Dear Church Family of Covenant Creek Community Church in Bellbrook, Ohio;
On behalf of all of us at PAHS, I would like to express our deepest gratitude for the generosity of your members in supporting the 5K race to raise funds for our children!
Thank you so much for all the effort you put into raising funds for the benefit of our work with the children who have experienced various forms of abandonment. What a tremendous help it is to have funds that help defray the costs of raising children in our current economy! It seems like both costs and needs are rising.
The money you are sending will be distributed to the following areas of need:
1. One thousand Dollars will go towards the purchase of an industrial dryer for our new Laundry Facility.
WHY: We are rebuilding the Nutritional Rehab Center. Up until now it has most of the work has been done by volunteers who have come as a group (the project was started in 2007). Having teams do the work saves significantly on labor costs. A team from Canada are planning a trip in early 2013 to work on the structure. They have talked about completing the Laundry area so that we can have an adequate facility in which to do the little children’s laundry every day. It has been designed to be self-contained unit so that it let’s in enough sunshine and air, but is secure enough that the clothes themselves stay in the facility. Besides completing the building, we need to purchase industrial washing machines and dryers which are an urgent need during the rainy months (May through January), as well as special bricks for the walls that will allow air-flow and rebar that will serve as “the roof” on part of it (so sunshine comes in). This project is a great need as the current “Laundry House” is literally falling down around our laundress, Iris.
2. One thousand Dollars will go towards the cost of diapers and formula for the infants and toddlers recovering from malnutrition in our Nutritional Rehabilitation Program.
WHY: Our organization spends approximately $1,000 a month on diapers and formula, these are purchased with a charge card and must be paid for on a monthly basis.
3. Five hundred Dollars will go toward the education and graduation costs for one of the teenagers in the PAHS Home for Girls.
WHY: The cost of a private Christian education for our older children in the Homes is very high. We urgently need help supporting their education! At the moment we owe $49,237+ US Dollars to the school for all the children that receive an education under our sponsorship. (We are fortunate that the school has up until now allowed our children to continue attending in spite of the high bill. They do this because they believe in our organization and that they will receive the funds as soon as we have them. We are praying and waiting on God to provide these funds, so that we can honor this commitment!) This bill includes the cost of educating the children in our Homes, our employees’ children and children from very poor families that live in the mountains or in our community who meet the criteria and merit a scholarship.
Johana – a lovely young lady now – was once a malnourished baby herself in our Nutrition Rehab Program in the 1990s. She has grown up in our Home and will be graduating from Secondary School with a degree that emphasizes computer skills in November this year. She has many added costs for her practicum and graduation. She has two jobs on our campus: one is to be the older-sister type/caretaker for our special-needs girl, Jenny, who is in a wheelchair. Johana helps Jenny with her homework, gets up and dressed in the mornings and completes other general care-taking duties; her other job is to read to and sing with the little children in the rehab in the evenings during the bedtime hours. She will need to come up with money to pay for practicum uniforms and transportation and other costs associated with her senior year and graduation, and she is also dearly hoping to receive a scholarship to attend University next year. Her dream is to become a professional licensed nurse in Honduras. It will be an answer to prayer for her to receive funds for any of these costs.
We are so impressed with all those who donated to this cause by faith. I hope to convey our deepest heartfelt thanks to each of you who donated time or money and in any way have supported this effort to raise funds on our behalf. In addition I hope that you know that you are now part of our extended family and as such, you are most welcome to come for a visit! In the mean-time PLEASE visit us online and share with others at our website www.panamhealth.org or at our Facebook Fan page and help us reach 1,000 fans by September … we are currently at 828, so please SHARE us with your FB friends!
We look forward to partnering with you in the future and welcome your feedback as to how to serve you better in connecting you to those in need.
Once again, THANK YOU, THANK YOU for your great effort and your generous spirit!
With Kind Regards,
Anita M. Zelaya-Youngberg, RN
Pan American Health Service, Inc
Nutrition and Educational Outreach for the Hungry, Sick and Homeless.
View pictures from the race here!
