All Saints Day in El Salvador 11/07

Despite some large setbacks with the airlines, my recent trip to El Salvador was a great experience. First of all, I had to deal with a cancelled flight and as a result a complete lack of luggage once I arrived. Thankfully I finally did receive my baggage the night before I was scheduled to return back to Miami.

The trip itself was a wonderful mixture of family, cultural holiday, and work. We hosted an end of the year meeting with all the directors of the different orphanages. We discussed project possibilities for the upcoming year and evaluated all the support they have been receiving up to this point. The homes in El Salvador greatly benefit from our Angels of Hope program. In fact, we are the primary, and perhaps only, source of outside support that many of them receive.

This year we completed water-related and/or construction-related projects in all the homes. Now that they are already benefiting from their new bathrooms, cisterns, cupboards, etc, we are looking forward to starting to work with agricultural and animal husbandry projects that will further enrich the nutrition and quality of life within the homes.

Within the past four months we have added three new homes to the program. I took the time to visit each of the homes and meet the administration and staff. I love visiting the homes. The children always have a "show" prepared and are very eager to receive us. I get a tour of the facility and always call the children out who have not made their beds yet. It was wonderful to see all of the new homes and welcome them into our Angels of Hope family.

I love the children in El Salvador because they are very affectionate. I enough hugs and kisses to last me a year. All the kids line up to say hello and goodbye with hugs and kisses each time I see them. It's great!

On top of a great work trip, I also happened to be present for All Saint's Day. This Friday is a national holiday and nearly everything in the country was shut down. I spent the day with my in-country coordinator and her family. I found that all the people in El Salvador were in the cemetaries or out visiting relatives. We stopped every ten minutes for great home cooked food and more visiting. By the end of the day I had eaten my fill of Pupusas, elote asado, tortillas, requeson, caldo de gallina, frijoles, and jugos naturales.

We went to visit her grandparents, aunts, and uncles. They all lived in small little pueblos up in the mountains. The scenery was beautiful and each of the homes was filled with unique smells, food, and people. We picked beans out of the pods and an Aunt showed me how to make fresh cheese out of natural cream. We visited the cemetaries and decorated the tombs of different relatives who had passed. There were bands playing music for the dead and families gathering over the graves of their loved ones.

And I did all of this, five days of work and travel in El Salvador, in the same outfit because my luggage still had not arrived!

Guatemala 10/10

Since I had spent nearly a year working as a volunteer in Guatemala, its always exciting for me to go back. Luckily for me, I get to go back a couple times a year.

I spent time this trip in meetings and evaluating some different projects in our Angels of Hope sponsored homes. All of the children are now finishing the school year and looking forward to their summer break. They start classes again in January.

I love markets. I love crazy, loud, colorful, smelly, crowded, random, bustling village markets. This has always been one of my favorite things since I started traveling. You can find anything, from buttons and telephone cords to pirated dvd's and handwoven placemats. The traditional fabrics and patterns in Guatemala are beautiful. The colors are bold and risky in their combinations. Long running cultures and ethnic groups have their own individual patterns which have been adapted and are now appearing on journal covers and picture frames to cater to the ever-growing tourist crowd.

You could easily lose me for a couple hours, if not days, in a place like this.

Dominican Republic 09-07

Last week's trip to the Dominican Republic...

I was fortunate enough to be traveling with FFP's Project Manager for the DR. We traveled to see some of our current project sites including some incredible efforts along the Haitian-Dominican border. There are these tiny little forgotten communities of people struggling to survive along this no-man's-land. The mountains are the only thing embracing these suffering families.

Food For The Poor is completely changing the face of these villages. The initial facelift comes from buildling brand new concrete block homes for each of the families. Their shacks of sticks, mud, rotten wood, and scrap metal are being replaced with brightly-painted, sturdy, large, cement block homes. A large multi-purpose community center is nearly finished, along with a community school.

But this project is not just a face-lift... a communal chicken coop is nearly finished, and plans for further animal husbandry and agriculture are the next step for this revitalized community. The men and women of the village are being employed to construct their own homes and those of their neighbors.

Their is a spark of life and most importantly hope that can be seen in the faces of the villagers. I felt truly blessed to have been able to take part and see it with my own eyes. I look forward to seeing the finished projects.

After traveling the countryside I returned to Santo Domingo to spend time with the children's homes that we support through our Angels of Hope program.




We harvested tomatos, peppers, and plantains of a seperate FFP agricultural project and delivered large boxes of them to each of the six of our Angel of Hope sponsored homes.








The children are all back in school now and it was truly a joy to see them rolling into the homes with their school uniforms on... buzzing about what happened at school and who has a crush on who.


For most of these children it is an advantage that they have been placed in one of these homes. The majority of them are not orphans in the "orphan Annie" sense. They do have living parents or relatives, but unfortunately the parents are so poor that they are unable to provide and care for these children. Outside of the homes the children suffer from malnourishment and do not have the opportunity for an education. On the contrary, once these kids are brought to the homes they are nourished not only physically, but mentally and spiritually as well. They are often provided with the opportunity for vocational/skills training in a specific job field or scholarships for college tuition.