Greetings from Quimistan

Greetings from the sunny south! Thirteen of us arrived safely yesterday afternoon, and the remaining three come in this afternoon. We were bundled up for the cold rain in Atlanta, and arrived in San Pedro Sula early afternoon to be greeted by sunshine and 90 degrees.

This morning a group of us are setting up and completing training for eye testing and eyeglass fitting beginning this afternoon. They are sorting hundreds of pair of glasses donated by Lions clubs. June, Charles, Vanna, Brittany, and Shirley are practicing how to say in Spanish, ¨Rest your chin on this, and put your forehead here, I will adjust and focus the instrument. Blink twice and hold still.¨

Jerry and Michael are checking on the needs for minor maintenance on bathroom facilities around the school and clinic, and taking care of what needs to be done. They plan to go to Jicaro school this afternoon to check the status of project work underway there.

Earlier this morning, Sam visited the home of some young people whose mother died recently, to determine their needs. Right now he is talking with the director of the local school to determine progress the local community leaders have made toward funding their part of a proposed higher education project here.

Ken is setting up our schedule with local leaders, discussing what needs to be done during this trip, and exchanging thoughts about several projects they are proposing for the next few years.

Then there´s Roxanne. Unfortunately, when we arrived in Quimistan and unloaded the bus, we realized that her luggage which was sitting outside the bus when we loaded at the airport didn´t get on the bus. A trip back to the airport didn´t locate a missing bag. So today she is in San Pedro Sula, wearing borrowed clothes while she shops for essentials.

I´ve encouraged everybody on the team to use their cameras and to post their own notes to this blog. I think there may be a slight delay until we figure out how to use the system here. But look for more notes and pictures as the days go on.

Ken and I just now talked with Maynor Castillo (with the great help of a translator), the administrative assistant here. We have asked him to begin using this blog site to transmit his own messages and photos. His English is about as good as my Spanish, so we will need to locate a good English-Espanol-Inglais translation program we can all access on the internet and be able to understand each other. This could be a terrific way to keep people informed about what´s going on here.

Stay tuned. We´ll be back online sometime! Pray for us to be sensitive to God´s leading and to be good ambassadors for Christ.

Allen