After a four year hiatus due to the pandemic and family needs, we are excited to have the opportunity to work with a new group of high school students through Sus Manos. This year we will return to Las Palmas, the International Children´s Care (ICC) home in the Dominican Republic. It has been eight years since we last visited Las Palmas. We built strong bonds with children, house parents and administration during our previous three visits to the campus and had intended to make it our yearly destination, but scheduling conflicts had kept us away. We are so excited to return and to renew our relationships there.
We have nine students plus one parent who have joined Sus Manos this year. This is an unusual group, because while four of the nine students are in my Spanish 3 class, the other five all speak Spanish at home. This level of Spanish proficiency should help us make lots of connections with the children at Las Palmas.
We had an orientation to Sus Manos in October for participants and parents. Our November training session helped students understand the foundation for short term service learning trips and the Sus Manos philosophy.
We have nine students plus one parent who have joined Sus Manos this year. This is an unusual group, because while four of the nine students are in my Spanish 3 class, the other five all speak Spanish at home. This level of Spanish proficiency should help us make lots of connections with the children at Las Palmas.
We had an orientation to Sus Manos in October for participants and parents. Our November training session helped students understand the foundation for short term service learning trips and the Sus Manos philosophy.
- We discussed why Christians should do short term missions. We looked at salaries in the Dominican Republic and saw that if our trip is just about painting a building, it is a poor use of funds, as it can be done so much less expensively using local labor.
- Romans 1:11-12 is our focus: sharing our faith and learning from our new friends at Las Palmas.
- A video from the "Helping without Hurting" series showed that financial poverty is only one way that sin has created brokenness and that we are not superior to those we seek to help.
- We watched a video introduction to Las Palmas and ICC´s work there.
- We read "The Tyranny of the Urgent" and discussed how we spend our time. We saw that we need to learn to focus on the things that truly matter, not only the things that seem urgent, but are not actually important.