Give Hope 2 Kids Blog

Great Volunteers Make Our Day -- Everyday

The ministry of Give Hope 2 Kids couldn't function without great volunteers.  We've been blessed through the years with awesome volunteers, people who have come and helped us love kids and do excellent ministry work.  This season, we have our largest volunteer force to date.  We're doing more than ever before with education for our community and it's all thanks to these great people.  

Kelvin & Monica Johnson, with their daughter Kelly, have served with us for over a year and a half now and have made a big difference in our ministry.  They have tackled a wide range of projects while they've been here, from hosting groups, to working on construction projects, to throwing parties for our kids.  They currently lead in the planning of the Friday Night Youth Group and the community classes we teach.  The Johnsons plan to stick around GH2K for at least another year or two and we're certainly grateful for the role they've played in our lives and ministry.

Recently, another family moved down to work with us: Jacob & Cynthia Baker, and their girls, Maddie & Myra.  All four of them have jumped in here with hearts to serve.  They expect to be with us for a couple of years and we're looking forward to spending that time with them.  Their family is involved in a wide variety of activities, from collecting eggs (the girls big job), to co-leading the preschool class, to administrative work, to leading the volunteer "church."  

Leah is an awesome gal who is part-way through her year volunteering for GH2K.  She is our resident librarian, who organizes the Library and much of the Library Program and classes.  The spark she's added to the Library is huge!  Leah also co-teaches the preschool class.  We really appreciate her great attitude and willing heart.

In July, Kaitlen came and started her year of volunteering here.  Kaitlen is assisting with teaching English, preschool classes, and is using her passion for soccer to spend time with kids here.  She has a great heart for the kids and we really enjoy that about her.

For part of last year and earlier this year, we had an excellent volunteer here named Daniel.  Unfortunately he had to leave us for a season, but the good news is that now he's back!  We're excited to have Daniel here again.  He excels at building relationships with our Honduran team, while helping them build more of our facilities, and he's excellent with the kids.  We've always appreciated Daniel's heart to serve and be wherever he's needed.

Our newest volunteer Corey came and jumped right into everything: construction, teaching classes, and spending time with the kids.  He's already added a lot to our team.  He has a great heart and a lot to offer when working with kids.  

So, as you can see from their long and varied job descriptions, we depend a lot on our volunteers.  They make our ministry a success.  Give Hope 2 Kids certainly wouldn't be where it is today without the history of excellent people coming to give of their time and passion.  Thank you volunteers! 

And here's an updated photo of the our family.  We're Jason & Sarah Furrow, the directors of GH2K, and our kids are Josiah & Eliana.

Thanks to Our 2013 Summer Groups

This summer we were privileged to host two amazing work groups.  They helped us complete several important projects on the Give Hope 2 Kids property. 

Our first group visited us from Lancaster, Minnesota.  For many of them, it was their first trip outside of the US, but they quickly adapted and got to work.  

We finished several painting projects with them, made desks for computer classes, and worked on the new volunteer duplex.  This was an amazing group with great attitudes.  We want to say a special thanks to Wes, our volunteer Kelvin’s Dad, who helped organize all of the details for the group.  

Our other group came from Virginia.  This is the fourth year in a row that we’ve had a group visit us from Cloverhill Assembly in Midlothian, Virginia.  Our good friend Rachel Kelly is the team leader.  She always brings a group that's ready to work and have lots of fun with kids.  This year they did a makeover of an elementary school in San Luis, a small village that's a 45 minute steep hike up from our village.  We also painted the 2nd House for kids, installed bookshelves in the Library, painted the office, and several other projects.

We are grateful to these groups who sacrificed so much to get here and serve others.  Thank you to all who came!  We enjoyed having you.

Time for Kids: Thoughts from GH2K Volunteer Becca

We asked our volunteer Becca to share what she's learned in her first few months here at the Give Hope 2 Kids Children's Home.  Here's the wisdom she has to share:

St. Francis of Assisi once said, “Preach the Gospel at all times, and when necessary, use words.”  I never really knew what that meant until I came to Honduras. 

In November 2012, I decided (or should I say God told me) to go to Honduras for 5 months.  The only experience I had with Spanish was high school.  I could only remember one phrase and that one was not going to help me.  So, how do you convey to these children that you care and love them, that they are something special, without knowing their language?  

Some of the most valuable gifts we have to offer anyone are our time and actions.  Whether it is going swimming with the kids (their favorite activity), pushing them on the swing, listening to the girls talk about their day, even when you don’t understand a word, or making bread to bring a smile - - it all counts, from the smallest act to the largest act. 

I never realized how much our actions and time matter until I saw how they had the power to break though culture and language barriers.  Maybe this is why the Bible warns us against being lazy and to number our days.  With only one and a half more months left here, the thing I regret is not spending more time with the kids and remembering that my days are numbered (they go by faster than you think).   But isn’t that true in our everyday lives, whether we are hanging out with abandoned kids in Honduras, or with our family and friends back home.  We are only here on this earth for a limited number of days. 

Being in Honduras has taught me to make my time matter, to make my actions count, to resist procrastination and feelings of laziness.  Actions do speak louder than words.  Time is our most valuable gifts.  They are some of God most powerful tools that He uses through us and for us.

Thanks to the Groups from 2012

We want to express our gratitude to the teams that came during the summer and fall of this year.  We are blessed to be connected with these churches, as well as the groups who represented and came to work alongside our Give Hope 2 Kids team.  We accomplished a lot with their help.  Thanks to everyone who came and worked!

Here's a brief synopsis of the projects that we worked on with teams:

Cloverhill came in June as our first large team for the year.  They helped us organize our Library and Kid's Home storage, mixed cement for our new Office, and interacted with kids from our Home and our village through our community activities.  We always enjoy working with the awesome young people that come from Cloverhill.

Cornerstone brought our youngest group of the year, but they all had great attitudes and were hard workers.  This group spent time with the kids in our Home and community through our Library, English Classes, and Youth Night, as well as various work projects.  

Faith sent a hard-core construction team.  These guys worked so hard and flew through the project list we prepared for them.  They put a roof on our Office and on a carport and helped make our Activity Center area better with sidewalks and bleachers, among other things!

 

Destination was our last group of the year, in September.  They helped a lot with the foundation and walls of the Johnson's Apartment, wired our Office, put up more storage shelves for our Library, and more.  We enjoyed making lots of new friends from this group.  Thanks everyone!

Goodbye to Volunteers

It is with great sadness that we’re saying goodbye to two volunteers that have made a huge difference in the work of Give Hope 2 Kids.  

Brayden Delans has been with us since October of 2011.  He spent a lot of his time working with our construction team.  He also was an integral part of our Library and Youth Nights.  Brayden has a real gift of relating to kids. 

Erin Winkel (known as Eva in Honduras) joined our team in November of 2011, and straight off made herself an incredibly huge asset to the ministry.  She focused a lot of her time on English classes, the Library, and helping to host visitors. 

Both Erin and Brayden invested countless hours in our precious kids and the kids from our community.  They will be missed not only by the ministry, but also by all of the young people from our village.  Thanks  you two for being willing to invest your lives in others!  We appreciate you and hope you'll come back soon!

If any of you feel a calling to work with our ministry, please call or write us.  It takes a large team to carry out the work of our ministry.  Write us at [email protected] for more info.

Introducing More of the Give Hope 2 Kids Team

Ever since we started Give Hope 2 Kids, we've had endless projects to do without the human resources to get them all done.  Recently though, we've been really excited to watch  a great team of people gathering around us.  We feel that we're able to accomplish so much more now.

We've yet to introduce our house-parents to everyone on the blog, so we want to take this opportunity to have you all "meet" Wilfredo & Sinndya and their two kids, José (6 yrs) and Dana (1 1/2 yrs).  They've adapted really well to life in the country with us and have done a great job accepting kids into their family and life.

This season, we are excited to have four volunteers here with us.   They'll be with us for most of this year. With the arrival of new kids and never-ending construction and agricultural projects, we are thankful for the extra hands.

Kelvin and Monica have always had an interest in missions.  With their newborn baby Kelly, they made the decision to sell their house and move down for year.  So far they've been living with some of the kids and helping parent them.  Kelvin is a great dad and handyman and loves to work on agricultural projects.  Monica has been an excellent mom for the house they're in and has helped with organizing and running our Youth Night, Library Program, and English classes.  We are blessed to have them as good parental figures on the property.  Kelly is practicing sitting up on her own and is Josiah's little buddy.

Brayden came to visit us on a short-term summer trip with his church.  It didn’t take long to for him to realize God was calling him back to continue building relationships with the community here.  He spends his days working outside with  construction and agricultural projects and hanging out with the kids (and most of that time the kids are literally hanging off him).  Our village soccer team recently invited him to play goalie for the season and Brayden is excited for the opportunity to make friends with and minister to his teammates.

Erin has always had a desire to serve people in Latin America and felt God was calling her to volunteer with Give Hope 2 Kids after her college graduation.  Erin spends time working with kids in the Library Program and English classes and enjoys dabbling in the agricultural work.  She also works a lot with administrative projects (like helping to put together this blog).

 We're really grateful for all these awesome people working with us and helping to make Give Hope 2 Kids a success!

Celebrating Five Years of Ministry

We are celebrating five years of ministry!  God has blessed us with a very productive season and we are thrilled as we look back and see how far we've come in our quest to care for children who desperately need help.  

To celebrate these years we put together a memory book summarizing the time.  These pictures show how we prepared to, and now are caring for abadoned children, and how we've reached out to our community.  Click on this link, choose to make it full-screen from the bottom right hand corner, and enjoy watching a ministry be born!

http://www.blurb.com/books/2356454

Please feel free to share your comments with us

and share the link on your facebook page!

 

Equipped to Reach Out

For several months we’ve been working on a project that will make a huge difference in how we minister to our community.  In order to continue forward we realized that we needed more tools from the US.  We needed to equip our Children’s Ministry, get food processing equipment to help us be more independent with our food production, and bring in 15 donated laptop computers.

So, we undertook the huge process of bringing a container from the Richmond, VA area and we lots of people we need to thank.  Paul and Shirley Furrow (Jason's parents) worked tirelessly to help us gather the items that we need.  Thanks Mom and Dad.  We love and appreciate you.  Life Church and Evangel Christian School helped us out by donating items, storing everything until the container was ready to ship, and loading the container -- thanks you guys!  Destination Church also donated items and helped load the container on shipping day.  And we can't forget David Martinez (our right hand man down here) made 8 trips in our white work truck to bring all of the items up the mountain.  Thank you everyone!  

It was a lot of work, and we’re still sorting it all out, but now we have so many more of the tools that we need to grow in our ministry.     

 

Thanks to the Clover Hill Group!

We just enjoyed having a group come from Clover Hill Church in Virginia.  It ended up being the same week we brought the first kids into our Children's Home, so it made for some busy days.  We really appreciated how flexible the group was as we changed things to accommodate the new kids.

While they were here this group spent a lot of time with the children in our village.  At the elementary school they taught English classes and put a fresh coat of paint on one of the buildings (with lots of assisstance from the kids!).  They also helped with our Library Program and put on a soccer camp.  Our village kids had such a fun week.

The group kept busy by visiting Instituto El Rey for a day of work projects and a soccer camp and they also helped us do some work on David & Olga's house.

Thanks guys for all your hard work and great attitudes!  We enjoyed having you.

Wiring and Roofing

This past week we enjoyed having a group of eight come down and help us out. It was a mixed group of friends and family, all who had been down to volunteer on a previous trip or two. We so enjoyed having these "repeat visitors" down. They showed how much they value the work we're doing by their continued investment in us and we REALLY appreciate it.

During their week with us we were able to put roofs on the Volunteer House and the Furrow House. We also got a good chunk of the wiring done on the Furrow House.

We also want to say thanks to those who donated to help us buy materials for the roof on the Volunteer House.  This really helped us along with this big project.

As we look back at the past few years we feel so appreciative of everyone who has invested in our construction projects, either with time or finances.  We wouldn't be near so far along in our work without our generous supporters!