A very Happy
New Year to you all!
We are so
pleased to be able to say that, little by little, we are moving forward with
what has seemed to be like building the Ark!
To those of
you who have contributed to this and who are working to help us in some way, we
cannot say thank you enough. It doesn’t
matter how you choose to support us, we are so grateful for it all. Some of you choose to support us with your
prayers. How valuable that is!
Developments
since our last newsletter:
Our goal to develop a cottage industry for women using the
produce from our property is in its infancy.
I have been doing trial runs with recipes for market research and the
chutney made sold out within an hour.
More orders were placed almost immediately, prompted by the positive
comments from the initial purchasers.
We are still searching for suitable women to make the products.
Without children visiting regularly to participate in helping to pick the
produce as part of their involvement here, it is very labour intensive for us
when we already have a full quota of work.
We have been blessed to have a part-time volunteer who has
helped out on a general basis. She has
experience in veterinary care and fund raising, so she is a great asset. A volunteer to help with book keeping would
be a great bonus, as it is very time-consuming.
Our attempts to find regular visiting children have been
foiled because they have no transport to get here and my vehicle is too small
to accommodate a group. We are seeking
out establishments which have a vehicle to bring them in. It is always a matter of finding solutions to
challenges in whatever way possible.
Nonetheless, children do continue to visit us, sometimes
arriving on their own, and we work to educate them in so many informal ways by
involvement with the animals and what we are doing.
Children watching hen and chicks
One little girl only agreed to go home to her mother because
she was going to fetch her clothes to come back!
There is plenty to stimulate children here and they recognise
that, though they describe it as that there is not as much going on anywhere
else, as here. The rabbits and dogs are a
great attraction and the dogs obligingly let them lead them round the garden. Petting or feeding a horse along with
observing how to pick out its feet is also of great appeal. Sylvester, the lilac Burmese cat, is always
available to be stroked and would make the shyest visitor feel special and
loved with his constant purring.
The first words of a little girl who arrived to visit a few
days ago were, ’Isn’t it pretty?’ It is
certainly true that we continue to do landscaping work and are working to make
this such a beautiful venue that visitors will pay a small amount to come here,
enjoy and learn from our animals, appreciate our tropical gardens and buy our
produce. We are aiming to find as many
sources of revenue as we can in order to be as self-supporting as
possible. Little by little we are
succeeding, though we shall always probably need outside sponsorship as well.
Our egg, fruit and vegetable sales have been satisfactory,
bringing in a few hundred pesos [a few pounds!] a week, not quite enough to run
the place! Every little bit helps,
however, and it is a start.
We very much aim to live what we teach in terms of helping
others and service. We now have 21
chickens and 3 cockerels, as we purchased a few more to help out a neighbour.
His son had been killed in Santo Domingo and he had no money to be able to
attend the funeral.
Our cockerels don’t fight since we put the aggressive one in
the pot, but we swapped one cockerel for another rabbit, Isadora, when a
friend’s cockerel died. Anthony and Cleopatra, a pair of rabbits, arrived a few
weeks ago and we had fun building them a hutch with two compartments for when
the female has kittens. To raise funds we
had planned to breed rabbits to sell as pets and for meat, but that purchase
was also to help out a young man, out of work and with a young baby, in order
for him to buy baby milk. In this
country, such a story can often be a scam, but in this case it wasn’t and we
got some rabbits in return. He has been
promised a baby rabbit in due course to make up for the cheap price he gave
us. There was a benefit on both
sides.
Anthony and Cleopatra
The rabbits eat our vegetable peelings and outer leaves as
well as fruit that is not of top quality.
The chickens pick through the used sawdust from the stables and devour
any other fruit and vegetable waste that has not been composted or the
occasional centipede we have been forced to kill. Its bite would kill a dog or cat and possibly
a child and certainly require a visit to hospital for an adult. We try not to waste anything and to encourage
that in our workers and the children who visit.
Our vegetable garden is now considerably more advanced than
in the previous photograph posted. We
have harvested Swiss chard, arugula, lettuce, peppers and tomatoes. Our tomato plants are laden with cherry
tomatoes and keep producing an amazing crop, as do our pepper plants. We now have a better arrangement for providing
shade from the blistering sun and heat in normal weather and we have planted
many more varieties of crop.
I have also been creating a herb garden, not quite as grand
as and on a considerably smaller scale, but, modelled on the Elizabethan herb
garden at Kenilworth Castle! This will
be an interesting development, especially as I work to educate residents and
visitors alike to use natural products rather than the commercial seasonings
full of artificial, potentially harmful, ingredients. We are still searching for an acai palm,
which though from Brazil does grow here, in order to harvest and sell its
berries, which have amazing nutritional and antioxidant properties.
We have had some success with selling our plants taken from
cuttings or from the seeds of produce we have purchased. It is a challenge to teach workers and
children how to tend them sensitively, strategically and with love, but they
are gradually following instructions.
The alternative is that I make them start again! Nonetheless, that takes a lot more
supervision and time than I am always available to provide, so things don’t
always turn out quite as expected!
That
was the case with a pair of rustic gates!
The young men had worked so hard, but failed to use the tape, screws and
a saw provided, only nails and a machete because that is the way things are
done here! As a result the wood had
split and the gates didn’t fit where they were supposed to! Next time they will have to be made with me
standing over them! Fortunately, the
wood was only poles collected from the jungle next door... but, what a waste of
effort on their part! It is almost typical of the rough-shod and brutal
approach common here. How can people
know any different if they have never experienced anything more accurate or sophisticated?
Our gardener says that he is going to use the
simple design of our rustic fencing to separate his kitchen area from the rest
in the shack he is building. There is a
lot of unconscious learning and modelling going on. Never did I think I would be teaching
wood-working skills or how to use the tools, but how can people know when their
education is so limited at school?
A sense of humour is critical here, however! I still tear my
hair at how often I have shown helpers how to put on a halter properly and why,
but I still catch them doing it backwards.
I caught one of them trying to lead a horse with the halter upside
down! Fortunately the horse was
amenable, yet he must have been so uncomfortable. These people have not had teaching in developing
spatial awareness and so many of the other things which we absolutely take for
granted in developed countries. Their
motor skills are generally quite poor, because they have never had the practice
as a child.
One helper saw me sewing and asked me where I had learned
that. I said that it was in school, to
which he replied that they would never learn anything like that in school
here. These situations make us
appreciate how very blessed we were to receive such a broad education and how
hard it must be to have our more sophisticated expectations imposed on them.
OUR
IMMEDIATE GOALS last time were:
1.
To obtain the funding to maintain 9 children.
There is
considerable interest in making this possible, though so far no funds have been
pledged or forthcoming. The sponsor we
had for one child has agreed to allow us to reallocate that money to helping
visiting children, but now we need to find a solution to transporting them here.
2. To paint the exterior of the building where necessary.
We have had
almost non-stop torrential rain for
the last 5 weeks or more. This is not a
good time for painting and besides there have been other more urgent pressures
on our time.
3. To purchase four new
batteries [available locally at approximately 250GBP/375US$] for the inverter, used
during the frequent power cuts, to replace those damaged by the long power
outage caused by Hurricane Irene.
This still remains a matter of concern for us.
4.
To maintain the existing status quo for staff, visiting children
and animals.
We have received
funding to cover existing staff hours for one more month. We do have some funding for visiting
children. The funding for animals is
sometimes irregular as sponsors have other commitments, though as always we have our few very loyal supporters for
whom we are extremely grateful. They
help us in so many ways, not just with money.
News/Reports 
