When we look back and realize that we've only been building for 5 months, we are amazed at how much progress we've made.  To accomplish this we've had a team of great Honduran workers and several volunteer groups that have jumped in and helped.  Everything has been coming up fast!

 

At the moment we are preparing to put roofs on the first house for kids, an office, and a storage shed.  We've also started working on the second house for kids and have almost completed that foundation.

 

Besides the buildings, we've also made significant progress in general property development.  We now have electricity connected, which included purchasing our own transformer.  We have a 600-gallon water tank high up in the hills and a 2500 foot pipe system, which brings us our mountain spring water with amazing pressure.  Also, we have the fence along the front of the property starting to come up.  For agricultural progress, we have 2000 mahogany seedlings being planted up a mountain and another 2000 mahogany starts coming up.  We also have been planting many other fruit trees for future good eating and revenue production.

  

As we've got to know the property more, our vision continues to grow.  Different parts of the land suggest certain uses and our ideas for the future are continuing to develop.  Along with the houses for kids, some of our other plans include a community library and playground, a dorm for volunteer groups, fruit groves, and a tropical demonstration garden.  We are certainly grateful for this property and excited to see what it can become. 

Much of the building this year happened because of volunteer groups that came down and helped.  We want to express our thanks to the two teams from Virginia and the team from North Carolina that came this year so far.  They worked hard and got dirty.  The jobs they did weren't glamorous, but it's really made a difference for our building.  Thank you again! 

 

We are also looking forward to great times with three upcoming groups from Indiana.  We're hoping that with their help we can have the first house ready to move into and the second well on it's way.

You may remember a family of six girls that we have fed and looked out for during the past year.  Their mother had abandoned them and their father worked and lived an hour away during the week.  

 

A couple of months ago things came to a crises point for them, where they received direct threats and just weren't safe in their home alone.  At that point we brought them to live where we could care for them directly and know they were safe 24-hours-a-day.  They stayed under our care for three weeks.

 

While this was a wonderful time to spend with them, we knew that it wasn't the best long-term solution for them.  With their father around and interested in them, we felt it was best for them to grow up in their own family.  Our solution was to offer their father a construction job at our property, so he could move back home and still provide for them.

 

Our solution is working well!  It's been about a month now that their father has been living at home.  It is so good knowing that he is there with them every night.  He has also been a great addition to our work team and we see things moving faster because of him. 

  

We feel privileged to have cared for the girls personally for those three weeks.  It was a great glimpse of what life will be like when we take in kids.  We really enjoyed giving that time to them.  More importantly though, we were excited to help a family get back together.  We feel that is a great accomplishment of our goal to Give Hope 2 Kids.

 

I wanted to include our most recent photo of the two oldest of the girls (Ruby is on the right side and Roxana on the left).  This photo was taken at a half-marathon that the girls ran in San Pedro Sula.  They were two of only three girls that went to represent  Instituto El Rey.  They are both exceptional runners and we are very proud of them.

We want to keep in touch with you, so you can feel involved in what we're doing here in Honduras.  To do this, we're trying to be faithful blog writers, so please come and see the progress there firsthand.  We've also just updated our photo slideshow so you can see more of what's happening here.  If you're on facebook, we've just added a Give Hope 2 Kids group, where you can leave us messages and discuss what we're doing.