Play Structure Complete!

The large wooden play structure we had designed was finished a few weeks ago by Domingo, one of our faithful team members who is a local pastor in his 50s who serves with us as the Christian Leadership teacher, Carpentry Club leader, and elementary math teacher. We love the way it turned out, and the kids are all over it every chance they get! It has added a very fun and dynamic dimension to recess and lunch hour, and it supports our overall mission to restore broken youth spiritually, emotionally and physically for God’s glory.

Living Waters Ranch to Enter a Three-Week Intensive Mid-Year Term

With our roughly-40 students (8 from our foster/adoptive family and about 30 from our local community who participate daily in our discipleship-based homeschool) we will be entering a three-week period of different classes as of next week to ‘shake things up’ while further equipping our youth with experiences and knowledge they need in order to continue growing and exploring God’s will for their lives. My husband Darwin will be giving several intensive choir workshops; I’ll be teaching a Biblically-based world geography class (in addition to a crash course in grammar along with several Speech/Communication workshops) with our older students; and each child/teen will have the option of ‘specializing’ in one of several areas, including English as a second language, Agriculture/Christian Leadership, Carpentry/Christian Leadership, etc. All students will be involved in twice-weekly art classes during this mid-term time, and we’ll continue faithfully with our Bible study and prayer groups as usual.

The following three pictures were taken during Darwin’s reading class. (This is our 15-year-old son Brayan who is so sweaty because he just came in from recess). Darwin has been extremely creative in the class as he’s taught the kids to read in latin, organize a class play, study the Scriptures, watch and write about motivational videos, read personal and spiritual anecdotes from great spiritual leaders from centuries past, read about brain psychology, and so on. The students Darwin has in his class are teens who generally don’t get too excited about reading (and/or are extremely shy and prefer to just sit there as Wallflowers), so his very concentrated (and energetic) efforts with these guys has had a phenomenal impact on their integral development.

Updates Regarding Katy

The lawyer from the local government office has yet to fulfill her word to go out to Katy’s family’s home to investigate her living situation, although she promises to do so this upcoming week. Please pray for all the government workers involved, as they are overburdened with cases of child abuse, neglect, etc, and the personnel and their resources simply aren’t enough to manage each one with excellence. Our home and our hearts are prepared to accept Katy into our home if and when the Lord should bring her, and we continue our active communication with the government agency in hopes of her rescue.

A couple weeks ago Darwin went out to spend time with and take a few photos of five of our night watchman’s children who are all in our school on the elementary level. Our relationship with them began almost three years ago, and God has blessed our friendship with their family in a very special way. All of the kids had not previously been in school, and the majority of their family members are illiterate and malnourished. The family was accustomed to moving homes frequently in search of jobs and a stable food supply for their family as they struggled in extreme poverty. God brought us into relationship with them first through Darwin’s youth choir, then the kids entered school with us full-time, and now the family as a whole is about to celebrate their 2-year anniversary of living on our property and serving alongside of us. The eldest son is currently in his last year of elementary school in our accelerated program for older students and is on track to enter high school in 2018. The eldest son decided to be publicly baptized last year, and most of the family members are actively involved in Bible study and prayer groups. These kids/teens are also some of our own kids’ best friends, as we all live on the same rural property.

Second-to-the-left is Armando, our faithful night watchman and the father of these five beautiful children. He is generally very quiet and keeps to himself, but Darwin caught him playing with his kids one evening and took advantage of these family photos.

Brayan and Darwin Compete in Local Race

My husband Darwin and Brayan, our 15-year-old son, competed last week in a large organized road race in the nearby city of La Ceiba along with Larry, a longtime spiritual mentor of ours, and several other local youth whom we have friendships with. Events such as these are almost unheard of in our area (there are generally very few organized sports teams for youth, and athletic training of any kind is uncommon), so Brayan and Darwin had been training together for several weeks prior as they got amped up for the big event. Brayan, who came into our lives as a very uncoordinated and broken 12-year-old in 2014, has really taken hold of long-distance running over the past couple months as he’s been training with Darwin and Erick, and he actually won third place in the youth category! I was unable to attend the race (I stayed at home with the rest of our kids), but they told me there were roughly 80 or so teen males who participated, and our son — who comes from very broken places, and whom God has been restoring and healing over the past several years in accordance with His will — came in third! Wow! We are very excited about his newfound self-discipline and motivation that Father God is inculcating in this young man whom we love so much, and Brayan is excited to travel with Darwin and Erick next month to compete in another road race in a city that lies 3 hours away.

Health Updates

As was written on our prior blog post, my health as of late had been quite weak as I was battling Typhoid fever and an aggressive virus. I’ve gone in several days over the past few weeks to a local clinic to receive IV fluids packed with vitamins and antibiotics, and they’ve done their job well! I’ve recuperated strength and energy and have even felt the desire to begin playing with the kids and exercising again. (A couple days ago I got into a pretty extreme game of Monkey-in-the-Middle with a large group of our students and had a blast). Thank you to all of you who have prayed for my recovery.

These photos were taken in Darwin’s twice-weekly PE class. As of July, we will be dividing all of our students up into different PE groups: dance, military patrol training (with Pastor Domingo who was in the military 20 years), long-distance running, sports, and games (for the little guys).

Teachers Attend 3-Day Conference

I am currently attending a 3-day conference with two of our teachers (Isis and Reina) in another city in Honduras as we seek to continue learning about this field that the Lord has placed us in. We’ve attended workshops on the legal side of managing a ministry, heard testimonies and advice from other people who have fostered/adopted kids, learned more about child psychology and how to nurture kids who have been through severe traumas, etc. It has been a fruitful time of making connections with others who serve in similar fields, learning from the experts, and also continuing to form the bond between the three of us as sisters in Christ. Below you’ll see a few silly photos we took when no one else at the conference was looking…

Reina jamming out with the translation headset…

Me pretending to give a speech at the conference. (I was not one of the speakers…)

Isis playing hide-and-seek under our conference table…

Amen! Glory to God!

2 thoughts on “May 2017 Updates and Prayer Requests”

I was blessed to read about your nigh watchman and his family and all the recent activities at Living Waters Ranch. What academic curriculum do you and Darwin use? I am in awe over how much the children are learning including music and most especially about the Lord Jesus.
Grateful you are feeling so much better! Aubrey

jenniferzillycanales says:

May 31, 2017 at 3:12 pm

Dear Aubrey,
As always, it is so good to hear from you. Thank you for your faithfulness to pray for and encourage us. We use a very basic homeschool curriculum designed by the Honduran government for students who are older and/or behind academically. It cuts to the heart of the matter and teaches the absolute most important subjects while leaving off all the ‘fringe.’ This curriculum only takes up about 7 hours of class time per week, so all the other classes (math, reading, geography, music, Bible studies, extracurricular clubs, agriculture, etc) simply come from the richness of knowledge and experience that God has given us (the teachers). We design all those classes from scratch and tailor them to meet the specific needs of our very diverse group of students. This aspect of our life/school (constantly designing and changing our own curriculum!) is possibly the most exciting (and time/energy-consuming!) part, but we are very grateful that the bare-bones homeschool curriculum allows us so much flexibility and allows us to add additional classes/discipleship opportunities. Let me know if that answers your question!

God bless you,
Jennifer

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