This a blog from my teammate Heather Horton’s blog about what we are doing this month. She did a really great job of describing what we are up to here in El Salvador so I just thought I would share it 🙂 ENJOY!!
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Mi Casa…home…Yep, that’s where we are…
Mi Casa is technically an orphanage, but technicalities don’t really matter…it’s a home, and a really good one at that! The children are brought in and raised in this family. One of my teammates asked me our second night here what I thought of the place from a social worker’s viewpoint…and I just laughed because this isn’t an orphanage, from a social worker’s standpoint this is a dream come true for children that once were orphans. Short of children being adopted (which I hear is pretty hard to do here), this is the next best thing…maybe even better for some because they get to stay in their home country. Surely you all have caught on by now that I love orphans and all things adoption, right?!?
So this month my team (all 7 of us! We got Courtney back and have a new teammate Kirsten) is living in the girls home with 9 beautiful girls up to 14 years old. They go to school in the mornings Monday- Friday so the house is fairly quiet then and only then! Once the girls get home it’s time for lunch, homework, dinner, and sometimes more homework. We get to hang out with them and just get to know them. It’s sweet to not have a set agenda of things to get done. We’re just building relationships with the girls and the women that work here and our contact and his family…and they’re all pretty amazing. We’re also painting some of the rooms in the girl’s and boy’s homes. So don’t worry, we do have stuff to get done while the girls are in school! It’s just such a different ministry than anything that I’ve had on the race. We’re pretty much free to do what we want and just live our lives. Play guitar in the middle of the day? Sure, why not! Take some kids to the park? Go to the mall and grab coffee? Spend a day at the beach with the kids? Watch Home Alone 1-4 in Spanish? Really as long as their homework is done and they aren’t currently grounded, we can get permission to do a lot of things. It’s sweet to have our main objective as simply building relationships.
I love that we are here and can tell you now that this will be the hardest place for me to leave from the past 10 months…crazy.
