The school year for most of the countries of the Caribbean is the same as the academic school year for the United States. So I generally like to travel to our Caribbean countries in October and November to update our rosters and collect materials for the sponsors. Oftentimes if there are any changes in the rosters they happen during the school vacation period. Many times the children are in the orphanage because their families cannot afford to adequately care for them. Sometimes the conditions change and/or a parent or family member may secure a new job and return to the home to take custody of the child. Usually they will not interrupt the school year for the child, and will wait until the break from classes to give themselves time to bring their child home and get them ready to attend school for the upcoming semester.
This trip was full of efficient work and also some treasured relaxed time sharing with the children. I chose to travel over a weekend to maximize on the time the children will be in the homes and not in class. This gave me more time to spend at the homes interacting with the kids rather than just business business business. I spent nearly all day on Sunday with our newest home. It is a smaller home of all teenage girls. We had a great time talking about Michigan (where I am from), winter, snow, bears, pine trees, coyotes, and all sorts of other things. The girls are very intelligent and I was surprised at how much they knew about this part of the world that was so far away and so different from their own. Two of the girls love the Discovery Channel and had recently seen a program about bears. They had a lot of questions about my day to day encounters with bears living in Michigan.. ha ha.
I took a collection of threads, beads, and other items to share with the girls. We spent a lot of time creating keychain, necklaces and bracelettes. It was a truly special time to get to know them and to share time together. Something that always amazes me about those who have so little is that they tend to be so generous. Out of all the beads and materials that I brought for them, each one of them had proudly made something that they wanted to give me as a gift. It was a wonderful and humbling day with the girls.
I was also able to see and evaluate some of the projects that we are developing in the homes. Some of those include scholarship funding for computacion classes as well as the installation of computer labs in each of the homes. We continued to develop a remodeling project for the kitchen space in one of the homes and revisited a previous project that was provided of a water filtration system for one of the homes. The filtration system is in need of some repairs and we were working to determine what they were and how best to address them.
Also during each home visit I was delivering letters to the children from their sponsors. You cannot understand what a great moment this is for the children. To receive a letter from someone who loves you in the best moment of their day. They all gather around to see if their sponsor wrote to them. They will read their letters and then show them to the other kids. All of the letters are safely stored under mattresses or between folded clothes in their dressers.
These letters are so important to the children. Please make sure to send letters and cards!!
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