School kids

Just wanted to show you some pictures of some of our school kids.
When school lets out everyday they run to visit us. As you might know, we tutor them everyday after their few hours of regular school and 3 days a week we provide a healthy and hearty lunch since many of these kids have so little to eat.

It is important to us that the kids know they need to work for what they have in life. So we have them help out. They take turns helping cook.

They also all help wash their dishes. The greatest thing is they are happy doing it.

I thought this picture was funny. Joel pulled the washing machine out of storage to wash a pile of clothes. The kids were so intrigued.

Enjoying dessert after their lessons

Last week, following the advice of the doctor in Guatemala City, Joel took our two Down Syndrome kids into Panajachel to have their TSH tested. TSH refers to one part of the thyroid. Making sure we have their thyroid under control will be a major step in helping these sweeties live a healthy life. We should have the results in a couple days.

Here they are with their moms, 8 mths (one of the twins) and 4 1/2 yrs old.

Let us know if you would like to help with feeding our school kids or help with the medical bills of our sweet babies.

Vicki and Jody are in Guatemala right now. A big thank you to everyone who provided formula for them to take down. The babies are drinking it now.

(Note: Pictures courtesy of Joel)

Mama/Tot program, Rain and New Veggie Garden and Guardian House

Joel is in Guatemala right now doing a great job of making things happen. He writes a wonderful blog everyday with great pictures so if you go to http://casadesion.blogpsot.com and click on the twitter travel link on the right you can see them all. I pulled off a few pictures to show you what is happening.

At the top are our new guardian house and new veggie gardens. Thanks to an awesome team, we now have a guardian house and will soon have a guardian in it. Joel is interviewing candidates now. Then we will have chickens . Now we have raised beds planted of all kinds of veggies. All this will help us feed the children we now feed [ over 400 plus 100 mamas ] and enable us to add more. In the picture is our guardian Juan. He is also in the picture of the rocks. He is the one making the rock enclosed structures called gaviones. They hopefully will protect our land from the mudslides that come thru every rainy season. It is quite an art to make a gavione and Juan seems to have it. We took in Juan because he and his boys [ 8 and 12 ] were homeless. So we gave him the job of guardian and they live on the property. We think Juan is autistic, but he sure makes a great gavione and raised bed garden.

The last picture makes me cry every time I see it. For they are all my mamas and all my children. These women had to walk a long way to get there and a long way back. But they get formula, incaparina and a meal and it is all they can do to make sure their kids get food as they have no education and can not make the money to provide it. This picture is of 38 mamas and 75 children. We now have a total of 90 mamas and over 200 children.I cry because we have 1000s more children who need to be in our programs that we can not take as we do not have the funding. PLease help us with this. For $20.00 a month, you can sponsor one mama and her children and we can take one more into our program.

thanks

Vicki

20.vicki@gmail.com