Greetings! We hope that this update finds each and every one of you well.
Those of you who are TOGETHER with Heart to Honduras received your JUNTOS campaign snail-mail packet earlier this month (picture above). As an organization, we all work together - every day our Stateside and Honduran co-workers are meeting together (albeit primarily virtually for now) - so the title seems very appropriate for us. We will share specific details at the end of this update on how each of you can be involved in this exciting campaign in a variety of ways! If you did not receive this mailing and would like to learn more about the current JUNTOS+TOGETHER campaign please visit the following link to learn a little more about what is going on:
Honduras right now:
After a more than 5 month closure, international flights into Honduras resumed on August 17th. But, Honduras continues under a "National Curfew" (essential activities allowed daily from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. according to the last digit of an individual’s national identity card) until at least September 6th. The national government plans to be begin slowly opening flights with strict health requirements to travelers over the next month and some workers have returned to factory jobs in order to try and provide an income lifeline for the country. Despite these measures, the economic outcome for Honduras still looks fairly grim. If you would like to stay abreast of what COVID-19 means for the country over the coming weeks and months, you can follow updates from the US Embassy to Honduras at the following link.
For now, our Honduran HTH co-workers continue to work from home with rare exceptions to go clean up the HTH properties or travel to the communities we work with. The most recent word from our Honduran director Henry is that he still does not foresee the reopening of our Honduran offices in the immediate future. We have been working with them to make our own return plans accordingly, which you can read more about in the "family" section.
Community Development and HTH Covid-19 Response
Thank you to each and every one of you that participated in HTH's "Food for Families" campaign. We personally know dozens of the people that were reached through this collaborative campaign between you - our HTH donors, the HTH staff, and the local Honduran government. This campaign resulted in emergency food relief for hundreds of people at a very critical moment in their lives when access to adequate nutrition was suddenly cut off. The "Food for Families" relief campaign is now finishing the second (and final) round of distributions. After the temporary "relief" mode this spring, now much of our efforts are turning towards restorative and sustainable rehabilitation and development efforts this summer. Namely we are three months into a participatory food security initiative in our three Communities of Holistic Impact (CoHI) - reaching approximately 1500 people.
In order to maintain our commitment to asset-based community development and empowerment of local community members, this CoHI initiative differs significantly from a traditional food security or agricultural development initiative. A traditional project might provide training and resources (such as improved seed varieties or new crop types) to local community members and then guide them through the cultivation and harvesting process in order to ensure food security for individual families within a community. Within this traditional paradigm, a family's access to food is paramount to other considerations such as community unity, participation, and long-term project sustainability.
In contrast, the CoHI food security initiative turns those priorities around, although both are important CoHI prioritizes community empowerment and long-term project sustainability over immediate issues such as food access. Although this may seem callous initially, it is important to note that we are not choosing one or the other - we still work on both fronts. However, when push comes to shove, and we arrive to a moment when we need to choose between a) "highest food production possible" and b) "highest level of community participation and empowerment possible" we will go with option b.
How does that look in practice? You can read all about that initiative and what else we have been working on for HTH in our CoHI update at the following link.
What does work look like?
With grad school over, Kaleb and Stacey together work remotely about 50 hours / week for HTH. After both the Honduran and stateside HTH boards voted for a new organizational structure at the spring 2020 board meetings, a huge part of our work with HTH this summer has been guiding our international staff through an internal transition. This includes revisiting and refining mission, vision, philosophy, setting goals and ensuring true impact.
Kaleb's grad studies could not have finished up at a better time to be able to use what he has learned to serve the ministry in this transition. We end Zoom calls with staff quite frequently and comment to one another "what just happened is truly transformational." What do we mean by that?
True participatory development is occurring within the international CPHTH (Corazon Para Honduras in Honduras and Heart to Honduras stateside) staff. We often say that COVID has provided us with the amazing opportunity to stop the day to day business and truly dig deep and do what we have always done in the communities with CPHTH staff! With traveling teams and camps suspended the staff has the time to focus on deep impact, planning, goals and evaluation. We have already developed so much as a team and are on track to come out of the COVID era in amazing shape, poised and ready to make true lasting impact in Honduras. This time however, the impact will not just be in the Community Development Department, but across the entire organization, touching everything that CPHTH does.
Family Update
We praise God that we have found a sustainable housing solution in Pittsburgh! We are now living in a house just minutes from the (wonderful, Spanish-speaking) church that we have been attending for the past 2 years. Thank you to all of you that prayed for us these past months as many decisions had to be made and moving executed. As we explained in an email we sent out in June, in an effort to seek stability for our family and work/plan well with our co-workers we decided to reschedule our originally planned early August 2020 return home to Honduras for January 2021 due to the complications of the global pandemic. Knowing where we will be located (Pittsburgh) for the next several months is of great comfort to our souls. We will continue to monitor the many situations in Honduras, talk with our co-workers and plan our return when it is possible. We thank God for our beloved neighbors and coworkers who continue to watch our Honduran home and animals. Keep them and our home in your prayers as we are unable to return to them.
Juntos/Together Campaign
As we mentioned at the beginning of this update, we want to invite you to personally get involved by doing several specific things to be a part of this JUNTOS + TOGETHER campaign. This campaign is about remembering that we are truly not alone - we are accompanied by one another and our faithful, graceful God.
1. PRAY+Together = Join members of our staff on Monday mornings at 10am for a time to connect and pray on Facebook live or pray in small groups for Heart to Honduras when you do your STAND+Together activity. This has been going on since July, so you can always go back and listen to the ones that are already done. We can honestly say that it has been an encouraging and uniting experience to join our brothers and sisters in prayer on a regular basis and hope that you too will be uplifted.
2. STAND+Together = We are asking people to pray and stand in solidarity. Stand, pray, and take a picture "6 feet apart"...the following link describes the details:
3. MOVE+Together = Register with HTH to walk, jog, run, bike, or whatever movement you like best. The goal is TOGETHER cover 1,573 kilometers that is the distance between our stateside and Honduran offices. Our family of 4 will be walking, jogging and biking! Will you join by moving at least 5k of those 1,537 kilometers needed? See details and register here:
Instead of just purchasing mass-produced promotional bandanas with the JUNTOS logo in the US. We decided to ask some of the capable women in Honduras if they thought could fulfill a tall order.... 200+ hand-embroidered bandanas in just 2 months. Not only did they say they could do it - they were thrilled! For most women in Honduras, opportunities for reasonable income are scarce - let alone in the midst of COVID. This project not only provided income for vulnerable women and families, but empowered people and skills that may have been undervalued or ignored by many local men and women. We celebrate their artistic skill and dedication, and pray that this small step of empowerment might yield great returns in their self-efficacy.
In late September you will hear about the LEARN+Together component (organized by Stacey) for you to get a chance to learn more about Heart to Honduras and Honduras in general from the comfort of your own home this fall.
And last but not least, at any time you are invited to GIVE+Together! You can mail in the return envelope you received in your JUNTOS mailing with a check, or you can give online at this link. Anything that you are able to give beyond your normal giving is so much appreciated in these uncertain times.
We are thankful for our generous and faithful supporters, and we are truly excited about everything that is happening at HTH right now! In the midst of so much uncertainty and change, we have seen the abundant provision of God and the beauty of the fruit of holistic development. If you did not take the time to read the CoHI update, we really encourage you to do so to get an idea of what we mean by that. We hope that you too will be uplifted by the stories that are included there.
How you can pray:
- Good harvests in our CoHI communities. Both spiritually and their current food security initiatives!
- The health of community members who are sick with various ailments.
- Grief processing for those that have lost loved ones to Covid-19 and issues caused by it's fallout during this time. May Christ and His Church be ever present and comforting.
- The smooth progression of the CPHTH restructuring process.
- Wisdom for CPHTH leadership on when to return to offices in Honduras.
- Safety for our coworkers that continue to do field work in spite of the current health crisis.
- Well being of our house and animals in Honduras while we are unable to be present and for our neighbors taking care of them.
WHO WE ARE:
Kaleb and Stacey Eldridge - Our shared passion for the people around us and around the world and our common faith in Christ 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 there 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 micro-business, only education, 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.