Orphanage Visit

We visited Orphanage Emmanuel where we lead several short term teams before going full time.  We were interested in sharing information about heat retention cooking with some of the leaders, checking on what the status of the hospital they are going to construct, and give Kelly an opportunity to see all the changes to the orphanages as she was last there about five years ago.

This is a photo of the team house with our truck parked out front.  The team house can hold about 60 people and there was currently a large team there who were doing various construction projects including the final touches on a new house for the big girls.

One of the things that is so impressive about Emmanuel, which is home to about 600 children, is just how beautiful the grounds and buildings are!

We were able to spend a significant amount of time with the girl we sponsor.  We have been sponsoring her for seven years, which was when she first came to Emmanuel, and now our relationship is very different as we can actually have a conversation with her!

Matt was able to give a Bible lesson to the "Power Toddlers."  These are 35 little guys with lots of energy!

The lesson was on Christ being our King and how when we put our lives under Him we do so for protection, provision and salvation, and in turn Christ has total reign over our lives.

These little guys pray hard, they pray with force and it is such a good example for all of us!

This is the new "Big Girl's House" that was finish and had this opening ceremony welcoming the girls to their new home!

Katja, to the right of Matt, is the Administrative Director of the orphanage and her husband, Max, oversees the little boys house.  We were able to spend an evening with them, share the heat retention lesson and make a bunch of balloons with their kids.  Katja actually cooked her first meal using the cooker the very next day!

Ellen and Kelly spent several mornings at the clinic taking care of six month filing backlog!

They also tackled a little construction project in the clinic.

Here Ellen is plugging in the newly mounted lighted examination scopes and Kelly is cleaning up the dust!

Proud trabajadoras (workers)!

We all spent a lot of time out in the special needs yard just playing with and loving on the kids.

This little guy with the blue balloon hat was burnt over much of his body in a fire at another orphanage.  He is doing very well and really enjoyed his balloon hat... then a balloon sword... followed by a balloon dog... and many more!

Our time at Emmanuel went very quickly.  We really enjoyed getting to meet the folks there on the construction team.  The majority of the team were all retirees who had been coming for years.  They could be going other places and spending their time in tours and leisure, but they have chosen to set aside from one to three weeks a year to serve.  In talking with them it was also obvious that they have remained faithful in serving in their home church also.  The oldest team member was 93, he still gets down to the wood shop making things like shelves for the new house, and he has a very strong testimony about living for Jesus!

A New Year and We are Off and Cooking

It seems amazing that 2014 is here and we're already back into ministry in Honduras!

One big joy for us is that our daughter Kelly came to Honduras mid-January and will be here for most of February.  She has completed a two year program in the Philippines in a Christian birthing clinic where she "caught" 92 babies!  She is certified by the North American Registry of Midwives and is now pursuing options to use her training on the mission field.  She's talking to some doctors, checking out clinics and visiting various ministries while in Honduras.

Kelly jumped right in with helping us here in the various daily projects we are doing.  Here she was helping to fill a new heat retention cooker.

We fill the bags with rice hulls that act as insulation for the cooker.  The wind was causing the hulls to blow all over the place, including into our eyes.

Here Kelly is closing the bag by hand sewing the fill hole.

We had our first heat retention cooking presentation at a ministry that works with single teen moms.  They have 12 girls, their 12 babies and two "Tias".  Tia means "aunt" and these are women who help oversee the daily operations.  Some of the girls come to them as young as 12 years old, their need is for help be a mom and also help in growing up themselves including finishing school.

We wanted the girls to get to taste two types of food with the heat retention cookers and so we made both chicken with rice and frijoles (beans).  We have a problem in transporting the prepared foods because we have to drive over very rocky dirt roads and some rather steep hills.  So, to minimize clean up we placed the cooker in the black trash bag and the pot with frijoles we "cooked" using our cooler.

We start the lesson by explaining the heat retention cooking process and then serving up the food.  The young moms loved the food!

Even in a nice facility like the one they live in, with an indoor kitchen and electric stove, they still cook daily with wood.  Why they do this is simply because they cook beans daily and it takes three to four hours.  That would be a lot of electricity and so they opt for an outside stovetop that uses wood.

Now imagine their reaction when they learn they can simply boil the beans for 15 to 20 minutes and then put the pot in a heat retention cooker for four, six or even eight hours!  They are really excited about heat retention cooking!  It's significantly less wood, less smoke exposure, less opportunities to be burned by the fire, less possibility that the food will be burned... there are such big positive gains from heat retention cooking!!

Kelly served Janet, home director with her husband Greg, a sample of the cooking.  Janet loved it and was thrilled to have her own cooker!

As the young moms and children finished up eating, Ellen went over the lesson and answered questions.  Most questions are really just asking for a repeat of what's already been taught and discussed.  It's ok and expected, as this is a paradigm shift in cooking and so it takes a little time and processing for anyone to accept this new way of cooking.

After they tasted how good the food was, we moved on to dessert... the spiritual lesson.  It was a sweet time of discussing "How do we, as believers, maintain our spiritual heat, our passion, for Jesus?"  We know that not all the girls are believers and this is a great opportunity to share with them what are the disciplines that need to be in a believer's life so they can see part of what it means to be a disciple.  When we share these disciplines we also read and discuss verses that go with them:

   Read the Bible: John 20:30-31, 2Timothy 3:16-17
   Fellowship: 1John 1:3, 1John 1:7
   Pray: Ephesians 6:18
   Share the Gospel: Mark 16:15, Acts 5:42
   Serve Others: Ephesians 6:7
   Go to Church: Hebrews 10:24-25:

"And let us consider how we may spur one another on 
toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, 

as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another - 

and all the more as you see the Day approaching."

The directors are doing a magnificent work loving and discipling, and have even had the pleasure of seeing some surrendering their lives to Jesus and being baptized!

We feel very privileged to be able to spend time sharing a meal, teaching and fellowshipping with these little ones loved by God.

Greg and Janet are sweet, sweet Christians who, as are we, are giving themselves freely that some may be saved!!  We are so thankful for their friendship!

Tamalitos with the Neighbors

We had a great corn harvest from our backyard this year and decided to try making tamalitos.  Matt's become really good at growing corn, but then again, he always was a bit corny!

I had never made tamalitos and asked my neighbor, Noya, if she would teach me how.  So she invited me into her kitchen to learn.  Tamalitos are only made with new fresh corn that still has some "milk" in the kernels.  It's a simple food of ground corn and a little sugar.

Noya and her husband, Alexander (above) and I had a little corn shucking party on their front porch.

The corn is not shucked in the usual way of simply pulling off the tulsa, or husks, but rather by first cutting around the base to preserve the "tulsa" for wrapping up the tamalito.

Here's our bucket of "tulsa" ready.

Noya was so fast as she cut the corn off the cob.

We had to go across town (~4 blocks) for our next step to grind the corn. The woman in the blue shirt has a little home business of running a big electric grinder.  She charged me 50 cents, which is the normal rate.

The grains of corn were passed through twice to be extra fine for making tamalitos.

Back in Noya's kitchen, we put a little sugar into the ground corn and then put a spoonful of the mixture into the "tulsa."  Noya made it look way easier than it really was.

Basically, each tulsa gets a big spoonful of very liquidy corn glop.  The big trick was keeping the corn glop in the tulsa as I rolled the edges around the glop and then turn up the end.  Trust me, it takes practice... or maybe being born Honduran.  :)

After each tulsa is filled, rolled and closed off on one end, it's put in a pot.  This is another skill that's very easy to take for granted as they have to be placed together just so in order that they don't fall over in the pot.

Here's our full pot almost ready to be put on the fire.

Here you can see the pot with the wood fire behind it.

The final step before cooking was putting a few more pieces of "tulsa" over all the tamalitos and then carefully pouring in about an inch or two of hot water so as to steam the rolls.  After the lid was on the top of the pot, we wait.  The tamalitos cooked for about 45 minutes, until they were firm.

Here's a picture of a cooked tamalito (right) alongside a tamale (left). (Tamales are made with corn, too, but a completely different recipe.)  Often our Honduran friends will make a meal of just tamalitos. While we do well to eat one or two because they are so filling, our friends will eat four, five, six or more in one sitting!

A week later, Matt and I decided to try and make them ourselves.  Halfway through, we had Noya come over to check on us.  She was excited to see "her students" practicing their new skill set!

¡Buen provecho!  (Enjoy your meal!)

Missions is Kids Play

We've received a lot of great comments and questions from our August monthly email newsletter and because of the interest in our trip to the orphanage we decided to expand on the trip with a blogpost.  There will be a little redundancy to the newsletter, but also a little more info and more photos.

2013 Maryland Team

We joined a team of 34 to serve at Orphanage Emmanuel in Guaimaca , Honduras for 10 days  This is the same orphanage we lead several teams to before becoming full-time missionaries.  You might not think that orphanage work goes in line with community development, but we firmly believe that the best way to reach a community, or change a country, is through reaching the children.  So, whether they are youths in the community or orphans at an institution, we desire to show the love of Jesus and share the truth of God’s Word.  Maybe this is how we can best put into practice today Jesus’ words to, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” Mt 19:14-15

Our first team was 2007 and only consisted of 10 folks including the 4 Zells

We started short term mission trips to Honduras in 1996 with Dr. Sam Maldonado, a dear friend and co-worker from my previous life at the FDA, and ten years later we started leading our own teams to Orphanage Emmanuel in 2007.

2009 trip, Zell family with orphanage church in background

The team that we started taking to orphanage Emmanuel was taken over by a couple, Dan and Joanne Andrews, who had been part of our last team.  They had a team scheduled for this year and invited us to join their team and help out with translating.

Balloon wars are always a blast!!
We had several during the trip.

Orphanage Emmanuel is home to about 600 kids ranging from just delivered and still in diapers up to young people in their early twenties about to head out on their own, and the orphanage has been operating now for 22 years.
 

This is Friday morning "Big Circle" where all the kids
gather for praise, prayer and a teaching.

In our normal use of the term orphan we think of children whose parents have died.  At Emmanuel that strict definition would apply to about 10% of the children and the other fall into a wider category of children without parents to care for them.  These are children whose parents are living but may have abandoned them on the street for lack of funds to care for them,  or maybe their mother has taken a new boyfriend/husband and he does not want to support the children from another man, or in the worst cases they may have been the victims of abuse in their home.  Whatever the case, the Lord has brought them to a place where they are well provided for and get to hear about Jesus often.

The "Small Boys House", made up of about 30 little boys,
recited an entire chapter from the book of Isaiah for Big Circle.

Here's a couple of those future Bible scholars close-up. 

Small boy's circle.  They are a riot!

Monday through Thursday each house has it's own small circle for praise, prayer and teaching.  I was able to give the teaching a couple times at the small boy's house in Spanish and without a translator!  It's so fun to talk to these little guys about living for Jesus!

One of the projects was to put the team's native English
speaking skills to work teaching English.

While we were at the orphanage the team had prepared and brought materials for several projects.  Several folks measured all the kids for clothing sizes to go on the Christmas list, a couple of folks gave hair cuts to hundreds of kids, they brought lots of crafts to do with the kids, they had materials for decorations and cooked an Hawaiian dinner to bless the staff, several folks helped at the school in the English classes, people shared at the morning prayer and worship circles, and many of the men shed pounds in sweat digging a 160' trench for a sewage line for a newly constructed house.

Power Toddlers getting a little custom hair styling attention;
If that's possible using just one cutting tip.
Ellen's brother, Matt Jones, is the one wearing the hat.

There were probably many other things done, including being with the kids in their respective yards playing soccer or making balloons and the like, but that's a good list to let you know what kept us busy for 10 days.

Field day planning.  In the center looking straight at the camera is Dan Andrews
 who is the current team leader with his wife, Joanne.

One of the biggest single events, that we did with four different groups, was a Field Day followed by a hot dog meal.  There were seven different stations including face painting, water guns, sack races...

We wanted to make sure that all the kids had fun!

Ok, I'm a big kid too!

"Gee, I'm pretty thirsty" has never come to my mind looking at a plunger.
Honest, the game was just to move the water with the plunger and not to drink it!!

The Hawaiian dinner for the staff was another major team activity.  This was a real blessing to the staff, the food was delicious, the tables were decorated very nicely, and child care was provided.  Ellen served as hostess while I was a waiter.

Ellen and her brother, Matt Jones, before the guest arrived.

Teens on the team going Hawaiian.

One of the ways that the orphanage is supported is by sponsoring a child.  It's been a joy and a privilege for Ellen and I to sponsor Ruth since our first year to the orphanage.  She is growing into a wonderful Christian young lady.

Playing "Qwirkle" with Ruth at the ice cream shack.

Our first year with Ruth in 2007!

Ruth and Matt 2008

We do have a couple other pictures we could post, like 900+, but I'll have to keep it short do to our internet limit.

We're looking to go back in September to share with some of the staff about heat retention cooking!

Blessings!!  Matt

No Water in Humuya

We live in a pueblo or maybe it's more of a  'pueblocito' which is little town.  One of the most amazing things is that in our little town is that we have electricity and water pretty much every day.  The electricity goes out occasionally but is normally restored pretty quickly, and the water is shut down about once a month to clean the tank but otherwise we have water every day.

Our water is not potable, that is, it's not drinking water, but it's fine for washing clothes, doing dishes, taking a shower and watering plants.  This is because the water is piped directly from a river into the community tank that serves the town.  They pipe the water from a long way off, like 4 miles, so that it's coming from a cleaner part of the river.  To do that they run 4 miles of four inch white PVC pipe over ground to the tank.  That's a lot of pipe!

About six days ago someone, or some people, not living in our pueblo decided to take a machete to the pipe and destroyed several sections.  It was a lot of work to fix because they had to walk the pipeline to find the broken sections.  They fixed the first section not knowing there was another area cut until they tried to refill the tank.

In all we had five days without water.  One advantage to such a crisis that the people here have over how we live in the states is that they all have a pila (pronounced 'pee-la') which is a large concrete tank to hold water that is part of their kitchen.  They use this water for cleaning clothes and doing dishes.  So, they have a ready reserve of water at their house that can normally carry them through a short water crisis.  How long will that water last?  It's apparently about four days.

On the fourth day without water the containers of water we keep on hand for just such a time had run out and so we started what turned into many trips down to the river to bring up water for ourselves and several of our neighbors, especially the elderly.

We only took a couple photos and videos of our water delivery.  The people were sooo grateful to get dirty river water that they gave us big hugs and even kisses on our cheeks, and we told each one we were happy to be able to give them water in the name of Jesus Christ.

After fetching and delivering water we were rather beat and when you consider the weight of water, it's actually pretty understandable.  Each gallon of water weighs 8.34 lbs.  We were moving about 32 gallons of water with each trip which is about 267 lbs and we did many trips!  Our muscles are sore, we're sunburned, our knuckles are scraped up from the plastic containers, and we feel great to have loved on our community!  Thanks so much to all of you who make it possible for us to be here! 

"Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”  By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.  John 7:38-39

"He (Jesus) said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life.” Rev 21:6