Special visitors...and news!

Last week, we were very very blessed by the fourth visit from one of our first and always faithful supporters, Ben Whisenant. He was accompanied by Bryan Doyle, Missional Life Pastor at First Baptist Church McKinney, Texas.

They were a great encouragement to us and even better are creatively leading their church to play a bigger role in the ministry here in Bolivia.

So here's the news: soon we'll have a new addition in ways to support the homes: child sponsorship!! We've felt led to this for a while now, both due to popular request and the realization that a "connection" to one of the children is very powerful, but I haven't had the time or full motivation to just go for it. However, meeting with Pastor Bryan easily brought me to the tipping point. I mean, how could I resist when he spoke of their THREE WEEK mission conference to be held in April 2009, and how they will announce the need to their thousands of members, and the big display table Casa de Amor will have, and they would expect every HDA child to garner 4 to 5 monthly sponsors in that event alone?!

Pastor Bryan also spoke of sending a professional photographer next month from Texas, to spend a few days with us taking pictures of each child and filming a video to be shown at FBC McKinney during the missions month. Wow, how could we say no?! With all of this "jump start" support, we can easily take the sponsorship opportunity to our home church, other churches, our website, etc.

Here's something to think about: would any of you former volunteers be interested in helping me design the child sponsorship packets, and/or assist with the communication process between HDA and the sponsors? Please let me know as we begin to put the details of this in place! I'm excited about the possibilities as I begin the process of researching other existing programs, creating our guidelines, and writing up short histories/bios on our kids. I still need to be cautious of increasing my administrative load here in Bolivia, since that's already way heavy, but with more help "the sky's the limit". Fun!