Following a difficult 2017 and a tumultuous start to 2018 with the political unrest and accompanying uncertainty, we returned home to Honduras the first week of February and have had a busy, but good and productive few months already. Hot - yes. Dry - yes. But, the political unrest has stabilized and we do not feel the effects on a regular basis for now. In our family of four now, Eliana is now 15 mo. old and not near the screamer she was last year. She is still proving to be sensitive and expressive but much better and finally acclimating to the world around her. Alida will be 4 years old in May and she continues to be a joy. She loves life, her animals, and friends.
Personally, life in Las Lomitas keeps us busy in the days, evenings and weekends as we continue to support and attend the local church. Stacey is in the midst of training Xiomara, Pastor Eduar's wife to lead the children's Sunday School. We support the youth group with guys and girls meetings once a week and even attended the HtH Extreme Camp with a few of the older ones this March. One in particular, Fany, comes to our house for personal discipleship with Stacey once a week. Please pray for God to continue to firmly plant her in Him and grow her spiritually.
Stacey attends a local women's group and teaches an English class at the local school once a week. Church & prayer services, a discipleship class, and local fundraising events like food sales keep us busy and provide a lot of opportunity for relationship development. We were too busy last year and have learned a lot about how to better manage a full time job, local ministry, and family now that we have two kids. So, pray for us as we continue to balance and continually seek holistic health. Pastor Eduar has continued to be a stable source of leadership and quality preaching in Las Lomitas but he and his family still do not live locally and he is a full time carpenter. He admits to being spread too thin. Pray with us that they would be able to move to Las Lomitas and live/work locally as we know this will relieve a lot of the travel/time burden on him and his family. Their names are Eduar, Xiomara, Helen, and Abi Funez if you could remember them in your prayers. They specifically ask prayer for Xiomara's son(Eduar's step-son) Eduardo, as he doesn't know the Lord and is quite a challenge for them.
On our "homestead" the rainwater cistern is proving to be quite helpful as the 3 hours/week of community water system is out again. The dry season calls us to ask God for rain as the cistern gets low. Two baby goats were born this March and the mother is providing milk for our girls as well as her kids. Our other two goats are pregnant and due in July. Chickens are giving an average of 7 eggs/day and the garden is waiting for the rains to start to be planted out. Bananas, papaya, and many flowers adorn our yard as well.
As many of you know we started a small business a few years ago working with Eduar and a few young men in Las Lomitas to make products for coffee lovers from coffee wood. de Palo is growing slowly but surely, with a couple of large orders coming through this year. We don't have very much time to give to it at this phase in our lives, just a few hours a week, but if you would like to learn more or be a part of providing dignified work to our neighbors check out the website here. Stock will be arriving in the store in May!
We continue to work full time with Heart to Honduras as "Developers of Transformational Initiatives." Continue reading below to learn more about what that looks like. We share a job position and depending on the week or topic each fulfill our tasks. Most common is for Kaleb to work four days a week and Stacey one with HTH.
Within the HTH Department of Community Development, we continue to see remarkable strides forward. After six years of holistic, collaborative efforts with communities, we are starting to see some truly exciting results. As we have developed strong connections with communities, local government, and other local organizations, the true power of unity has started to yield some transformational collaboration. Most significantly, many of these communities who said "We can't provide anything" just five years ago are now leading and organizing their own development. This process of empowerment is probably best expressed in the following graph of the collaboration data that we have been collecting since the program began.
This data is exciting for a number of reasons. We are thrilled and grateful to be a part of an NGO that is taking seriously the dignity of the people we serve alongside. This data reflects that the communities with which we work are beginning to see themselves as capable partners - protagonists in their own development, not as simple recipients of charity.
These exciting six years of progress has led us to finally launch our newest initiative that seeks to capitalize on the remarkable gains we have experienced.
After 2 years of planning, a new HtH initiative, Communities of Holistic Impact (CoHI), launched at our Santa Elena campus this February. Three communities are joining us on this new adventure - Las Lomitas, Caliche, and Lomas del Aguila. CoHI is a long-term initiative designed primarily to empower community leadership to be highly-effective agents of change in their own community. It is a unique and exciting program that draws on the past six years of collective development experience. Together with our coworkers on both sides of the border, we have developed a comprehensive way to qualify and measure the success of this program.
So far, we have worked through three basic training sessions with the communities.
What is a community? / What is a healthy leader?
and...
The Holistic Being and Community
Each of the three communities, their leaders and local government officials, signed agreements with HTH to invest the effort necessary effort and resources from their communities in order to grow. If this program is successful, we will see these communities move through the four phases of development in the next 10 years - albeit at different paces and with different results. Right now, we are starting with the Hatching phase, learning to think differently and together as we pop heads out of our shells.
One part of the CoHI Initiative are community activities and challenges. The first activity for each community to prepare and organize a community lunch - using only local funds and resources.
Each community approached it in their own way... Lomas del Aguila was truly remarkable. With more than 400 people fed and food to spare, this small mountain town organized a remarkable feat - a first time for their community! They left the event animated and excited to take on increasingly bigger challenges. The event helped them prove to themselves that they are capable of tackling what lies ahead for their small town.
Las Lomitas failed to organize a successful event, but decided to take the challenge on in late April - determined to learn to work together despite divisions that exist in the community. The even led to a very honest discussion amongst community leaders about how the greatest risk facing the town's development is not lack of resources, but lack of unity and organization.
Caliche truly amazed us as well. Town leaders went from house to house collecting local resources - two pounds of rice here, a kilo shortening there. Some gave chickens, some gave tamarinds for juice, in total 43 people provided something so that together more than 150 people could enjoy the meal that followed. We were so proud to celebrate their accomplishment with them.
We have also worked with each community within the program to elect a "Community Development Commission" made up of nine representatives from the local community council, water council, school council and churches. We used the exercise as an opportunity to model transparent democratic process through a secret ballot vote. We will be working closely with each commission on a number of exercises over the coming years - starting in April with a community mapping exercise.
Do you want to be a part of these amazing things that are happening in Honduras?
How you can join us: As most you of understand a "non-profit" organization like Heart to Honduras functions thanks to generous donors like yourself.
Despite some of the most truly exciting and successful years, financial support for the ministry have recently been down. As a result, at this moment we are seeking financial support. Specifically, we are asking you to consider to partner with us at HtH with a monthly donation. A monthly gift carries the incredible advantage of being a reliable and sure source of income for the work that we do. A consistent monthly gift as opposed to one-time gifts allows us all to establish healthy expectations and budgets. If you are able, please consider giving monthly.
Small monthly gifts could multiply and fill the need if many are doing it. If you and 5 other families from your church or community commit to $50/mo. that is $3,600/year and has an enormous impact. $50/mo. is less than $1.70/day. What are spending $1.70/day on right now? $50/mo. may be equivalent to a meal or two eating out each month for your family. Use this opportunity to share and teach your families and churches that TOGETHER we can do so much more.
We would love to add 15 monthly givers this month. Will you help us reach that number ? Will you join Heart to Honduras as a monthly giver? We would love to report back in May that we hit that goal together.
Over the years, so many difficult and amazing changes have been made within HtH, and we can honestly say it is a credible ministry doing amazing, true, holistic development work in the name of Jesus. We would love to see more people engaging with it as a whole.
You can give a tax-deductible donation in monthly increments via Heart to Honduras (a 501.3c) by visiting the HTH online giving page.
Who we are:
Kaleb and Stacey Eldridge - Our shared passion for people and our faith led us to marriage in June of 2009. In 2010, Heart to Honduras offered us the opportunity to step into a full-time International Community Development role. In 2011 we left our full-time teaching and tech-writing jobs in order to move to Honduras and have been here ever since. Why? Our faith leads us to the understanding that we cannot just view people as only souls (to be saved) or only bodies (to be fixed or provided for), but as whole people.
We are all in poverty - mentally, physically, environmentally, emotionally, financially, spiritually – not one of us escapes the grasp of oppression and suffering. We believe that only through hope in Christ can we ever fully escape this vicious cycle. As holistic beings, our response to poverty must also be holistic. We can no longer just engage the world in only church, only poverty alleviation efforts, only counseling, only microbusiness, only medical work, or only environmental advocacy, but work to bring all these elements into one holistic model that ministers to unique needs in each individual or community. This understanding leads us to live intentional lives that focus around relationship with God, ourselves, our environment, and others
Thanks to all of you that love and support us in so many ways. You have been a key part of our work in Honduras over these past six and a half years. Grace, peace, and love to you all.