With March has come some settling in to a steady pace here in Atenas. Since my graduation and preparation to join EMI, there´s always been a big change around the corner. This past month has been a welcome time to make progress on existing work and develop existing relationships.

At EMI, the order of business has been finishing projects. While the church in Peru made sure our preliminary plans complied with city regulations, sent any required changes, along with their own comments, to our volunteer architect, we have time to complete projects from last year. Two of these projects are in Haiti, and one is in Mexico.

The project I have done the most work on, the Haitian Children´s Home, gives orphans a family, a home, and an education. The Pye family founded HCH in 2006 with a vision to not just house orphans, but to adopt them into their own family. If you read about their family at http://haitianchildrenshome.org/, you'll recognize that each child really is part of their family. Right now, the Pyes have adopted 21 children into their family and are raising them to love God and preparing them to improve their community as adults. A second family is about to join them.

The Pyes just bought a 16 acre property with eventual plans to house 8 families, followed by space for school, a workshop, and a church. Of course, the best terrain is reserved for the soccer field. While they actually have a beautiful oceanfront property, most of their land is extremely hilly, and littered with rather treacherous volcanic rock. EMI is providing plans for each family's home, water supply, grading to make the terrain usable and cover up the rocky terrain, and a road capable of handling a bus to reach the homes.

Besides work, the interns (minus Ben, plus a friend of Emily's from Texas) took a trip from Saturday, March 27 to Wednesday, March 31, bonding and enjoying some of the abundant beauty of God's creation here in Costa Rica (which we paid for ourselves, in case you were worried : ) We saw some lava rocks race down the sides of Arenal Volcano, did some hiking in Monteverde cloud forest, and surfed and sat on the beach two days in Guanacaste

We did a good bit of sitting on buses as well, catching some of them with a helping of God's grace, despite our best efforts to plan every detail. The end of our trip overlapped with the beginning of Semana Santa, or Holy Week, a week that everybody has off of work and school. Many go on vacation to the beach, especially near the end of the week. However, since Semana Santa tends to be recognized as a Catholic holiday, many of the Evangelicals here hardly recognize Easter due to the hard split with Catholicism. My church did have a sermon about the resurrection, but some Evangelical churches carry on as if Easter didn’t exist; hardly any of the churches here plan anything special like we are used to back home.

Prayer Requests for April:

• Issuing three finished projects within the next two weeks.
• The volunteers designing for the Iglesia Cristiana y Misionera of Lima, Peru.
• Four of the high school/college age youth from my church going to a missions conference in Guatemala:

¬ Praise that they raised the funds to go

¬ Pray that God would teach, lead, and inspire.

Thanks again for your continued prayers and encouragement.

In Christ,

Jim Flinchum