September 2015 update

Hello friends. 

Wow.  It has been a very busy summer between hosting teams, travelling home to CT for visit and of course, building, building, building.

The family is doing very well.  The kids are enjoying school and are all actually doing amazingly well, considering that most of the teaching is in Spanish.  Elise has made a lot of friends and loves going to learn and socialize.  Mara, Jonathan & Abby are a little less excited about school and would much rather be huddling together on the couch playing mine craft.  Yvonne has hit a good routine of taking care of all of us, spending time in her bible and with Rosetta Stone.  She enjoys helping to host teams when they come out to the Ranch and has started to garden and make the place look great.  And best of all, we are all blessed to have Miriam living out here.  She is so patient and loving to all of us and a great example of trusting in and living to serve Jesus.  I am having a great time as we are into full blown construction mode on our house.

 

This first house is about 200 square meters (2,000 square feet) and will be the model home for the rest of the construction we will be doing here at the Children’s Ranch.  Each house will have the capacity for 8 children and one ‘Mom & Dad’ set of foster parents.  If we can quickly raise the necessary funds to continue construction, I hope to be able to move into the house by the end of this October.  We still need about $40,000 to finish this first house.  As of this writing, I do not have any more funds to order the next batch of materials.  

I am certain that this project is part of God’s plan for some of His most special children here in Costa Rica.  I am also certain that God’s timing is far superior to my plans.  Either He is telling me to take some time off from construction to focus on my family and making more relationships in the local community, or He is looking for me to completely trust in His provision.  I have about 2 weeks worth of work that I can do on the house without spending much more money, at the end of which I will have to determine how to proceed.

Our family has been extremely blessed by the generosity of our family and friends and churches and we have had enough money every months to pay our bills and continue with our ministry.  We hope that everyone knows how appreciative we are for that support and how much we recognize the sacrifice that this is for each of our donors.

 

I would like to issue a challenge to everyone that reads this blog.  Please consider how you might be able to help support this very worthy project.  Perhaps you have the resources to personally send our ministry a tax-deductible donation to continue construction.  Perhaps you feel compelled to band together with a group of folks and try to raise some money to help.  Every bit helps and every bit is needed.  I have a page on the ministry website that breaks down the cost of building one of these houses.  Please visit http://68ministries.org/our-mission/living-waters-childrens-ranch/promo-video/ to see this detail and much more information about the Ranch.

The leaders of our ministry have met and we have decided that we should have at least two families, preferably three, living in homes at the Ranch before we start taking in children.  We can build a house in 4 months if we have the funds.  How amazing would it be for us to raise the $160,000 that we will need to get to that point to start radically blessing these children?

If you have any questions or comments please send me an email to rob@68ministries.com  I would love to hear from you and perhaps discuss how you can come down and check out what we are going first hand.

Happily Serving,

Rob Wutka