Christmas Eve 2010

We started the day mixing up some sugar cookie dough.

We had planned on a picnic lunch in a park, but it was cold and rainy, so we had a "picnic" in Timmy's room under a fun tent Dan made.

What could be cuter than our kids smiling at each other?

Tabitha joined the cookie making fun after lunch.

We had another picnic (this time in front of our tree) before leaving for church.

We worshipped with our church family; we enjoyed singing familiar Christmas hymns in Spanish... and eating tamales, a Christmas tradition here. 

I visited with my good friend Felicia.  Look at what a mama tica I've become, wearing a sweater and keeping Tabitha completely bundled when it was probably about 70 degrees! 

So thankful for a fun Christmas Eve with our little family!

I'll be home for Christmas

... home, in Costa Rica.

We'll be here, just the four of us, for Christmas this year. I've been feeling nostalgic and homesick for the States the past couple of days. When I'm missing our family there, my mind can wander to a scene of what it would be like if we were there with them. The scene is pretty charming and ideal to me. I see candles glowing, stockings hanging, fire burning, family laughing, snow falling, grandparents and my little ones snuggling. A mist of tears drowns this scene, and as I wipe them away, my eyes and ears are opened to the scene surrounding me.

I see a sweet newborn babe's newly discovered smile, a big open-mouthed grin, as she gazes up at me...

I hear our tea kettle whistling, even though it's sunny and 75 degrees outside...

I see the glistening reflection in our tile floor of the twinkling lights of our cyprus Christmas tree...

I hear a precious, clear, 2 year old voice singing "Away in the Manger" as he plays with his little paper and plastic nativity scene...

My heart is lifted, a smile comes, and my spirit rejoices.

I'm home.

I'll be home for Christmas. In Costa Rica.

Then, my now thankful eyes fall on yet another scene, the simple nativity in the center of our table. I think of Jesus. My King. My God who left His home, the glory of heaven, to redeem me, to give me an eternal home. With Him.

And, my heart is truly home. In Jesus.

I'll be home for Christmas.

O holy Child of Bethlehem!
Descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sins and enter in,
Be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels
The great, glad tidings tell,
O come to us, abide with us,
Our Lord Emmanuel!

Proyecto Manuelito

September, 2010 Project Trip:

School Campus

Talanga, Honduras

The other day, I (Dan) posted a summary of my February project trip.  Now it is time to summarize my September trip to Honduras.

The Ministry

Project team at the transition house

We went to serve Proyecto Manuelito, a very special ministry run entirely by Hondurans that finds kids on the streets of Tegucigalpa and gives them a stable and loving home where they have the opportunity to escape the cycle of poverty that landed them on the streets.

I was so impressed by this ministry and the amazing people involved with it that I would like to share a little more about it.

The ministry has two stages.  First, there is a transition house where children stay for up to a year before moving to the complex in Talanga, a rural town about an hour north of Tegucigalpa.  In the transition house, the children go through a form of detox both physically and emotionally. 

Many of the kids on the streets of Tegucigalpa are addicted to sniffing glue.  The addiction starts because the fumes of the glue take away their hunger pangs, and the chemicals in the glue ensure they remain addicted.  This physical detoxification is where the ministry of Proyecto Manuelito begins.

It continues with an emotional detoxification where the people of Proyecto Manuelito attempt to instill values in these children who have lived an “us against the world” life before entering the project.



Proyecto Manuelito in Talanga, Honduras

Then, when there has been success in these two areas, the children graduate to the Talanga campus where they have the opportunity to receive stability, love, and an education in order to develop into productive members of society.

While the staff of Proyecto Manuelito invest their lives in these children, their hope is that the children will recognize Christ in them as they pour themselves out just as He did.

The Project

This is where EMI comes in.  As a result of the glue use, many of the children have some sort of permanent learning disability, and the public schools in the small town of Talanga are not equipped to accommodate these students.

Volunteer architect working on the school design

The ministry now has a vision to build an educational campus and contacted EMI about providing the design.  EMI has served Proyecto Manuelito several times in the past so this project built on an already existing great relationship.

The school will serve not only the special needs children of the project, but also those of the surrounding community.  The ministry gave us the example of a typical Honduran public school that has one special assistance classroom for about one thousand students.  The ministry asked us to include three of them in the complex designed for two hundred.  What a blessing it will be to those children to receive the education they need to “step out of poverty and into a world of hope.”

Final school complex plan

The Team

Project team

There were a couple of odd statistics regarding my team for this project.  First of all, it was the first project I’ve led with a team of all men.  Next, all of the team was quite a bit older than me.  As the project leader, I was worried about these dynamics before the trip, but each member of the team was flexible, had a servant’s heart, and exhibited a humility that made my job enjoyable.

I would like to share an example of their hearts and of God’s sovereignty in the timing of our project trip.  When we arrived at the site, the ministry informed us that the water was out.  It was a two-fold problem with the city supply and with the ministry’s water storage tank and pressure pump that began just before we arrived.

As a result, for the first two days of the trip, only some of the luckier team members were able to shower, but that wasn’t the extent of the problem.  The entire campus had no water.  That means that the children couldn’t shower, the staff couldn’t clean the floors, nor the cooks wash dishes.

So, one evening, after dinner, our team volunteered to cart buckets of water from the spigot at the entrance of the site (where there was water) through the mud to the kitchen so that the cooks could wash up.

Finally, when we realized that the city water problem had been fixed and that the only problem was now on the ministry’s site, our water and plumbing engineers took a day away from their intense project trip schedule to dedicate themselves to solving it.

Project team after a short soccer break

They used their own expertise and a simple pressure gauge that we brought with us to isolate the problem: a leaky pipe in a little used branch of the system.  They closed off the branch, the tank filled, the pump delivered water to the site, and we all got showers that night.

I don’t think it was coincidence that our team arrived the day after all of these water issues began.  I don’t think it was coincidence that our electrical engineer also does plumbing design or that the pressure gauge (which can be easily forgotten) made it into the bin to come on the trip.

This team didn’t forget that our first priority on a project trip is always to serve the ministry.  That is usually by providing professional designs, but it can also mean carrying water through the mud or trying to solve a perplexing challenge. 



Dan digging a percolation test hole



six weeks

I can't believe Tabitha is already six weeks old!

Six weeks and 4 days, to be exact.

How have six weeks gone by already? It's going by way too fast. That might sound silly when she's still so little, but I find myself getting a little panicky when I realize that she doesn't look like a newborn anymore, that the image of her being so tiny and new is already fading in the blur of feedings, diapers, sleepless nights, rocking, bouncing, and snuggling that the past month and a half have been. I don't want to miss anything, forget anything, but the reality is life with a newborn and a two year old is b-u-s-y. There is no time for pensive journaling (or blogging!) about it all. Still, I'm trying to soak it all in and treasure these first weeks with Tabitha.

Six weeks is such a short time when I think of how much this little girl is part of us now. Our family wouldn't complete without her and yet it's only been such a short time that she has been in our arms.

Little girl, we love you. Don't get too big too fast...

*By the way, Dan is contributing two posts to the blog this week.  Make sure you read his posts about this year's project trips; they are such a huge part of what we do here!*

La Palabra de Vida

February 2010 Project Trip:

Entryway & Multi-Purpose Facility

Belen, Costa Rica

It has been a long time since my first project trip of 2010 back in February, but I (Dan) feel like it is important to write about it anyway.  Better late than never, right?

This project was unique before it ever even started.  I always say to teams during the trip that I believe that God assembles the team of volunteers for every project.  Sure, there is a lot of work finding and recruiting the volunteers, but it is ultimately God who prompts professionals to take a week away from work and families and provides them the ability to volunteer on an EMI trip.  Never before has that truth been more clear to me than on this trip.

The project team out to dinner

Initially, I was assigned to lead a project to design a new sanctuary for a church in Pavas, Costa Rica.  I recruited a small team of three volunteers for that design.  The architect also asked if his wife could come on the project with him.  I had coordinated and purchased all of their flights and assigned each of them their responsibilities for the church design when the pastor of the church told me just two weeks before the trip that he could not meet the requirements to host our team!

Now I have four people with airfare purchased to come to Costa Rica to do an EMI project trip, but I had no project. 

But God provided…

It turned out that just a few weeks before, we had received a request to provide two simple designs for a Christian school in Belen, Costa Rica.  They needed a design for a new entryway to keep students safe from cars as they walk to and from school and a preliminary design for a multi-purpose room the school can use for daily chapel services and other special events.

They were in a hurry for the design, and we already had a full slate of projects for that term so we did not think we could provide the design for them.  But with my previous project falling through,  it seemed like a perfect opportunity that God had given us to provide the design for this ministry!

Volunteers working hard

I would like to use the story of Barbara, the wife of the architect, as an example of God’s sovereignty working all things out beforehand for this change in project.
She is a Spanish teacher, and was excited to help us as a translator as we worked with the Spanish-speaking church ministry, but the missionaries who run the school were Americans so we wouldn’t need any translation.  By faith, she arrived in Costa Rica not knowing what she would do all week.
Then, during the first meeting with the missionaries, as they told us about the history and vision of their ministry, it came up that they had hundreds of books that had been donated to the school for their library, but there was no one who knew how to catalogue and organize them (or the rest of the library for that matter).  Barbara piped up saying that she also had a degree in library science!
She spent the rest of the week holed up on the school library cataloguing and developing a simple system the ministry could use after she left to catalogue their books.

The entryway design in progress

It was a similar story with the design volunteers as well.  I could see how each of their individual experience, talents, and personalities fit so well with the new project requirements as we were able to provide the ministry with the completed designs in time to complete construction of the entryway before the rainy season.  It was evident how God put this team together to serve La Palabra de Vida school even when they had thought they would serve an entirely different ministry.

At the risk of making this even longer, I would like to share one more thing that made this project trip special.  Sarah was able to join me and the team for our final weekend.  She was able to listen as the team shared about their experiences on the trip and what God had taught and shown them.  It was a great experience for her to experience first hand the effects of my ministry to the volunteers as a project leader.

architect's rendering of the multi-purpose building

Introducing...

... Tabitha Christie!

Our precious little girl, Tabitha Christie, was born on November 5th at Clinica Biblica in San José, weighing 7 pounds and 1 ounce and measuring 19.5 inches.   The past month, which would have been my last month of pregnancy, has been filled with the joy of getting to know our daughter.  I'm so glad she came early so I got to hold her sooner.   We are praising the Lord for a healthy baby and a safe delivery.  Thank you to all of you for your prayers. 

Of course, there is so much more I could share: hundreds of photos, the story of my surprisingly fast labor and delivery, how we're adjusting to our new life as a family of four, an explanation of Tabitha's name... but, those will have to wait for another day.  I'm going to go snuggle my baby!