Fear of testing positive to COVID-19 has been prevalent among virtually everyone in the world, but especially among those churches that under normal conditions put together a mission team to travel to Mexico. As a result, we have not had a mission team travel to Casa Hogar La Familia since February of 2020 until recently.
Four of us decided we couldn’t stand it any longer and in December of 2021 I joined three missioners from Texas and flew down to Palmarito to show our faces and let Juan Francisco and Silvia know that we had not forgotten about them. All four of us tested NEGATIVE for Covid on our trip back to the States.
Then in March of 2022, I joined a mission team from Oklahoma to travel to La Familia, and once again, all ten of us tested NEGATIVE for Covid on the trip back home. Our work projects while at La Familia included giving the dining room its first coat of paint in two years and changing out all of the hardware and installing automatic closers on all of the exterior doors.
While we didn’t have time to paint the casita that houses the swings and sliding board, we did purchase the paint and got a commitment from Chucho and some of the boys that they would get the little house painted after we left for home.
The Federated Church Mission Team from Kingfisher, OK purchased the services of “Taco Man” who brought all the fixings needed to prepare a taco meal for both the mission team and all of the children and staff. What a great treat, especially for the kids. Little Cristofer ate ten tacos — I counted!
Jazmin is staying at the casa for a few days until her nursing job begins at a Puebla hospital. Jazmin wants to specialize in anesthesiology, but before she can fulfill that objective, the hospital wants her to spend two years working as an intensive care nurse to gain the experience she needs before moving into her specialty of choice.
Josué and Rodolfo have entered engineering school twice only to have the school close because of Covid precautions. Now they are getting ready to return to Puebla and begin their studies again.
Isabel is a senior at the University of Colima and is currently seven months pregnant. She and her husband, Gabriel, are staff members at a Casa Hogar in Colima where they have an apartment. Daniel is doing extremely well at the University of Colima and Fernanda began her freshman year at the University of Colima this past Fall.
The casa is really in great shape. The next time you visit, I believe you will be impressed with the improvements that have been made to the property. The casa received a donation that was sufficient to install solar panels on the roof to reduce the cost of electrical power, install approximately a quarter acre of pavers on the parking and laundry area of the property, install railings on each of the balconies and complete the perimeter wall on the lower side of the property.
We are currently studying the possibility of replacing the 15-passenger van, which gets very poor gas mileage and is costly to keep in good repair. We will let everyone know if or when we will need donations to fund that expense.
Finally, we are proud to report that the church Juan Francisco pastors that meets each Sunday and each Thursday evening on the second floor of the casa has almost fully returned to the attendance levels it experienced before Covid came along. We all enjoyed an enthusiastic worship service of singing, prayer and preaching on the Sunday we worshiped there.
La Familia is currently home to 30 children.