Friday, August 21, 2009

Meet Andres and a Need.

Two blogs back, I posted about Andres' surgery to repair a hernia. He is completely recovered now and doing great. He celebrated his 9th birthday on August 18th. Andres lives in House 3 and has four brothers and sisters that are also here in the home. He is a pretty quiet child, but is always the first person to give you a hug when you enter the room. Andres is in the second grade.

Andres with his cake.

Also celebrating a birthday this past week, was Shaun. He turned 29. Sadly his birthday was a rainy day with a hail storm. In the evening, however, each of the kids came to our house to sing to him and to either present him with small gifts or in one case to give him a rehearsed speech about "coming without a gift, but coming because the children wanted him to know how special of a person he is to them." Kevin, delivering the speech, paused in the middle and looked up at his "tia" to ask how the speech was supposed to go. It was all very sweet.

Shaun with Lujan.

On another note, I am posting a picture of the recently repaired street lights on our property. Several months ago, we became aware that there were several very dangerous issues with the electricity at the children's home. The estimates for repairing the problems ran anywhere from just over $1500 all the way up to $3000 for the necessary repairs. We had this project in our minds as a priority when one day Mario from house 1 came to tell us that his plant in his front yard shocked him. We went with a meter to check out the problem and the plants and bricks around the house's meter box were holding 200 volts of electricity. After this discovery, we called the electrician and asked him to please come and start the work- that we could not afford to wait- for the sake of the children's safety. These repairs, including replacing several power polls, repairing transformers, replacing street lights, tightening existing wires, and trimming all trees interfering with the electric lines have now been completed (for just over $1500). Our property is now much safer for the children- and much brighter at night. If you are interested in donating to this electric project (or future electric projects dealing with each house's wiring), please contact us at mortonmissions@gmail.com.

The street in front of the homes at night- with the repaired street lights.

2 comments:

Christie said...

The lights sure do make a difference there at night, and we're glad the plants aren't so electric now. Boogie woogie woogie. Happy birthday to Andres and Shaun! :)

SMS-Cooper said...

WOW! What a difference the lights make. Can't wait to come back for a stay.