Happy Easter! Spring has finally come to the frozen North! We are surrounded by blooming daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, crocuses, and maples while the song of early returning birds fills the warm spring mornings. All of nature reminds us of new life, and our New Life that fills our souls every day. We join with the global Church today in remembering Who it is that makes us all family.
family
We have decided that 2 and 4 are wonderful ages. For both of our girls, the first year of their life was not entirely pleasant... there were not many loving snuggles, smiles and laughs. They both cried A LOT as babies. The second year of life was met with strong personalities which required constant training and guidance. But now, Eliana turning 2 and Alida getting close to 5, wow, what a different world. It’s like we are starting to breathe a bit for the first time as parents. Add in the nature of our international travel, life, full time job and always on mission, and it’s really been a long almost 8 years now since we quit our stateside jobs and moved to HN. We did not even know how much we needed this time in Pittsburgh.
We love watching the girls grow to be more independent and feel our family of four solidify. Alida is asking every question in the book in order to understand the world around her and Eliana is learning to talk. They are learning self-control, to play together, fight and make up. They EAT, a LOT! We have enjoyed visiting places like the local conservatory, library and Children's Museum throughout this frigid winter in Pittsburgh, PA. The convenience of living in the States is amazing. Stacey and the girl’s life in our rural village in Honduras involved leaving once a week, if that, for a few hours to go to town and get groceries, fried chicken and a coffee. We only got to the “big city” for a nicer meal out (like Pizza Hut) and maybe a movie about once a month. The other day, here in Pittsburgh, we were amazed to realize that we had come and gone three times in one day and it was no big deal!
Our little city apartment close to campus may seem old, small and simple to some but to us it’s a castle - the most comfortable place in the world. We feel like we are staying in a luxury hotel every night. Nothing crawls across the walls (or us) at night. The inside is not the same temperature that it is outside. It is clean, quiet, safe. Ahhh.... We have truly enjoyed every day here. It’s been good for our souls. After the initial several months of moving and transition, we have been able to start working on our own personal renewal and holistic health. Being close to health care, spiritual/personal enrichment options, family, friends and even continual access to wifi to stay more connected has been a tremendous blessing. As much as we love our Honduran family, we have genuinely missed our U.S. family and friends. Being a part of one another’s lives once again, having trusted babysitting, and helping one another out is something we miss when in Honduras.
Heart to Honduras
We continue to work with Heart to Honduras, very closely with our Honduran staff. Since we are working remotely, we spend a lot of time on email, Google Drive and WhatsApp we have great systems in place to make this possible. With HTH we have two “babies” of sorts that we have worked tirelessly to create and sustain over our time there.
The first is the Community Development Department and its holistic, healthy support and local initiatives. We recently reported the data the on the 2018 Community Development Initiatives and are pleased to see that collaborative growth in several sectors continues.
Municipal governments now near 20% of total resources in initiatives, compared with 0% just 8 years ago. Beneficiaries broke 10% this year for the first time. These are people who just 8 years ago were saying they had nothing, and now, are saying that they have something, and that they are worth something. That there is a God and people that care about them. Community and local church continue somewhat steady. We somewhat expected that since in order to catalyze growth in those two groups, we are working more closely with them in...
...which launched February 2018 and is the second “baby.” The second year of the program got kicked off this February with a two day, overnight time with all three community’s commission leaders at the HTH camp in Santa Elena. Community leaders have also participated in an additional training on fundraising and finance management in their communities in March. You can read all about what’s happened so far in 2019 in our separate CoHI update:
In addition to our work in the regular comings and going of the community development department, these updates help you catch a glimpse of what we work to prepare and execute with CoHI (Communities of Holistic Impact). Props to our two amazing Community Development co-workers Fredy and Otto. Amazing men of God who we have the privilege of working with every day, even at a distance. We thank God for them, their lives, their families and work ethic every day. Please pray for God to strengthen, encourage and sustain them in this rigorous work.
School
This semester has really flown by. Kaleb is one week away from finishing up year one of his master’s in International Development at the University of Pittsburgh. The first semester felt like falling off a cliff into the ocean and trying not to drown. The second semester has not been quite so alarming, but still quite challenging – a little more like intentionally hopping into a cold river and trying to swim upstream. That being said, Kaleb has very much enjoyed the swim. The subject matter is of endless interest to him and is extremely relevant for the work that we do. Here’s a quick overview of what he’s learning this semester – and how it applies to our work.
Political Sociology
Taught by a world expert in democratization, Kaleb has very much enjoyed this class. In particular, it has provided valuable insight into the complex dynamics of governmental responsiveness, citizen participation, and civil society. For his term paper, he examined the role of "democratic hypocrisy" within participatory civil society institutions in Central America. In a nutshell, what happens to people (particularly Honduran people) when they are told by politicians, international aid groups, churches, or community councils that they are valuable members of a church, community council, or political movement only to be quietly dominated by superiors when they are close to centers of power. This is something that we have observed very closely now for seven years, and it was a very helpful exercise to be able to think down on this problem in this class.
Public Policy Analysis
What makes for good public policy? How do we know that it is good? What criteria can we (should we?) use to determine good or bad policy? This is obviously a highly subjective and value-laden pursuit, but the class focuses on a few analytical tools that we can use to analyze and write good public policy. Kaleb’s term paper is a collaborative effort with a classmate to analyze Israel’s (seriously dysfunctional) refugee recognition policies and provide a politically-feasible alternative policy. This class will help us hone internal policies within Heart to Honduras to help us consistently achieve the kinds of goals that we want to achieve.
Intermediate Quantitative Methods (a.k.a. Math, Stats, and Graphs)
How do we use statistics to inform our decisions? How can we try to understand which came first, the chicken or the egg? Where are we likely to make poor decisions based on data? This class (like Stats round 1 last semester), has been a stretch in a very healthy way. This class will very much help us at Heart to Honduras learn to collect meaningful data and how we can interpret what we collect using statistical tools. Kaleb’s joint research project for this class is looking at migrant flows from Central America to Mexico and the US and using regression analysis to suggest whether the flows are based on immigrants seeking economic opportunity or fleeing from violence in their home countries. We will be able to use many of these quantitative skills to evaluate CoHI advances.
Program Evaluation
Just from the title, you might be able to tell that this is far and away the most practical course that I have taken thus far. The entire semester has been focused on how to do perform reliable, valid program evaluation. The class is focused on how to design a proper evaluation and carry it out in an ethical and (as much as possible) objective way. Kaleb had to pick a program for which to design an evaluation. He picked (wait for it…) an amazing program called Communities of Holistic Impact by a little NGO known as Heart to Honduras! It has been an excellent opportunity to evaluate the program in-depth and has provided a mountain of potential for improvement to the program. He has really enjoyed it. At the very beginning of the semester, Kaleb had to create a very basic “logic model” for the program. The one that resulted might provide a little clearer picture for you of how we believe Communities of Holistic Impact really works.
Coming up...
Prayers are appreciated for all of our upcoming travel. Our next update will likely be from Honduras.
Kaleb is on the last stretch of his first year in Grad School. He has finals (4/22-4/24) right after Easter weekend and as soon as he finishes we will travel to Dayton, OH to be at a Heart to Honduras board meeting and meet up with our staff for the last 5 days of April. We will have a busy 2 weeks. We get back to Pittsburgh and pack our bags for the summer May 16-Aug. 8 in Honduras. Our home, neighbors, pets, local church, co-workers, full time job, lots of work and being a good neighbor await us. We will be able to settle back in at home just in time to jump into the May Communities of Holistic Impact workshop visiting all 3 communities involved in COHI the first week we are back. We will reconnect with our co-workers, work together face to face on a daily basis and be able to visit many communities we have been in relationship with.
How you can support us...
Thank you for caring about our family. We appreciate your love, concern, and communication. Here are just a few ways that you can support our family.
1. Your prayers, encouragement and friendship.
Hearing from you, being a friend to us, listening, reading, and staying in touch perhaps means more than you know. Though we work with and meet a lot of people in our line of transient work, deep friendships are hard to come by.
2. Read.
Continue to learn more about healthy, holistic, International Development. What we do - and why we do it! If you want some recommendations, just send us an email!
3. Financial support is always needed.
We personally--as well as the ministry of HTH--continue to come short of the yearly support needed. If you haven't joined HTH's Awakening to invest in the ministry on a monthly basis, please do so here...
A special need currently is our summer plane tickets. Eliana is now two years-old, which means that there are four of us paying full price now purchasing round trip tickets once or twice a year. If you would like to give a special gift to HTH to help with the cost of our summer travel to Honduras, please note in the memo “Eldridge 2019 Honduras travel”. You can give online at the link below or send a check made out to Heart to Honduras at 1180 Wesley Ave. Xenia, OH 45385.
4. Advocate.
Spread the word to others and talk about HTH and healthy transformational community development. Help others be educated, involved or start to give financially. Would you consider asking another friend or church to join you?
Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom!
Love and spring greetings to you all.
We'll send word soon... from the other side of the airplane door.
Kaleb, Stacey, Alida and Eliana Eldridge