Welcome to 2016 everyone!
Bonnie has been meeting with a ministry who helps to
design and build schools and churches in rural areas. This team specializes in
buildings built in other countries made from cinder block. They are offering
their architects and engineers to draw up plans for the school with all the
requirements by the Costa Rican government at no cost to us.
These plans are detailed and drawn to scale, and will be presented to the city planner in Costa Rica and to begin the permit process for building the school. This team has helped complete a list of things that needed to be done to make the permit process move along smoothly. God knew what we needed and has provided for our every need. We are so excited and are praising God for His provision and continued favor.
Cailene and Cornelio felt like going into 2016 was a bit of a hiccup, but a much needed one to refocus and reanalyze their lives.
As of 2016 we now have reached a new record for our youngest and oldest students! We have from age 2 to 65 and everywhere in between. We are excited to have opened new younger children’s groups and are expecting more growth in the school!
Cornelio was in a martial arts competition and had a hard fall. The other person landed on him snapping his collar bone. He was taken to the hospital. Praise God the bone missed his lung by half an inch. The hard part was he was in the hospital for 8 days with pain pills and waiting for there to be room for him to get the break operated on. Costa Rican hospitals are different. You can only visit for 1 hour in the evening then the rest of the time you and a room full of others are just waiting. Everyone has their own bed but there were 8 in Cornelio’s room all sharing the same bathroom. There was lots of time to think and pray. Through this three week process Cailene continued to teach at the university and the school. It truly was through prayer, family support and pain medication that we headed into 2016.
The things Cornelio come away with was that he learned that a person can have his or her own plans and think that everything is going just fine, but God still changes things for the better. When a person depends on his or her own physical strength to get through the day in and day out stuff our bodies just get weaker and we will eventually fail. Sometimes it takes a bad situation for us to analyze our lives and refocus on God’s plans and that our own personal strength doesn’t make a difference! We all need to learn from our tough experiences in life and choose to grow from them!
Mekhi took his first steps this month!
Also, he is starting to respond to both Spanish and English words.
