March Madness

A lot has happened since our last blog update. We have great intentions of updating our blog frequently, but our busy days have kept us from doing so as often as we would like. We will try to a fit a bunch into this update to catch you all up.

We had an exciting week working with our first team here at LOL. A youth team of high school seniors from Resurrection Christian School in Colorado came to serve at LOL and in area villages. In all the team had 42 people, of which they were broken up into three different ministry sub-teams. Sarah thoroughly enjoyed serving alongside the sub-team that went into local villages of San Filipe and Santa Cruz. Two days were spent at the village schools doing ministry with the students. A highlight for Sarah was playing a softball game organized by a group of the village children. Other sub-teams hiked into remote villages near the Guatemala border and camped out for a few days of ministry. There were also construction projects at LOL included in the teams’ schedule. Let’s just put it this way, you can do a lot of ministry and projects with 42 people!

Two weeks we moved out of LOL and back to our apartment. It is amazing how quickly our two months living on site went. We are expecting the government to be sending additional children to LOL, so the room in which we were staying will be needed to house new children. We have mixed emotions about coming back to our apartment. On the one hand we will miss being in the midst of things throughout the entire day. On the other we will enjoy having additional family time away from the midst of things. We hope that one day we will again be able to live on site, but preferably in staff housing (which does not yet exist). 

Sarah’s parents and sister came down for a weeklong visit. They took us to Placencia for a few days to relax and enjoy the beautiful beach there. After being able to travel to a couple of the popular cayes (islands) last year, we have decided that Placencia is much better, with much better beaches and a nice vibe. It is also only 80 miles from where we live. 

Mark just finished building a chicken coop. We plan on having a couple-dozen layer hens to begin with. This will be a time for experimentation with different breeds and feed options, and will provide an opportunity for some of the children to get involved with caring for the chickens. Feed is very expensive here, so we will be looking at options to produce most of the feed ourselves. If we are able to do this we can later expand production to help offset those food costs. We currently use an average of 300 eggs per week, so we would need a few more than two-dozen chickens to produce that volume. 

Mark also built an arbor that will serve as a trellis for a squash-like plant called Chocho, or Chayote. The sides were built with a technique called a vertical wattle fence. This is a sustainable fencing design that Mark has wanted to build for quite some time. All the materials (minus a few nails and screws) were found in the bush (jungle) around LOL. 

Mark has also begun working on his next exciting project, an aquaponic greenhouse. If you are not familiar with aquaponics here is the gist: raise fish in tanks, circulate the fish water/waste through plant grow beds, the plants consume the nutrients created by the fish waste while also cleaning the water. Mark will be attending a four-day training course in Florida at the end of this month. As of now the plan is to build a 24’ x 72’ greenhouse at LOL that will house the aquaponic system. We will write more about this in a separate blog update.