Home Again

We arrived safely home at midnight after a long but uneventful day. Everything went as hoped – an easy ride to the airport, on-time and smooth flights, magnificent daytime cloud and evening ground lights displays. We turned on the water, turned up the temp setting in the house and went to bed. Our goal this weekend has been to sleep and we are accomplishing that. Slept 19 hours on Saturday - sleep and Superbowl on Sunday. We both feel a little energy returning today so we will tackle a month’s worth of mail and look at our calendars for February.

We did manage to bring some warmth with us to raise the temperature above freezing this weekend. Hope you enjoyed that - maybe it will happen again today.

On Thursday afternoon, we visited a community called Los Jardines de Colon, a city outside the city of Colon which is ½ hour from San Salvador. The city has 800 residents, many streets, houses packed close together. At 6:00, school children and men and women returning from work were pouring into the city. This community has access to bus lines and decent roads so employment is not an impossible challenge.

We saw the lot where the leaders want to build a community center and home for workers of the center. They have ambitious plans and are eager to get the building project started. We also visited several homes to look at the style of construction. The homes were the basic cinder block style with the kitchen on the front or back porch, a corridor living room, 2 small bedrooms, two windows to the front and an open entry to the back yard.

This city also has large homes and yards that are attractive. We did not get to visit those. So it appears that there is a variety of income in this city.

Because our visit was unscheduled, we did not have the opportunity to meet with community leaders to learn more about the women and youth programs that are established and what their goals and needs are. While there is still much unknown, we have accepted the request to live and work in this city. The main project will be the construction of the community center and the “guesthouse” which will be our home. Another project will be to begin an urban organic garden to teach about nutrition and self-sufficiency for food supply.

As we visited the rural communities, we realized the isolation these required was more than we could commit to. While a city placement is far from what we had expected, our desire continues to be to serve as best as we can. Our skills and gifts will be well used within this community. Our starting time is May. Many details here must be finalized in a short time. We thank you for your support on our January journey and ask that you keep us in your prayers as we move forward.

David and Nancy