Busy Summer – postings now resume!

Who forces children to sleep on dirt floors?

The reality of the life of a child in the villages is that there simply is no money for the ‘basic’ needs of life. Many don’t have enough food to eat, decent clothes to wear or warm blankets at night.  In 95% of the families, up to six children have to “bed down” on a dirty, cold, damp dirt floor. There is no money for an extra bed.

The Bed Project will help every child in over 300 homes by giving them a bed – up to four or more will sleep in this one, over-sized wooden bed. This will keep them off the dirt, so they can be warmer each night.

This is a health improvement project as much as anything. We see many sicknesses in the children due to sleeping on the dirt floors, and the use of these beds will help to dramatically improve their health. Respiratory problems and other sickness will decrease if the child doesn’t have to sleep on the dirt floor.

The cost of a sturdy wooden bed, 4 ft by 7 ft, is $40. We are seeking sponsors so that we will be able to provide a bed for each needy family.

These aren’t “hand outs” -  the people pay for the beds by giving us Volunteer Hours.  Each family works for 13 hours in exchange for a bed. Work  includes helping with the school kitchen including construction of the new kitchen, cleaning up trash, helping with maintenance work at our clinic, helping to make beds and build stoves for other needy families, and doing community project work.

We are excited about The Bed Project, because while it IS about the beds, and it IS about improving the health of children, as families work out their hours it will also be a great catalyst to create a better sense of community. We’ve seen it before, even in the USA, that when poor people help others in need, and help to improve their community, it creates a sense of self-esteem and community pride.

If you can help us to buy materials for more beds, click on the Donate tab and donate online.

THANK YOU.

They Came from…. Kentucky!

A group from Kentucky Adoption Services came to visit for a day and were a great blessing to the people of the village. This group worked very hard all day building beds, doing dozens of lice shampoos and helping in the clinic.

SEE A SLIDE SHOW (w/music) OF THEIR DAY IN THE VILLAGE: <click here>

New Slide Show: CCU Student Trip

A group of 14 came to visit and work for two days.

They helped in the clinic, built beds, did many lice shampoo treatments and, painted an entire school!

Here’s a little slide show with music of their trip!  (Missing a few photos at this point, but will add soon.)

To view, click on words above, or Mr. Smiley!

“Space Age” solar comes to the Village

Stan, our very mission-minded friend from Colorado, came to visit, help and work for two weeks at end of April, first week of May. The rainy season starts May 1, and it lived up to its reputation by starting to rain the night of April 30th.

Stan has been on dozens of mission trips to at least eight countries and has seen all sorts of missions and living situations. He’s an innovator and visionary and brought a solar cooker that he designed, with the idea to see if it would be something to use in the villages. The villagers were very intrigued, as they had never seen anything so ‘space age’ as a large silver solar dish! (see slide show link, below)

We then showed Stan the living conditions and how the children’s health is made worse because they have to sleep on the floor. We shared with Stan how we wanted to start some sort of “Bed Project”, and he came up with a workable design for a wooden bed. We call it a ‘sleeping platform’ because we don’t include a mattress. With the dirt, filth, chickens, dogs, and children who aren’t 100% “bathroom-oriented”, a mattress would become a dirty mess in no time.

With these wonderful wooden sleeping platforms, the children can now sleep off the ground and they stay dry and much warmer because the wood doesn’t pull out the warmth from their bodies like the damp dirt floor does.  The children LOVE the wooden beds, and we are getting dozens of heart-tugging requests from other mothers who also have children who sleep on the dirt floor. (most do)

CLICK HERE to see a slide show of Stan’s trip. (Happy kids on bed, below)

New Slide show of Clinic – nice!

Click <here> to see new slide show of Hands of Hope Medical Clinic. Nice photos, and very nice music… listen to the words!

Click: Village Life in Pictures

It seems like we notice something new and interesting each time we drive up into the mountains to the villages where we have the clinic. The colorful scenes and the smiling people don’t tell the whole story, though. There is so much sickness, poverty and domestic violence that we see each day.

It takes hours for the mother and children in each family to hunt for, cut, collect and return with firewood.

Only a few families in the villages we serve can afford a cow; it takes years of saving to get one, or maybe a loan at 30% interest from the bank.

The cow is a very important addition, but less for milk or meat. Mostly to sell the calves, or raise the calf for sale.

This family has a dirt floor house with adobe blocks for the first 3 feet of wall, then cornstalks for the walls and a leaky tin roof. They keep their very skinny cow close to the house to keep it safe, and during the day, the children will walk it and look for patches of grass along the side of the road. Land is too valuable to use for grazing.

Marcella, age 40 has 9 children including this little one she carried the day I took this photo. She didn’t want to smile, because she has no front teeth. Many women lose most of their teeth by age 40, due to lack of dental care and poor nutricion.

She’s very, very  poor and has had a hard life so far. She comes to the clinic sometimes, and is nice and softspoken and we’d like to help her…. but it’s hard to know just how. There are SO many families in need, so many needs and just not enough money or time or person-power to do it all.

It seems that the poorest areas in many countries, have the greatest scenery and views. Sort of a cruel joke of sorts. The beauty of Guatemala is quite amazing, such wonderful and different types of scenery.  Sometimes we miss it, though, because it’s hard to see the beauty among the poverty sometimes.

I love the colors in this photo. I caught this little girl off guard as she gazed listlessly at some children playing soccer in the street. She was intrigued, but didn’t seem to want to participate.

This house is across from our clinic building. Behind that yellow metal door there are several dirt floor houses made from corn stalks. We plan to build beds for the children living there.

It’s really a harm to the health of children to sleep on dirt floors, especially in the rainy season; the floors are damp and cold. The rainy season is May 1 to November 1.

This 8-year old boy in our village needs to work to help his family, so he can’t go to school.

Here, he’s carrying the leaves from a corn stalk, which his mother dries and sells to others who use them to wrap little “chuchitos”, sort of like miniature tamales.

Why was this old lady so thankful? (tears?)

It wouldn’t seem like such a big deal for most of us – but she thanked us with tears in her eyes.

The Rosenberger group (Light and LIfe Mennonite Church) from New Mexico was here for nine days and we poured cement floors for widows who lived in cornstalk shacks with dirt floors.

The dirt floors could never be truly clean, were damp, and bugs and spores were free to come up through the floor.

The concrete floors are SO much nicer, drier, cleaner and healthier.

To reach these “houses”, required walking up very steep paths, quite a long way. We couldn’t get materials delivered there, so we had to premix the cement on the road and put it in bags, put bags in the pickup, drive pickup partly up the road, then carry the bags the rest of the way. Unload. Repeat.

This lady isn’t a widow but her husband is blind. He tries to earn money by going to the field with his cane on one hand and a hoe in the other. Quite sad, and they really hardly have enough food to eat.

Tough job carrying bags of concrete uphill

The houses that needed floors were up the side of a mountain and for one, we had to walk along an open sewer. And for each, we had to carry the bags of concrete, sand and stone. Tough, especially in the hot sun at an elevation of 7,600 feet.

But the Rosenberger team from “Light of Life Mennonite Church”, New Mexico, worked really hard with a great attitude.

School Kitchen – no food for the children?

The construction of the new school kitchen in our village is coming along. We received a generous donation from the Mike B family which will help pay for the roof struts and roof and floor and some other kitchen work.

The shame is that the school has announced that they now don’t have money to buy food for the school to feed the children.  This is really sad news because for many children, the one nutritious and hot meal of the day is the one they were receiving at school.

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