All Teams Great and Small

Note from Trish: This post was supposed to go up several weeks ago, but I had trouble getting the photos of the team. In the end, I still don't have what I was hoping for! Everyone involved talked about the huge improvement at the school, from the new paint job - but I never received a photo of the finished job! If any of these team members see this post, and have a photo showing the marvelous "after" that they'd like to share with me, please do so, and I'll put it into this post! Thanks!

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Recently, Sowers4Pastors hosted a group of folks from Lighthouse Church in Maryland. Lighthouse normally sends large teams to Honduras, where they typically do VBS programs and construction projects for the children of their sister church program in Crucitas. This time, the team consists of only six people. But to paraphrase my granny’s favorite poem, “All teams great and small...The Lord God made them all.”

Preparing the classroom before painting

And more preparing!

This team may be small in number, but they are doing much needed specialized work. First they spent some time painting a school in Crucitas. Then, they spent the rest of the week using their skills to do repair work on Kim and Jonathan Hall’s rental house and electrical wiring for the new multi-purpose building on the Sowers’s property.

As a rule, landlords in Honduras aren’t known for making quality repairs, so having a team of qualified individuals to help out the Halls is most welcome! Trish and Allen remember all too well what it is like to request that a landlord make repairs. In fact, Trish even wrote a blog post about their own experiences as renters back in 2007 when their kitchen sink was leaking. When Allen went to repair it, he discovered the previous “repair” had been made using strips of rubber from a bicycle innertube, aluminum foil, some form of glue, a hair ribbon, and a dental floss-like product!

While part of the team works on the Hall’s house, the other part of the team will be putting in lights, outlets, and switches in the Sowers’s building. One of the team members has the goal of getting Trish out of the warehouse she and Allen call “home” and into a proper house as soon as possible. Because of the domino effect, completing the wiring for this building is a definite step toward doing just that. Once the new building is completed and used for its intended purpose, Russell and Iris’s new house can be completed. When that happens, Allen and Trish can move into Russell and Iris’s current house.

Trish is a pretty laid back individual and she never really complains about living in a warehouse, but she does have an ultimate goal. For years, she has lived with plywood countertops in the kitchen. Even though the plywood is painted a lovely blue, it isn’t exactly the material of choice for designer kitchen decor! As you might imagine, there are some issues with using porous plywood around a sink. Trish’s goal is to be out of the house before the plywood countertop around the sink -  which already displays a significant amount of damage - rots to the point where the sink plunges down into the cabinet below - likely while full of dishwater! She is nothing if not practical.

Additionally, while the team was at the Sowerses' place, one team member peeled off from the rest of the group and did some needed maintenance and repairs on several of the ministry laptops. As one of those laptops was scheduled to return to the US with their team, because of a recurring technical problem, this was a timely and much appreciated house call!

Thank you to the team from Lighthouse. You may be small in number, but you’re still great!

 - posted by Christi