(not arise and be mediocre.)
Lord, take my hands and help me to make something beautiful! (not mediocre)
That´s one of my prayers,
The other one is Lord, forgive me, I am disgusting!
I feel God wants these kids
to be blessed, not just mediocre (which in Nicaragua can be interpreted as a life of misery. While I am not a teacher nor an authority of any sort, I’ve noticed, after our third orphanage, third feeding center and third school that things are still the same. Those that know me will attest that I can´t even read or spell very well. All I can do is work hard, but at 56 in stifling hot tropical country, even that is fading quickly. The mosquitoes and heat is ridiculous and getting worse than ever. We live and work near the city´s garbage dump. Our hours between the school, feeding centers, medical outreaches and construction projects are grueling. The conditions are getting worse, (robbery, power-water outages, dengue-malaria epidemics, increasing poverty and desperation) But I do know that this work is for the love of God which constrains us and we have to make changes NOW in our schooling, feeding program and upcoming Jim Winner Home for At Risk Children (the orphanage)
Grand Kids and Great Grand Kids of the children I first helped are in the same soup lines. Change has to be made. Kids have to be able to reason clearly, for spiritual reasons as well as the obvious reasons. God does not have grandchildren.
If we keep putting into it what we’ve been putting into it, (with our eyes closed) we’ll keep getting the results. It applies to computers, economics, electricity, plumbing etc etc. Garbage in, Garbage out. Also this applies to child development. We want to free these kids of those chains of apathy and fatalism that their fathers and fore fathers have..
It´s like a mortar barrage, you need to keep moving the and angling the mortar´s barrel to get the proper adjustment for maximum affect. Continually seeking to improve.
Improvements this week.
The Jim Winner Home has made significant progress.
We’ve added a “goes into line” as well as a wall dividing the “goes outta line”. Also, we’ve added numbers because the kids were getting desperate and hurting each other. If there are numbers, there’s no need to fight for the position in line. Sorry for being the proud parent screaming into the video recorder, but i get excited with these kids, we love these kids so much, when they hurt we hurt.People say “the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expect different results” I don´t know if that´s true, but in this case it definitely applies.
So although we are still doing stuff like folkloric dancing (as required by Nicaraguan law) The Montessori is becoming more and more a reality. We are looking for readily available materials for their arts and crafts.
Can you help me to identify these items, in either spanish or english (I got the cow part), just the plants in these pictures around the orphanage would be great, Stuff that could be used as natural materials for crafts.
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Dean and Winnie Peters
deanpeters123 skype