Dale and Glenna Dorothy, WGM international pastors to us as missionaries have been visiting us. I have been explaining some of the different ministries that we are involved in here in Choluteca, Honduras.
I explained to Dale and Glenna that one of our church's is pastored by a man by the name of Jairo. Jairo is a fantastic pastor. The church is so blessed to have a pastor with so many talents. Jairo works together with his wife in counseling members of the congregation. One of the things that most amazes me is that Jairo is busy as a pastor but he still has been studying at the Nazarene seminary. He has been the top student in Greek and Hebrew. He finds ways of teaching the Greek or Hebrew root of different words in the Spanish text from which he preaches. The church also has a group of 8 boarding students who live above the parsonage and Jairo leads them in a devotional and prayer time every evening.

I was also explaining to the Dorothys how fortunate we are to have a fantastic mechanic by the name of Jairo teaching in the vocational school. This Jairo worked for Mercedes Benz at one time. He is working with our second-year auto mechanics students to open a service center for repairing vehicles. Jairo has also bought three vehicles to fix up and resell at a profit. Jairo's reputation for repairing vehicles is spreading around the country. During the second week of May, Jairo is taking his students and loading up their tools to go fix a bus that is in another part of the country.
 

Our regional Bible Institute director's name is Jairo as well. Classes on Old Testament Survey will be held on May 15-17th. Jairo has been preparing nearly 40 students in the region to take the first class. The majority of the students are from our new Shalom congregation. Others come from our two congregations in El Limon and a couple come from other denominations. Under Jairo's guidance, the students have been working thier way through the workbook over the last couple of weeks. Jairo has arranged for visiting teachers to spend a weekend in intensive classes.

When I mentioned that Jairo's brother needed prayer because he is losing his eyesight, Dale asked, "Which Jairo are you talking about?" In reality, Jairo Fonseca is one man and he does much more than I have already mentioned. I don't know how he finds time to be the good father that he is or how he has the energy to encourage his brother in a time of such need. The only hope for the return of Jairo's brother's eyesight is to have cornea implants in both eyes.
Please pray for Jairo's brother. It seems to be an impossible dream to obtain the transplants. Especially pray for Jairo as he is feeling the need to help carry his brother's burden.

We were hosts to a dental brigade in March. We were able to visit 4 sites, where the group did teeth cleaning, flouride treatments, and pulled teeth. It was a busy week.

Dr. Daniels had been on the nursing brigade several years ago and wanted to return. He decided to come with the church team/dental brigade. He and Dr. Kathy Stone had a small medical clinic while the dentists worked.

The last day we were able to treat one lady with a special medicine that the nursing team had brought the week before. We also helped treat her for her diabetes. We were thankful that we had this small clinic the second week, along with all of the help from the dentists. We plan to continue to do flouride treatments in the targeted village of "7 de Mayo". 

We were privileged once again to host the OSU team. There is always a LOT of activity with the team, especially when there are 35 on the team. We have nurses going to do wound care at the hospital, some who work in labor and delivery, and others who go to villages to provide health care. We also have pharmacy students and their professor, Jeff Huston, who have been coming the past few years. We have other people who come to help us in the logistics of everything: with dispensing of medicines in the pharmacy, cooking, entertaining the children, handing out water (since the temperatures usually run around 100 degrees). It is a busy week, but fulfilling in knowing that we are able to help so many who need health care provided. Here are a few of my over 600 pictures of the team.

Houses at the dump area where we treated people the first day in Choluteca. We worked in Tegucigalpa with the people at AFE the first day: they work with the people who live near the dump.

The mayor of Choluteca is providing new houses for the people in the dump area.

School where we worked near the dump.

We had to use anything available as a site to do wound care. The kids loved hanging from the trees to watch.

We even had a wound care specialist with us. This could have been a serious wound later for this young man. However, a week after his care, we visited him, and his wound was almost healed.

Everyone fell in love with this lady. Jeff, the pharmacist is so tall that he towers over most people, but this lady was exceptionally short, so the contrast is remarkable. 

Justin in the pharmacy at San Jeronimo.

Having fun with bubbles.

Special friends

Wound care at "7 de Mayo". This is part of our health teaching outreach we are focusing on in this village.

Some of the special blessings for the week were getting to know some of our local people better. Our neighbor lady, Fany, was one of our translators. Through her, we got to know Monica (shown above in black shirt). She is an exchange student from Italy who helped us translate. She did not complain about the heat once. We have been invited to visit her in Rome!

We even enjoyed a trip to the beach, where most of us ate plates of fish and fried plantains. Nothing better!

The nursing students and professors helped deliver a lot of babies that week, as well as did women's health care in the village. I am in this program at OSU now to finish in another year. 

Its hard to catch Larry in any picture. He is usually the one taking them. He loves showing the groups around the vocational school, where he is the director. He also loves showing them his big "OSU" symbol painted in his office.

It was especially exciting to have Maria come down to help with the group this year. She was a big help! She is on the far left beside Angie. We were considered part of the teaching staff of the brigade.

The last day before the the team left. Thank you to OSU CON and the College of Pharmacy for helping us in Honduras for the 10th year. 

We hope that you have had as special an Easter season as we have. We have been spending a lot of time working with our new "Shalom" congregation. It has been especially joyous to see how they celebrate Easter for the first time together. There are now several new Christians who are experiencing real hope for the first times in their lives.

One of the church's members invited us to spend Wednesday at their property outside the city. Everyone took food. Some people took extra meat to cook over a grill so that there would be plenty for those who could not afford it. The kids spent the day in a plastic swimming pool, and adults formed teams to play "hillbilly golf" and "corn hole". The main goal was to get to know each other better.

On Thursday evening Angie and I invited people over to our house to watch the video "Fireproof". The theme was on love and marriage. "You never leave your partner behind." It was exciting to see some of the couples and youth capture the message of the video. It also saddened me to hear a very good friend comment, "I wish I had seen the video years earlier." One of our biggest jobs as a church is to establish solid Christian marriages in our congregations.

It is normal to have people come to our house several times on any other day. On Good Friday, it was about 97 degrees outside. Most people had gone to the river or were hiding out in the shade somewhere. No one was working. We did not expect a visitor at 3:00 in the afternoon. When Angie opened the door, it was Ruben.

Ruben is one example of a young man who has found the hope that only Jesus Christ can offer. He graduated from El Sembrador last fall in industrial mechanics. Though Ruben has not found a steady job yet, he always has a smile.

When Angie opened the door for Ruben, he told her that he had come to practice the guitar (another story).  He promised to be quiet so she could rest. A few minutes later, the door bell rang. It was David coming to practice with Ruben and the rest of the praise team. A few minutes later there were about 15 children showing up to watch a video. So much for anticipating a nap on a Friday afternoon! Later in the evening we enjoyed the video on the Chronicles of Narnia.

Our youth at the Shalom church have been making lots of tutti-frutti lately. Tutti-frutti is made from all kinds of fruit such as watermelon, papaya, cantaloupe, banana, mango, etc. which is cut into small pieces. It is best served in a Popsicle made from Kool-Aid frozen in a plastic cup with a stick.

Social capital is the result of building relationships among people. It can be between individuals, families, communities or in this case a church congregation whose members spend time with each other.

One of the first things a new church congregation purchases is a guitar. The reason that our youth have been making tutti-frutti is to sell the popsicles in order to raises funds to purchase a guitar for the new church. Most of the young people do not have jobs and are in school. In the early stages of growth, the new congregation did not have a budget for purchasing a guitar. It was exciting to see the youth use the guitar for the first time in our devotional on Wednesday. They know that they are doing their own part, but the purchase of the guitar is only a part of the benefit of making and selling tutti-frutti.

A side benefit of the tutti-frutti production is the time that the youth spend learning to work together. The youth would divide up the responsibilities of gathering the fruit. Needless to say, our mango trees at the clinic made a valuable contribution. Once all the materials were collected the youth would gather to prepare the ingredients, fill the cups, place them in the freezer, and clean up Angie's kitchen.  A low sugar variety is made for diabetics.

Additional social capital is built when the tutti-frutti is brought out for selling to our congregation. Our congregation is notable in that people can be found standing around visiting for 45 minutes after services. Maybe tutti-frutti has something to do with that.