Liz Kinchen shares this story of a wonderful ministry that began with one small congregation refusing to turn from people in poverty and instead dreaming of What One Can Do. Read it and imagine What Your Congregation Can Do, too.

Some 27 years ago, a couple from Minnesota living in Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras, made a life-altering decision to respond to the devastating poverty they witnessed on the streets of this impoverished country. With help from their small Episcopal church, they rented a house and collected five boys living in the streets of Tegucigalpa and offered them shelter, food, clothing, an education and a new life. This was the humble beginning of El Hogar de Amor y Esperanza.

Since this early beginning, God has graced El Hogar with growth and success in its mission to ?provide a loving home and education in a Christian environment for abandoned, orphaned and hopelessly poor children, enabling them to fulfill their ultimate potential as productive human beings in Honduras.?

Today, El Hogar has over 200 boys and three campuses: an elementary school for grades 1-7; a Technical Institute where boys can choose to learn a trade in carpentry, metal work or electricity; and an Agricultural School where boys learn crop production or farm animal care. By learning a trade with which they can get a good job, these boys are breaking the cycle of poverty from which they came. El Hogar is also teaching these children that they have a loving God and they are precious and worthwhile. With the self-esteem they develop at El Hogar, they have the confidence to enter their new lives upon graduation, as role models for their communities.

El Hogar is an oasis in a sea of despair. Honduras is fraught with extreme poverty, hunger, crime and a growing threat of gang warfare. The children taken into El Hogar come from the poorest of the poor. At El Hogar, you hear the joyful laughter of children who know they have been given a new chance at life. These are children who deeply understand the love of God and the heart of generosity. When Hurricane Mitch devastated the country in 1997, and the displaced homeless of Tegucigalpa came to the gates of El Hogar, these boys took their few possessions ? a set of clothes and their shoes ? and gave them away at the gates. They understand need. They understand generosity. They understand salvation. This is what they have learned at El Hogar.

At El Hogar there is a wait list to enter all three of its centers; the need is enormous. But El Hogar is transforming lives and is transforming Honduras, one child, one family, one neighborhood at a time. The growth of El Hogar from five boys 27 years ago to over 200 boys today is funded completely by donors and sponsors in North America. Our Executive Director in Honduras, the Rev. Richard Kunz, travels to the US and Canada several times a year to preach in churches and speak at groups to tell the story of El Hogar. A former parish priest at All Saints, Princeton New Jersey, Rich is now a missionary of the Episcopal Church living in Tegucigalpa Honduras.

In addition to El Hogar?s sponsorship program, where an individual or church can be assigned a specific boy to support and follow through his years at El Hogar, El Hogar organizes mission teams of volunteers to go to Honduras for a week at a time, to live in community with the boys and to help with basic projects on the campuses. Mission teams go on home visits to the neighborhoods the boys come from. They see, first hand, what life is like for close to 40% of the world?s population. They see, first hand, what can be done to change this reality, bit by bit. They see, first hand, just how far the dollar can go ? all the way to offering new life where before there was only despair and early death. They see, first hand, what love can do. They return home and see their lives ? and all life - with new eyes. Many see that it is possible to make a difference; poverty can be eradicated ? with strength, courage and the will to do so. El Hogar, both the children who live there, and the many people who make it possible ? are a living, breathing example of God?s transforming spirit and the Millennium Development Goals in action.

To learn more about the ministry of El Hogar, visit their website: www.elhogar.org or contact their Executive Director in North America, Liz Kinchen at elhogar@3crowns.org or 781-729-7600.