Hacienda Of Hope

Carlos and the crew add the brick pavers to our new entryway. These pavers were made on site for this project. When complete, the four lanes will provide easy access to vehicles coming in as well as going out ...at the same time. When Hacienda of Hope is complete with 200 kids and approximately 50 adults, there will no doubt be lots of traffic buzzing and this will become a busy entry from early morning to late night. This is a view from the property as you would be leaving (headed West). We will add Bermuda grass between the lanes so they will become strips of green.

Martin & Lorena celebrated eight years of marriage today! They are a very special couple who love children. Lorena was raised like an orphan in many ways and Martin is from a large family. They make a wonderful Christian example of a loving mom & dad! Martin played professional soccer before making the decision to spend his life helping children. He saw how kids looked up to soccer players so much and yet were let astray many times. He takes his role as "dad" very serious each day. Lorena has a very large, loving heart for each child. She knows what it is like to be a lonely child and goes the extra mile to make life pleasant and happy for all of her children! Martin & Lorena love to "mix-it-up" playing soccer with the kids in this picture.

Luzmila turns 5 years old on Tuesday, September 27th. She had to attend kindergarden again this year because her birthday wasn't in August. So, she knows all of the routine and is able to show Dyanna and Maria the way as they all three attend together each day. Pat & I share the fun of taking all of the children to school each day in our van named "Senor Verde" (Mr. Green). Mr. Green has electric windows which is totally unlike any cars these kids have ever seen. One day as we were driving away from kindergarden, I rolled up the passenger side window from my driver's seat. As little Lu-lu watched it roll up, she turned and said very seriously "Grandad, Mr. Green is very intelligent!" On another day I asked her what she had learned. She just sat looking out of the windshield and said; "Grandad, today is Monday and we never learn anything on Mondays!" She smiles almost all of the time. She is already looking forward to her birthday next week.

The following are a few pictures that Pat & I took yesterday & today: The first is a view from a farm located to the East and South of our property. You can see our family home and apartment clearly. You can also see our new South property line fence going down the mountain. The blue color trees in the fore ground are young eucalyptus trees and the dark green taller ones are older eucalyptus trees. They are an abundant source of building materials for Ecuador. You are also able to see the road way we have constructed to our new "Prayer Dome" in the center of this picture.


This second picture is of our current work project. In order to be good stewards of our property, we must control some serious soil erosion problems. We have deverted rain water run-off from our pastures to the South side of our property where it is channeled into a rock lined drainage ditch. Here we are creating a rock water fall area to our creek in order to stop additional soil erosion(i.e. as seen above the workers). When complete, our new fence will run along the top of the rock wall. Please visit this site in a few days to see the completed project!



This view taken this afternoon is from a mountain corn field above our property. Pat & I were looking at a farm located North and above our property. You can see our new "Prayer Dome" on the left side. Our family home is just to the right of it. The large field to the left of the home is the farm. The red roof among the trees is the top of the main large building at Cayambe Christian Center.

There will be more posts to this blog soon about recent activity at the hacienda. Some of the youth from Twickenham returned recently from a mission trip to help with on-going construction. We should have posts soon from them about there trip.

Jay will be helping with the admin work on this blog and on the main site.
Cynthia will be adding posts soon.
Alisa will be updating the main site http://www.haciendaofhope.org
Jerry will, hopefully, be able to post updates directly from the hacienda.

One more thing, the blog provides an RSS feed that you can use to see the headlines from your bookmarks menu or other tools. Using the FireFox browser, you can add an RSS bookmark by simply clicking on the orange icon in the status bar at the bottom of the browser window while you are on this site.