Aid Distribution – Río Lempa

Natural Disasters - October 19, 2011

I am just getting home from a long day bringing relief to people who are in desperate need. I am super exhausted, but feel like I cannot compare to the people I met today! They are living in water and most have lost everything! We delivered these supplies to a shelter near Río Lempa, an area where the river flooded and was the cause of many deaths. There were 225 people in this shelter including an 8 day old newborn! (What a rough first 8 days of life!) The people there were very thankful and the donations of 200lbs of rice, 200lbs of beans, 200lbs of suger, 800 bread rolls, 625 bags of water, a pickup truck full of DRY clothes, a few bags of medical supplies and some bags of toiletry items […]

El Salvador Donation Drive

Fundraising - May 1, 2011

We are so excited about a great opportunity we have to get some much-needed donations to El Salvador! A Pittsburgh area shipping company has donated a 40 foot container for us to fill with donations. We will be collecting donations in the Pittsburgh area until Friday, June 10th, 2011. On June 11th the container will be loaded and shipped to El Salvador. All of the donations will be used in our ministries here to help those in poor communities, those on the streets, and those in the children’s centers where we work. We need your help in several areas! Here is how you can be involved. 1. Donate new or gently used supplies. 2. Help organize a donation drive at your church, office, or in your neighborhood. 3. Pick-up donations […]

Street Kid Ministry

Kids at Risk, Prayer, Urban Ministry, YWAM - July 29, 2010

This is Jon here and I wanted to share a little bit about a new ministry that we have recently started here in El Salvador. Ever since we moved here, I have been working really hard at building relationships with some of the street kids right down the road from the YWAM base. These boys live on the street 24 – 7 and have nothing. Some of these boys come up to you at this particular intersection and beg for money while others wash your windshield and even others just sit there and hope someone throws them 5 or 10 cents. While it has been a process to build trust with these boys, I am finally feeling like I have some relationships being built with them. It all started by just […]

Futbol Game with one of the toughest gangs here in El Salvador

Gangs, Kids at Risk, Life in El Salvador, Urban Ministry, YWAM - April 28, 2010

We had a unique but great opportunity yesterday to play futbol (soccer) against some members of one of the toughest gangs here in El Salvador. The Guatemala YWAM DTS team is here this week and we played for about 1 1/2 hrs against these guys. Although we didn’t have a huge chance against these guys, as they play together all of the time, we put up a good fight for the first half and the score was 4-1. At one moment right before half time, there were a few police that came over to the field area and put a kid in hand cuffs and took him away, but it was like everything was calm and God was with us and our players just prayed and continued to play soccer. Then the second […]

Ninos de la calle de El Salvador (Street Kids of El Salvador)

Gangs, Kids at Risk, Urban Ministry - April 8, 2010

I figure since Danielle does most of the posting (ok, pretty much all of it) I better take a turn. Now let’s begin this post by saying that this probably won’t be as good as Danielle’s, as she is very gifted in writing, but I will try my best! The title translates to Street Kids of El Salvador and that is where I want to focus. This past week, I had the opportunity to attend a conference on street kids, children at risk, children in crisis, etc. There were a good bit of take aways, but what I enjoyed most was that I heard from many different people who work in this arena who are from many different non-profits here. It was great to hear how others are doing things […]

Down time

Family, Training - October 17, 2009

This weekend has been a “down weekend” for us. We are in between programs as our language / phonetics classes finished up on Friday and our cross culture training program starts on Monday. I had lunch with a good friend from Denver and then we hung out and played games last night as a family. Today we decided to go and have some fun at Pike Peak! It was amazingly beautiful! God’s creation is breath taking. We also had some time to climb a pretty decent sized mountain and Tori and Ian loved it! Needless to say Tori and Ian are wiped out. Here are some pictures…