This summer Not Forgotten was able to send two work teams to Puerto Alegria! The construction continues as the teams finished the workshop/storage building, rebuilt the gazebo, and continued to build bungalows at the new site. When the teams weren't sweating in the hot Amazon sun, they organized Bible school for the kids and also took them for a day of fun at the zoo and movies. The summer teams are always such a blessing to the kids - they love hanging out with their American friends!
Struggles and hardships are ever present in a third world country like Peru. Poverty creates new temptations every day, and a well run, well funded place like the home in Puerto Alegria becomes a prime target. In September, both the generator and water pump were stolen from Puerto Alegria. Thankfully, due to the generous donations of so many people, Not Forgotten was able to purchase a new generator and water pump for the home.
For me, Christmas is a very happy, joyful time of year. It is a time of year where I am surrounded by friends and family and can meditate on the thought that God loved me so much that he sent his only son, Christ, into the world to rescue me from my sin. For street children, Christmas is painfully sad. While others are surrounded by people they love, street children are reminded of the family that rejected them and threw them out. This pain is compounded by the fact that their sense of self worth is so low that they could never believe a God cares about them, much less loves them and sent his only son to die for and rescue them. So Christmas is a difficult time for the boys in Puerto Alegria, and at Not Forgotten we are constantly looking for ways to show them that we love and care about them, and so does God. This Christmas, Not Forgotten, through the generous donations given by so many people, has provided funds to pay for a Christmas party, Christmas dinner, and Christmas presents for not only the 40 boys living in Puerto Alegria, but also for 350 other children that Scripture Union works with in Iquitos. We hope that through our giving, these children may begin to understand that we love them just as they are, and that God loves them as well.
On top of helping to make these Christmas festivities possible, a Not Forgotten work team will be teaming up with our friends from Nebraska and heading down to Puerto Alegria right after Christmas to spend the rest of the holidays and the new year with the boys. Please keep this team in your prayers as you celebrate with your family this season.
Perhaps most exciting of all, Not Forgotten is going to be able to pay for two teachers to live in Puerto Alegria year round starting in January. We are very thankful to Redeemer Community Church of Birmingham, AL for making this possible. This has been a big dream of ours for a long time, because the education of the boys in Puerto Alegria is very poor. The boys are educated at a government run school in the nearby village where they live. The teachers at the school have to hike 1-2 hours every day from Iquitos through a very treacherous trail in the jungle every day just to get to school (To the left is a picture of me crossing a river along this trail). As you may imagine, there are many days when it is raining too much (it is the rainforest) for these teachers to feel safe taking their daily commute, and there are other days when they just don't feel up to it. Other times these teachers go on strike in effort to improve their salaries and will not work for weeks at a time. These circumstances lead to a very poor education for these children and also instills in them the idea that education is not that important. These are things that we desperately want to change because we believe that education is an integral part of bringing these kids out of poverty and empowering them to create change in their communities.
I want to thank all of you for your interest in and support of Not Forgotten. We pray that you will have a blessed Christmas, and that we may all remember that the reason we celebrate Christmas is that, just like the street children in Peru, we were lost, but God loves us so much that he sent his son to this earth to save us from our own sins.
Merry Christmas!
Tyler Fuqua
1 comment:
thanks tyler!
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