Rick and Cheryl on Adventure

Trying Times Our last weeks in Honduras are not what we had expected. Since returning from Guatemala, we have been involved in work of the ministry with the intention to return to Canada on April 2nd. That plan has been scuttled. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to gain momentum, this post is being written under an isolation curfew and uncertainty about how long we will be forced to stay here. More on that at the end of the post. One of the events we had wanted to  experience while here is the m onthly meeting that Pastor Victor holds for all of the K-6 sponsored families. It is an opportunity for SOH staff to encourage them and see how they are doing. The whole family comes out to one of the schools and Pastor Victor opens with a devotional. Then letters and gifts from sponsors are handed out and any pictures that need to be taken for sponsors are snapped. Since sponsorship funds are able to provide a small food hamper for the family each month, next was the grouping of fam...

Every day is a good day with Hector and Ruth Ruth preparing Spanish rice for 26 Hector receiving a gift from a family which he re-gifted later in the day  Hector and Ruth Aragon have been serving in Guatemala for 21 years and administer one of the child sponsorship programs under Child Care Plus (CCP) that several of our global worker colleagues operate around the LAC region. We were invited to visit the Aragons and experience their ministry first-hand so that Rick could review the operations and provide some organizational advice. We spent 8 days with them, hosted in their home, which is also where Canadian ministry teams come for short term work deployments.  Little by little, over twenty years, Hector and Ruth have expanded their home and team lodgings on their property to accommodate teams as large as 16.  Between the team building and the extra rooms in the main house, they have 12 bathrooms! Back yard of he Aragon home. Just out of sight at the top o...

Back to School in Honduras Who needs 120 bottles of glue, 450 notebooks, 80 dictionaries, 560 pencils, 160 erasers and 120 sharpeners to start the school year?  School in these parts starts the beginning of February and the Schools of Hope (SOH) team here in Tegucigalpa are busy making sure their sponsored students will be fully equipped to resume their education after a 10-week break. Cheryl and I arrived in Honduras on January 9th and will be working with the team here for almost three months. This is our second time in Teguc, as we spent 7 weeks here back in November 2016.   The Capital of Honduras -Tegucigalpa One facet of this ministry is child sponsorship through ERDO, which is the development arm of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (PAOC).  More than 270 students are sponsored by Canadians through monthly donations that cover costs like school fees, uniforms and school supplies. 1 39 sponsored students attend grades 2-6 at three elementary schools in...

Teaching English in Colombia Cheryl spent May 4-12 presenting a one-week intensive English program to supplement the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classes at a rural school near Bogota, Colombia. Here is how this opportunity developed: In April, 2018, Rick and I visited PAOC global workers Darren and Patty McCrea in Bogota. Darren drove us all around the city and surrounding area, giving us a firsthand view of some of the ministry projects they were involved in. We had the pleasure of meeting several local pastors with whom Darren partners to bring help, resources, and the good news of the gospel to people in need. One of these pastors mentioned that the local high school principal frequently asked if it would be possible to get help with their English classes. I told Darren that yes, that was something I would be excited about pursuing. The principal was hoping that teachers could come for a week during which he would suspend other classes so that the greatest number of stud...

For the last two years Cheryl and I have been serving on the missions mobilization committee at our church. This church family has always been very generous in their support for local and international initiatives, but we felt as a committee that it was time to re-engage in some hands on service projects.  Since we have connections in Latin America, Cheryl and I offered to check with our PAOC global workers to see what might be possible. Two significant opportunities came up and when we shared these with our church family, we had so much interest we were able to form two teams. One team of eight would go to Honduras to install water filters (with Rick leading), and a second eight person team would join Cheryl in piloting an intensive English program for high school students in Colombia. Tegucigalpa, Honduras - May 5-14, 2019 Since 2010, Schools of Hope has been working in a very impoverished area on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Cheryl and I spent two m...

Step by Step Cheryl and I continue to find ourselves being stretched as we continue on this journey we are on.  Since I stopped working back in 2015 it has been our intention to  sell our character home and relocate to Saskatoon.  For me, I had more or less linked these two events and over the past year we had been rethinking this plan as we found ourselves getting more involved in our Church and the process of selling property had become a long and more drawn out affair.   After zero offers during the listing period last year we had the idea to put a simple for sale sign in the window in December. Since there was a house for sale a few doors down, and we thought there might be some drive by interest.  This plan seemed rather dubious since the past two years with realtors had yielded no solid offers but there was no downside to putting a for sale sign in the window. In late January we had a couple come and view the house and very quickly it turned into a ...

Is there a bridge between China and Africa? My time in Zambia was spent in the City of Kitwe, which is located in northern Zambia. Unlike Zimbabwe where there is not much industrial development and investment in the economy, there are things going on in Zambia.  There are roads being built and a lot of building and activity in the mining and manufacturing sector.  The vast majority of this investment is by the Chinese and so there are many Chinese expats living in Zambia that work in these Chinese operations or are in the country and operating some sort of business.  Large compounds are built to house these workers and there are two near the mission property where I was staying. There are dozens of these compounds around the country and and one of the Bishops from the Pentecostal Assemblies of Zambia has a compound filled with Chinese workers  right across from his church.   Bishop David as I will call him, was considering how best to minister to these wo...