January 05th, 2024

You never stop learning it seems.  

The Milk Project has a busy January every year...got to get food out to each location, update inventories on cups, utensils, etc. and meet with parents to sign the kids up for another year.  It is matriculating like for school. 

In Tegucigalpa this is, relatively, easy.  But in the rural areas, with harvest time in full swing, it is a little more difficult to coordinate.  Yesterday was a meeting in Las Botijas, and 23 of 35 children's parents were there. 

The new staff there will have to visit the other 12 households, to see if they were busy, or if they have decided to not continue, and if so...visit our list of families still waiting for a spot to open up.  

Our scholarship students were on hand to help and get some experience moving food, seeing how things work administratively...training up the next generation, even if we don't know specifically if any of them will end up doing something like this full time in the future.  

Working with children is not easy and not always predictable.  With families, even more so, and in multiple scenarios/locations...well, you get the idea.  Always learning though!

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Also learning that while the work upstairs continues on the office building, the tedious finishing work on all the concrete walls (stucco to be ready to paint) that we can make some progress on the "bodega" (warehouse) downstairs with a separate crew when the right block went on sale at the end of the year.  Right now, just doing the side walls on the two sides that need it most (the side that faces the road, and that faces the mission house where there was a lot exposed.)

We will have to wait for groups to help us progress on this, for the funding and labor help, but hopefully it will be good enough to park cars in here soon at least.  But...to be able to move in all the stuff from the containers and then sell them, that will probably not be ready until maybe the fourth quarter of the year.  

Back to the Milk Project, we are also constantly learning about how to help with home issues.  When it is cisterns or beds, that is relatively straight forward, but occasionally we have donations come in to help with roofs or floors.  

With some of the homes though, replacing a roof isn't so easy...if the wood supporting the roof is also rotting.  

So, there are some conversations and thinking/planning to see how to help best when sometimes you can't fix everything, since rebuilding the wood and the roof, a new house essentially, could cost over $2000, depending on where, when, and who can help put it all together.  

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And also learning...about vehicle repair.  After a long stay in the shop, with a complete overhaul and much other work (which we got into step by step before knowing how deep the hole would be), we got the white Ford back just before Christmas. 

Gently using her to break her in, she broke down...right there.  Better there than on the road somewhere, as apparently the clutch master cylinder went out.  

So...back she goes, eventually.

Getting around the country to do everything takes vehicles, and trying to manage that and them in a sustainable, manageable, and economical way sometimes feels like we have it down, and then sometimes...like we are still learning.  

Spoiler alert then for life...we are always learning.  Never will the day come on earth where we have it all down, when it all makes sense, when it all goes according to plan.  That can be discouraging.  But knowing it is coming at least, helps.  Sometimes.  :-)