Building the preschool

Thanks to generous donations from the United States, we are moving forward with the construction of our new preschool facility. Up to this point it has consisted of a peaked metal roof and concrete floor, partially enclosed by low concrete-block walls, with the beginnings of a kitchen, bathroom and storage area.

Soon the walls and ironwork will be complete. Insteads of glass windows, there will be large open areas for ventilation made secure by iron bars. This is very typical Venezuela architecture as insulation is never a concern and the wind seldom blows hard enough to blow rain in. (There is virtually no rain for six months of every year anyway.) The next steps will be to finish the bathroom, kitchen and storage area, and cover the rough concrete with smooth, polished tile. Luz Maria's son, Pedro, has been our "maestro de obra" or foreman in this work. He has done much of it himself and has contracted other workers to do the rest.

The completion of this facility will allow us to greatly expand the scope of our activities. On Sunday, May 22, a record 60 children attended our Sunday school class. It is becoming more and more difficult to accommodate and supervise this many children in the space we currently have available. In addition, the new facility will enable to host more educational events provided by the public school teachers who periodically visit this area.

Luz Maria has had a vision of a Christian school here for a long time, but many people, inclusding members of her own family, have regarded it as a pipe-dream. The new preschool facility will be a (quite literally) concrete reality that will help convince them otherwise. We still have much to do, but this is an important first step.

Along that same line, we gained some recognition from the larger community surrounding us this first Saturday in June. In March we hosted the distribution of Christmas gifts to the chilren (better late than never) by Samaritan's Purse, an evangelical charity led by Billy Graham's son, Franklin. Because of this, we were invited to a meeting at the Baptist church in Barinas to give a report on our ministry in La Caramuca. Other reports were given by a group from the Baptist church and representatives of two Pentecostal churches.

We took five children from La Caramuca with us and they were given the opportunity to sing two songs they learned in our Sunday school. Luz Maria´s daughter, Sarai, made name-badges for the children in the shape of open Bibles. These drew attention on the bus from La Caramuca to Barinas and we took advantage of that fact to explain briefly what we were doing to people on the bus.

The state government's director of child and adolescent welfare programs also attended the meeting in Barinas. The Venezuelan government is very interested in what churches of all denominations are doing to address social problems that affect children and adolescents, such as childhood malnutrition, sexually transmitted diseases, teenage pregnancy, sexual abuse and domestic violence, and alcoholism and drug abuse. Instruction in moral values that strengthen the traditional family unit is regarded as important in combatting these evils.

So this meeting was a great opportunity for us to raise awareness of our project within the Christian and secular communities, and build their perception of us as a legitimate and positive presence.

Please pray that God will continue to open doors for us.

Never too late for Christmas

It is never too late for Christmas in La Caramuca.

Luz Maria's sister, Rosaura, a member of the Baptist church in Barinas. has been involved with Operation Christmas Child, a project sponsored by Samaritan's Purse, a nondenominational Christian relief agency headed by Billy Graham's son, Franklin Graham. Families in the United States contribute to this project by filling shoeboxes full of school supplies and small toys as gifts for children in poverty-stricken areas. For more information on Samaritan's Purse and its activities, visit www.samaritanspurse.org.

There were still boxes of gifts available for about 50 children in our neighborhood and their needs haven't changed in the last three months. Because of the limited supplies, we organized a by-invitation-only event at the main preschool in La Caramuca. The preschool has a chain-link fence and gate that allowed us to keep people from just dropping in to grab a free box of goodies. The boxes were presented to the children after songs, games and Bible stories.

But one thing that made this event truly different was the involvement of the children's parents. We went door to door with our invitations and stressed that each family was required to have an adult representative at the party. So we had nearly as many adults at the party as children, a real first.

Another distinctive feature of this event was that a group of four boys aged 5 to 10 were directly involved in the preparations. As a reward for their hard work, we took the boys out for pizza in Barinas a few days later at the pizzeria that Luz Maria and I like the best. This place offers octopus as a pizza topping, but I have not worked up the nerve to try that yet.

The best part is that this Palm Sunday the boys and some of their friends accompanied us to Corpus Christi Lutheran Church in Barinas. Pastor Edgar Brito and the congregation warmly welcomed this large group of visitors from La Caramuca.

It is still the dry season and it has been extremely hot here, even hotter than normal for this region. Water levels in the rivers keep dropping to the point where it becomes a real challenge to provide the hydroelectric power that people depend on here. That is why we have been having power blackouts for two to three hours every day for the past few weeks.

No doubt you can imagine some of the problems we face being without electricity for extended periods of time. But beyond the obvious inconvenience of the blackout itself is the fact that the faulty wiring so common in houses here often cannot handle the surge of powering back up. Many refrigerators and other appliances have been damaged. In fact, our main refrigerator is not working now, although I am not sure whether that´s because of the blackouts or not. Fortunately, we have a smaller refrigerator provided for the preschool program that we can rely on until the larger one is fixed.

But an even more serious consequence of the power surges is the number of people have been injured by electric shock. In fact, two people in the neighboring village of La Mula died through electrocution. These incidents have really been the talk of the territory.

Through a mutual acquaintance, Luz Maria has been invited to counsel one of the relatives of one of the victims. Please pray for her as she searches for the right words to share God's love with this family.