A Note from Casa Bernabé

Enclosed are several pics, I think speak simply for themselves, from Casa Bernabé's new Culinary Vocational program. These are 14-18 year old girls. This is, of course, 1 of 3 programs your World Orphan Fund has provided for that started last month. Again, we thank you for helping us begin our first vocation program in our 30 year existence.

When Guatemala adoptions were open to US citizens, this program was not needed, as many children were adopted long before they needed any vocation training. Now, sadly, with adoptions having been closed for 6 years, we have had to revamp. The children are aging out. While we provide education in our on-site school, many will not have attained more than a 8-9th grade education for having missed early years of school, pre-Casa Bernabé.

Our culinary vocational instructor is Cantonese/ Guatemalan. She is a solid Christian lady who loves these girls and wants them to prosper. She has skills at a level we could never have afforded, but she is the best and what God brought us! This week she is teaching the girls practicality with, "If you owned a small restaurant, what can you create for your menu with only the food currently on your shelf?" Pretty amazing! Thanks again, World Orphan Fund, for blessing these children in the way you have provided. It is changing their lives.

Vocational Training in Guatemala

Boys at Casa Bernabe, Guatemala City

Preparing older children to be successful in the outside world is critical because the outcomes are grim for orphans when they reach adulthood. Studies show that 60% of girls will prostitute themselves and 70% of boys will become criminals to survive. It doesn’t have to be this way.

That’s why we feel a strong calling to create and support vocational training programs wherever possible and in particular, those that will help girls become self-sufficient.

In January, we visited Casa Bernabe in Guatemala City and were surprised to find unused, fully equipped classrooms to teach skills like welding, hair styling, and cooking. But they hadn’t had a program in years. Why?

The classrooms sat empty because they didn’t have enough money for teachers. So, with help made possible by our donors we provided the funding for three teachers for a total cost of $12,000 annually. On Saturday I received a note from Andrew Griffin though FB about the new program:

Allow me to make your day, RJ: 

Here are the first pictures from the new, fully functioning, Casa Bernabé orphanage vocational program. It started weeks earlier than originally planned. It was a BEAR to plan these children's schedules with school around this, but we did. The buzz of all the children in the program is one of incredible excitement and even younger children want to participate. This is the welding program in our shop- all set up- up to 8 boys at times (mostly Saturday "groups" and weekday "one-on-one" classes).

The welding instructor is a local Christian guy about 35, who has worked at Casa Bernabe off and on for years. He wanted to give back to these teen boys. He himself is an incredible artisan and patient man. The girls started with culinary and hair styling last week as well and are psyched! Allow me to further rock your world by telling you that 3 weeks ago out of the blue, the government sent us a hair stylist one day a week and she saw the other 2 vocations and now 3 goverment instructors come one day a week to train OUR new instructors more and actually promise to Certify these teens when completing the program. Simply amazing timing. The Certifcation is worth it's weight in gold. We never thought that could happen...happy man? We are one happy orphanage staff. Thank you - Bless you

In four months we went from an idea of restarting a vocational program to having three up and running classes. It's always amazing to me what can happen with God's grace and a committed band of believers.

The World Orphan Fund will fund the vocational teachers for the next three years.

John McGourthy Sr.

May the road rise up to meet you

May the wind always be at your back

May the sun shine warm upon your face

And rains fall soft upon your fields.

And until we meet again, 

May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Irish Blessing

This past Friday, we lost a great friend and one of our biggest cheerleaders, John D. McGourthy Sr. of Mequon, Wisconsin. He peacefully began his new journey with his loving family singing and toasting him at his side as he entered Eternal Life on January 31, 2014, at the age of 72. John and Judy had been married for 50 years and they were blessed with six children and eleven grandchildren.

I remember when I first met John at our first Gala in Milwaukee. We shared a similar ancestry and we were able to talk for nearly an hour about our beloved Ireland and I told him stories of the orphans we had met in Central America. After the Gala, he grabbed me by the arms with tears in his eyes he said: I want you to know, I'll be doing much more to help these children.

John and Judy McGourthy in 2012

And that's exactly what he did. Over the past two years, the McGourthy family has made a huge difference in the lives of orphaned children in Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico. With their support, we've been able to remove arsenic from water, build homes, hire teachers and feed hungry children.

There's an Irish saying Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam. It means may his soul be at the right hand of God. Of that, we have no doubt.

St. Jean Baptiste De La Salle and My Dad

In May of 2011, five months after I started the World Orphan Fund, my father died in Florida. I was at Orphanage Emmanuel at the time, and the first person I told was my oldest Godchild Mersy. She held my hand for most of the day. Who would better understand how I felt?

My Dad Jean Johnson 1934-2011

That day I made a promise to myself: the first building we entirely funded through the World Orphan Fund would be named in his honor. That building is the new special needs house at an orphanage called Rancho Santa Fe. (Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos Honduras), in La Venta Honduras.

I was at the Ranch last week having a conversation with the Deputy National Director for NPH, Ross Egge, and he asked me about naming the house. It's a Catholic Orphanage, so I suggested there must be a St. Jean that we could choose. My Grandfather was reading Les Miserables when my Dad was born, so he was named Jean after Jean Valjean.

Today I received an email from NPH saying they had chosen St. Jean-Baptist de la Salle, the Patron Saint of teachers, to honor my dad. A French Saint, how perfect.

Saint Jean-Baptiste De La Salle

I would be nothing if it were not for for my father. I hope he likes the home we built in his honor. I miss him every day.

My Name is Angel

My daughter Keeley and I been at Orphanage Emmanuel in Honduras since last Thursday with a mission team from Gainesville and Blairsville Georgia. We come here every January together, because the kids are out of school and we have an opportunity to spend lots of quality time with them. It can also be a time where the children get, well, bored. So this year the team devised contests to keep them engaged. The winners won bikes that had been shipped down in December.

The letter below from a boy named Angel David. He won first place in the essay with a picture contest, and it touched our hearts.

The Lost Sheep

My name is Angel David Garcia Obiedo.

I want to talk about my family. Well, my family is very poor and thanks to God in 2013 they helped me find my family. It was a great happiness. I have been at Emmanuel for 12 years, and when they found my family it was 12 years since I had last seen them. I remember all the names of my family and that was something that made me very happy. Thanks to God. 

My father is 65 and my mother 53 and when they came to visit me. I saw them as old people. The truth is I would have loved to have known them when they were younger. They have only come to visit me one time because they are poor. But I love them so much and it doesn't matter what age they are. I will continue loving them and I hope to return to see them if God wills it.

The 12 years that I have spent at Emmanuel have been a great help to me because when I go one day I am going to leave prepared. Here at Emmanuel they have taught me many good things that can help me in my future but all with the help of God. Because if God is not with us in our lives we are nothing.  Likewise if He is with us then we are somebody in life. 

For my future I want to be able to have a profession and be able to bring my family forward to make them happy. That is the goal that I want to achieve and I know very well that I am going to do it if God wills it.  I am a 17 year old young man. I will be asking help from God in my prayers for him to help me finish this goal .

Something that I want to tell everyone from the group I want to thank you very much for having left your family in the US to be able to see each person in Emmanuel.

Also I want to thank you for the activities that you all have made happen with each one of us.

You all are a great blessing to each one at Emmanuel that God has given us.

Many thanks for coming to create new memories with each one of us that you can share with other people in your life.

Something that I want to tell you all is that you all will be in our hearts because you have been a great blessing to each one of us,

Selling a Child for Drug Money

I believe I have perfected the prairie dog maneuver – the art of bobbing in and out of a cold shower to avoid outright freezing. Then yesterday Kina and Rodney were able to get the hot water heater to work. It was nirvana.

Nahum picked us up after breakfast, driving us the 45 minutes to Jocotepec and La Ola Orphanage to meet directors Bob and Becky Plinke. Becky gave up her nursing profession in 2009 and worked with the poor at a dump in Puerto Vallarta and saw first hand the need to care abandoned and orphaned children. She founded La Ola in early 2010, and three months later Bob gave up his practice as a doctor and joined her.

La Ola is a girls only home for 17 abused street children. A rarity in Mexico, they take in older high-risk girls and their stories are often tragic. Three-year-old Valeria let me pick her up the minute I walked

Valeria

into the house. The child of a crack addict, her mother tried to sell her for 300 pesos (about 25 dollars) at age two. Angele came to the orphanage as a street savvy 12 year-old with purple hair a blackberry. She was being used as a drug mule. When she first arrived she was illiterate and signed her name with an X.

Angele

But lives change after children enter the doors of La Ola. Now 15 years old, Angele has learned to read and write and she’s now in high school. Valeria, despite having a mother who smoked crack during pregnancy, is a bright little girl who speaks to you in both Spanish and English.

La Ola employs two housemothers, women who have raised children of their own and understand the world of teenagers. They share the responsibility with others at the orphanage of raising the girls. One is always present at the house. While the girls get counseling, they have also bonded with these housemothers and often talk with them as a parent.

A fencing lesson at La Ola

Eight of the girls are enrolled in Terranova, a bilingual private K-12 school, and others attend Cetac, the public vocational high school. Cetac provides skills training in everything from administration to accounting and computers to laboratory technology. Two girls are even learning nutrition because they want to be chefs. Job placement afterwards is very high. Sponsors provide scholarships for the kids to attend both schools. No effort to give the girls outlets is overlooked. While there we were treated to a visit by a local volunteer who was on the Mexican National Fencing Team, who gives free lessons at the home.

Unlike most orphanages we work with, La Ola is blessed to have an outlet to provide their children the skills necessary to live independent lives when they leave the orphanage. This extremely important in a society where the better paying jobs go to men.

La Ola and other orphanages we visited here have been targeted by the local authorities and given a list of “safety” upgrades required at the Orphanage. The costs are an average of $3,000, a staggering sum for orphanages scraping by on budgets of about 100K a year. They are given little time to find the money, and if they don’t comply fines are imposed. It’s causing the orphanages to let people go because they no longer have the resources to pay them, and a stress on the directors. Already overworked and understaffed, the effect on the children is significant.

This targeting and the costs associated with it seem all the more baffling given the massive orphan problem in Mexico. To hear the Government’s side of it, they don’t have orphans here. Crisis would be an understatement. We will be helping La Ola with a grant to get them past the current cash crunch.

Postcards from God

The temperature here is 20 degrees below normal and it’s been pouring rain since about midnight. Great sleeping weather. That is until the rooster outside the window starts crowing at about 4 AM. Not to be outdone, every other rooster in the neighborhood feels obligated to chime in.

For some reason it didn’t really bother me and I fantasized about the breakfast that was being brought here in four hours. We asked Kina if we could do authentic instead of typical fare from the states and so far it’s been amazing. The neighbors are really nice ladies and excellent cooks. Not sure if my plan to lose a couple pounds is going to hold up to their cooking … a couple of times I actually had the urge to lick the plate.

We headed out at 9:30 this morning for New Hope, run by Nahum’s father Jorge Gutierrez. He was a pastor before becoming the full time director, and it’s obvious he loves the boys like a father.

Jorge Gutierrez

The property was formerly a residential house, but over the past five years they’ve added a kitchen/dining structure, laundry, bodega, directors house, greenhouse and woodworking shop.

Woodshop

The woodworking shop would make Bob Villa drool. Outfitted by Rotary International the boys learn not just skills, but math, how to read schematics and self- esteem. They have been able to sell some of what they have made in the local market, enabling them to see a project from conception to final sale. 

Greenhouse with aquaponics

The green house uses aquaponics to grow plants. It’s really quite ingenious -- the fish fertilize the plants and the plants oxygenate the water for the fish. This is the first orphanage I’ve ever seen that grows mushrooms. Nahum converted a chicken house on the property into mushroom production and they have found a market for them at many of the local restaurants, as well as using them in cooking for the boys.

I was amazed to learn they feed nearly 20 boys plus staff on $200 USD a month. It’s an astonishing feat, and what makes it possible is Walmart giving them day old bread and other products like fruits and vegetables that are consumable but no longer on the shelves. Add a cook who’s a genius and you have a recipe for a miracle. A vanload of the food showed up while we were there.

Daughter Reagan and Len teaching

The best part of our day was simply spending time playing with the kids and even doing their math with them. They love Jenga, and we found ourselves explaining long multiplication and negative numbers in Spanish. They really wanted to learn and the smiles of success were awesome. As a reward, if the boys did all of the math problems right they got a ticket to watch a movie. (they got to fix their mistakes)

Before we left Jorge told the boys how he believed there are no coincidences and that everything happened for a reason. He then looked at us and told the children we were sent to them as postcards from God, a reminder that He has not forgotten them. I looked over at Reagan and we were both tearing up. We are all feeling blessed to be here.