Teams, Coffee, and a Website - Oh My!

Russell shared information for a basic, “What’s Going On In Ministry” post. As usual, there’s a lot going on!

Allen made a sudden trip to the States, and while the family in Honduras can carry on in his absence, they did have to reorder some of the things on the schedule. Trish and Quito just completed two videos for Allen to use in his visits to the States.

Everyone's excited about
the upcoming teams!

Kim Hall and her family fly in on June 9th. They will hit the ground running and have a week to prepare for their team’s arrival on the following Saturday.

Russell is scurrying around to prepare for a summer of visiting teams (among other things). The first seven teams will all be VBS/kids’ ministry oriented. There’s a lot of preparation that goes into that. Melvin and others in the crew are riding around visiting feeding centers to make sure the program leaders know what they should be doing to prepare.

Carlos and Helder are fertilizing the coffee farm, while it’s the rainy season. Fertilizing now allows for good absorption, and there is less risk of burning the plants. In a moment on philosophical genius, Russell declared, “The weeds are growing like weeds.” Eight extra temporary workers have been hired, so there could be up to twenty men working the farm for the next couple of weeks. The weeds must be chopped with machetes. Then, they turn around and fertilize the coffee plants.

Coffee nursery

Helder has a nursery growing 20,000 coffee plants and 1500 shade trees, which will be added to the farm. The trees are a fast growing, tropical bean tree, which actually release nitrogen into the soil, rather than depleting nitrogen. That will help to fertilize the coffee plants. Since they are fast growing, they will soon offer shade to the coffee plants. This variety of tree is one of the few in the area that does not lose it's leaves in the dry season, and so it will shade the coffee during the hottest months. All of the plants in the nursery were recently fertilized. They will be allowed to grow there until late August or early September, when they will be planted.

Remember those first seven teams, that will be working with kids? Well, the eighth visiting team will be working on a construction project. Russell is having to plan ahead to gather all of the necessary supplies for that.

Speaking of construction… the Sowers are about to construct a new building on their property, which will contain ministry office space, storage for the food received for the feeding centers and for the coffee grown on the farm, and will also have bunkrooms for male interns. No, it will not slow down the construction of the new house. This building will be used as a temporary warehouse, which will be used to sort all of the materials that arrive on the end-of-2018 shipping containers. This will speed up the process of completing the house because they won’t have to store things there! Since the finishing touches on the house involve more detail-oriented work, they won’t be able to make much progress on that while they have visiting teams - but the crew can work on the construction of this new building.

A tantalizing glimpse of the new website!

Trish and Kelsea are working to enter all of the information about the kids in the sponsorship program on a yet-to-be-revealed new website. Kirstin (Allen and Trish's oldest daughter) is even lending a hand in Sarasota! Each child will have a profile of information, and a photo, on the website. Trish has taken on the task of entering the sponsors’ information into the system. Stay tuned for the big website unveiling!

 - posted by Christi