Dinner and a Show with a silent auction thrown in!

OK...just for a starter...mark your calendar for May 12th! That is when we will be having the dinner and a show! We will begin pre-selling tickets soon...what you will get for your money is a full meal served by the Ecuador mission team, comic relief by Joe Hobby and many assorted musical productions...well...people singing anyway! You never know who might show up or what they might do. I'm secretly working on a command performance of the old Faith men and women's quartets!!! Don't know that I can pull it off but I am trying! I will get back with you soon with more details but for now...save the date!

A picture of Mama Yoli's in Atacucho

Many of you know that last year while in Ecuador, we helped build a daycare in Atacucho. This year we will be doing some finishing work on the existing building and starting on an addition to the building. The addition will be a church, pastor's living quarters, SIFAT office space and larger kitchen/cafeteria for the children of the daycare. This is a fairly current picture of the daycare (Mama Yoli's). Last year we were on the 4th floor building columns to support the 5th and final floor. As you can see, it is pretty high up there and extremely windy! When you are looking at the picture, imagine a fence around the top of the building and children playing on swings and monkey bars...kind of hard for us to do isn't it? In Atacucho, there is so little available land, they build their playgrounds on the roof. This year in addition to digging footers for the new building and finishing out the old building, we will be teaching VBS programs at home daycares in the morning and Mama Yoli's in the afternoon. Added to all of that, this year, there will be a medical/dental aspect to our trip as well. The team members who will be working with the medical and/or dental professionals, will also be at Mama Yoli's. They will provide dental work, give immunizations, perform minor surgical procedures and as many other needed health related check-ups as possible. We look forward to having that aspect added to our trip! I will send more later but did want everyone to see the picture of Mama Yoli's!!!

Getting Ready

As most of you are aware, getting ready to go any where can be a major undertaking. Add international travel to the mix and it gets even harder, you have to get shots, passports and fill out mounds of paperwork. Since we are going on an international mission trip, we need to add fundraisers as well. We have flipped and served pancakes at Applebee's, sold turkeys and M&M's, we are currently selling Honey Baked Hams for Easter and have written and mailed letters to family and friends. We are in the initial planning stages for a dinner/show/silent auction scheduled for some time in May and last night, as you can hopefully tell by the picture, we met the cow as we worked at the Chik-Fil-A in Leeds. Whew!!

We will keep you apprised of the dinner/show/auction...maybe you want to buy a ticket!?! Let me know....LOL...s

Creating a Blog for Ecuador

Well, we said we wanted to create a blog for our next Ecuador trip...here we go!