We had a planning meeting with the girls involved in our craft ministry at Grace Church. So many great ideas for this year. One of our big projects is a Craft fair, April 21st. We will be raising money for our missionaries in Mexico, the Donohues. They have a ministry called Cuirim Outreach. The use Celtic Monastic tradition there, focusing the day around work, study and prayer.

Every summer kids from our youth group go down there and help out with whatever they have going on. This past summer they built a childrens cafe. Many of the kids that live there are home all day by themselves while the parents are at work. Sometimes they don’t have food. Cuirim outreach wanted to provide for them in this way by giving them a free meal and a place to come and play. I just got an email from Brian Donohue on their current projects :

This month we are working on finishing the children’s cafe. We are currently serving 40 kids MWF from 11-2. We still need an oven and a frig. I was working with the Mexican importation officials yesterday trying to get permission to cross large quantities of food for the children. We have been receiving free food from Tucson but cannot drive it across with out special permission from the head honcho. We have a place we would like to purchase to start a second cafe. We may put a deposit down as early as next month. We had a small house built for our family just across the border in the Arizona desert. Kirsten is painting this week. We hope to move in at the end of the month. We have almost finalized our summer trips. We have seven groups lined up from June-Aug. We are wrapping up the shoe drive for the season. We received about 3,000 shoes.

We have had a full winter. We miss being in VA this time of year. God has blessed us with lots of visits from our families. The needs here are great and we are privileged to be the ones who get to be “bridges of blessing”.

Please send us pictures of the craft fair.

Brian

The money that we raise will be for these projects, but we also wanted to give the Youth a chance to raise some $$ for their trips too. So we are encouraging them to make things to sell at the fair. We will be having some classes to teach them skills to get them started on their projects. So far we thought we would do a card & beading class and stenciling class.

We are also encouraging them to have their services available for sale (like mowing or babysitting) for the silent auction. We are looking for more ideas of things we can teach them in a night or afternoon that we can complete that night or shortly there after. The boys are the hard ones. Some of them are into making hemp necklaces but, it’s hard to find a boyish craft. Any ideas?