Sporting the Bears hat in the sun, that’s my dad. We would have finished all our projects if we would have had more days like this one.
We meet a lot of people through out the year (about 3500) so we get pretty used to saying goodbye. It can be hard to do at times especially with our interns who spend anywhere from 3 weeks to 6 months. Jara is from our hometown and has been down for 5 months. Megan began meeting with here weekly for discipleship since we arrived in March, so it was difficult for us to say goodbye this last week. We miss Jara already as she was a very hard worker.
The foundation for our new church plant in San Pedro is really starting to take shape. In the previous update I shared that property had been prepped, but now the trenches are dug, the footers have been poured, the floor level is being layed and the bathroom walls are all up. As I also said previously, we just have to have the foundation ready for CWE by early July and they will take it from there.
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On Saturday, May 2, we hosted our very first soccer tournament at the Rawlings Complex. Rawlings built us 2 baseball fields, a softball field, tennis courts, basketball courts, volleyball courts and a soccer field. On the same property, a camp that will sleep 900 is under construction and next year construction will start on the Bible Institute.
We saw 12 young people accept Christ as their personal Savior as a result of this tournament. The great things about it is that this is a ministry of our church planting team and these teens will be followed up and discipled by those in our local church.
On April 27th, Tim and Ginny Craiger (Directors in the DR) celebrated their 36th anniversary. With orders from Ron Bishop (President of SCORE), we helped them celebrate by decorating their vehicle. Megan had no problem stepping up to help. While Aby Prado (Church planting missionary) distracted Tim, the rest of us got busy.
Tim’s quote “On this, our 36th anniversary, we are celebrating 34 of the best years of our lives.” We love Tim’s humorous personality.
April was a great month. In it we saw the land cleared for our new church plant in San Pedro. The trenches are now dug, the rebar is in place and has been inspected and the footers are now being poured. In July, Construction for Worldwide Evangelism (CWE), will come and in 4 weeks will build the church from ground up!
More Land! The church project will only take up 1/3 of the property that we own in San Pedro. Lord willing we will be able to build a boys orphanage, the transition home (for girls out of the orphanages) and a Christian School here as well.
We were especially grateful for the 6 men from Grace Baptist Temple (TN) for helping us paint our facility. They traveled with a medical team from their church and donated their time and a paint sprayer to our ministry. The medical team even pitched in during their free time to help get as much done as possible.
A rather tall order-Our complex is a huge project consisting of 4 large buildings (3 of the 4 are two stories)! We are still in need of others to help us finish painting. Please contact us if you or anyone you know would be interested in helping.