The Cornerstone Church mission team had a terrific experience at La Familia in late June. Ms. Gina’s Crochet Club was a major success; the kids were tied up for hours making small satchel soap savers, friendship bracelets, and crosses. The boys especially took to hand-made crafts.
We purchased new school backpacks, splashed a day at the local water park, played lots of volleyball, and Connect4. We also raised enough money to help purchase new wiring for the church sound system.
Two very important projects were accomplished during our visit. The first project, we assisted a volunteer from Texas, Ms. Cathleen, with English lessons. The younger children met for an hour and created their own visual English/Spanish dictionaries by cutting out pictures and pasting into their very own English notebooks. The older children met for about 1 ½ hours and had a very informative lesson in problem solving, again scribing English words in their notebooks.
Our second project took us to Monica’s Kindergarten class in Quecholac. The children greeted us with a song and many smiles, then were dismissed for a recess. While the women (Cornerstone team and Siliva & Mayho) cleaned the classroom from top to bottom (yes, we did windows!), Chucho & the older boys gave some of the playground equipment a fresh, bright new coat of paint. As the parents gathered to take their children home, we presented them with a hygiene/first aid kit including bandaids, sport tape, antifungal cream, bar of soap, alcohol swabs, (a great big THANK YOU to CVS Pharmacy for giving us a major discount on these items), and toothbrush & toothpaste (another call-out to Dr. Adam Salzberg of Fishersville, VA for his generous donation), and some bubblegum and lollipops.
Oh, and we made sure that Silvia had a Girls Night in Tecamachalco ~ we miss you already, dear friend!
