often sick because they couldn't get the nutrition they needed, so we were able to buy each of the kids a bottle of vitamins. I know that these aren't huge life-changing gifts, but they seemed to really make a difference to these women who were scraping by.

 

I think the most important thing was that we were able to share not only what we were doing, but why we do it.

 

Medical Need

I know that this is a long shot, but one of the boys who is 12 has a tumor and has had 8 surgeries so far requires catheters (1 every 3 days) and colostomy bags. These things are very expensive in Ecuador, so she has done her best to get them from the US. Her cost has been about $1000 per year (in a country where a GOOD middle class salary is $6000 per year.). We've taken a picture of the type of catheter he needs. If anyone knows anyone in the medical field that could get some of these donated, it would be awesome. To this point his mom has been trying to clean and sterilize them to keep the cost down as low as it is, but that has been causing kidney and bladder infections. Any help would be great.

Setting up a Computer Lab

Thursday we were able to do another good deed.  The Wesleyan church in Panama City has setup a ministry training program and they've been trying to setup a computer lab to do some online classes. The pastor is a computer guru who was able to work on the computers, but we installed electricity and bought the tables to provide workstations. We also did some other work in the church.  We put some bare wires in conduit, fixed some fluorescent light fixtures, repaired 2 bad outlets, replaced a bad breaker, and fixed a safety hazard in the breaker box. Overall, it was nice to get our hands dirty and we really enjoyed spending the day with the pastor.   Thanks to Ed and Daniel from Orlando Wesleyan for your donation!

Check out all of our good deeds at http://yourfundsatwork.blogspot.com

Sister Act (and some other good deeds)

Sept 1 -
We had a fun time today. We visited a children's home run by 4 really cool nuns. After seeing what they were doing, we realized that while the kids get lots of donations, no one was doing anything special for these women who have sacrificed so much. In fact, just before we got there, the nuns were talking about their need for shoes. They each had one pair and they were pretty worn. So, we were able to take them to the mall and buy them not only a pair of shoes...but really good quality ones. It was really cool.

Sept 1-
A child approached us in the mall food court in San Jose, saying that his family was having financial problems and asked for money for food. Since we had some money left over from the previous good deed, we were able to buy food for his whole family.  Thank you to Stephanie from Seminole for your donation for these two good deeds.

Sept 4 -
We are staying with a missionary in Panama named Perry Hubbard. Dan has been working with him and helping them with tech stuff for years.  We arrived and their computer router was in the fritz, so thanks to Larry from California we were able to get him a new one.