DECEMBER 2017
Dear Mission supporters and Friends,
We hope you had a blessed Thanksgiving! We want to go ahead and wish you a very Merry Christmas (Feliz Navidad). We will be leaving December 21st-28th with our team of 41 people for Nicaragua for Christmas. This year again, we have a lot of our staff’s children going with us. It is always a lot of fun to have the families at Christmas doing missions together. They have worked hard to raise their money to go. They will get to bless thousands of children and youth for Christmas!! The Christmas container is already in Nicaragua with the thousands of toys and shoes waiting to be released for our Christmas trip. We will be sharing pictures and testimonies of all the wonderful things that will happen during our trip in later newsletters.
Bad Storms and Floods in Nicaragua:
Over the past month, there has been a lot of rain with big storms in Nicaragua. Due to so much rain, it has caused major flooding in some areas of Nicaragua. We shared about some of this last month in our newsletter. Some of our buildings were flooded at our schools and have been leaking from all the rains. We have spent around $5000.00 now to do repairs and to paint to get everything back looking good and fixed. We praise God it was no worse than what it was for us. We always want to maintain and keep our schools and medical clinics looking nice. We appreciate Rock Victory Church, FCC in Red House, West Virginia and a few of our partners for giving to help us fix the damage in Nicaragua.
Texas Hurricane Relief:
On the picture page, we wanted to share some of the pictures of the Texas Hurricane Relief that some of our missionaries were a part of with Sam and Connie Rogers. The team came home sharing wonderful testimonies of families being helped with all the supplies that were sent in the Pods for Texas. They were able to pray and share the love of Jesus to hundreds of people. We appreciate Alexandria, Katherine and Brandon Murray going to represent our Ambassadors to the Nations staff. They said they loved being able to go and help during the difficult time that Texas is going through. Thanks to some of our partners and churches that gave to fill the pod up, that we were responsible to do for Texas. The team said it was a huge blessing.
More Donations for Hurricane and Flood Relief:
We were so blessed this month with donations to help with Hurricane and flood relief for the Bahamas, an out island called Ragged Island and for Jamaica. We want to say a special thanks to Stuart Cramer High School in Cramerton, NC and their Senior Class President, Dylan Collins for asking the school to collect needed items for us to ship to help these places that have been hit by Hurricanes and floods. Dylan is the son of Pastors Chad and April Collins of Epic Church in Gastonia, NC. We were blessed to have their whole family and some of their church members to go to Acuna, Mexico this past summer. We are so grateful for their hearts to give to our missions, so hurting lives can be helped. Also, we were so blessed that our friend, Stacy, that helps us get our Payless Shoes, who is a manager, heard about us collecting items for the Hurricane and Flood Relief, called and said we want to help. She volunteers as an instructor for a Cheerleading Organization in North Carolina, so she asked the cheerleading teams to bring in items to help people in need. We were so blessed that they would do this for our missions, so we could ship these items out to help families that have been devastated by these terrible storms. We are thankful that God is sending people from all different areas to help. What a HUGE display of the LOVE OF GOD!!
Backpacks and Princess Outfits for Missions:
We went to one of our local Wal-Marts to shop and they had backpacks marked down, so we asked the manager if they would like to sell them all at a better price and they did. We were able to buy $10,000 worth of backpacks for $2,800. We bought around 800 backpacks. These backpacks are Awesome. The children and youth will love them in our schools and after schools. The manager was so kind to us. What an amazing divine connection God gave us.
Princess Outfits: Right after Halloween, we put a notice out on our Facebook page that we needed Princess outfits for our granddaughters, Princess Ava Jo Foundation. We know every year after Halloween, you can buy the princess outfits for discount prices. Ava Jo our granddaughter started her foundation when she was 3 years old and now she is almost 11 years old. She loves to collect princess outfits and package them with a Tierra, Princess accessories and a Barbie doll. Then we ship them to other countries and when she distributes them, her and the team dresses the little girls and tells them, “You are a Princess for Jesus”. We are so thankful for all the beautiful outfits that have come in so far and the ones our staff bought too. Ava is very excited about packaging them again. You can read about her foundation on our website -ambassadorstothenations.com .
Pastor Daniel visited North Carolina:
Pastor Daniel, our pastor from Nicaragua came to North Carolina to spend a few days with us preaching in 2 of the Freedom Churches. It was a great honor to have him with us. He is so busy working with the Nicaraguan government plus overseeing all our schools and projects in Nicaragua. He came to Miami for government work and then came to NC to preach. It was a powerful word!! We have been raising money for Pastor Daniel to build a home for him and his wife in Nicaragua. He lives in a government apartment. He has paid for his land and now he is saving for the home. He is such a blessing now for 23 years working for us in Nicaragua. We are happy to be able to raise money to help him have a home one day.
End of the School Year in Nicaragua:
By the time you get this newsletter, all the graduations will have taken place at our schools in Nicaragua. They are already doing all kinds of special events for the end of the school year. We are so proud of our students. We have seen these children/youth come ALIVE because of what Jesus is doing in their lives because of our schools. This is only possible because of loving, caring partners like you. Your prayers and continual giving are making the difference. Please remember if you have an 11th grader that you sponsor, they have graduated. If you want to send a card and a small gift, you still have time until
December 15th. We will take them to give to the graduates during our trip when we have our special event with the graduates.
San Francisco, Nicaragua Project Update:
We cannot thank everyone enough that has helped us with the new San Francisco, Nicaragua project over the past 3-5 months. We have raised enough money for the water well and most of the buildings right now. We still need to raise about $7000-$8000 for the interior and the contents (tables, desk, chairs, refrigerators, stove, cabinets, school material, etc). We look forward to seeing how far the facilities are coming along during our trip in December. We will be going there for a big Christmas event with food, toy gift bags, shoes and sharing the love of Jesus to the whole community. Partners, we are so grateful for helping us to start this new children/youth facility in an area of Nicaragua where little or no missionaries go.
New After School in Acuna, Mexico:
We are excited to announce that we opened our third After school program in Acuna, Mexico, the first week of November. Pastor Oscar, our main pastor in Acuna, and his son Nata, the After School Director said the children are loving it. We have already shipped all the Christmas gifts and products to Mexico for our after schools and children church children. It’s going to be a wonderful Christmas for all these children. We appreciate so much the partners that gave to make this happen. We are seeing these children’s lives impacted with the good news of the gospel in these programs.
**2018 New School Year Registration in Nicaragua**
Our new school year in Nicaragua starts the first week of February. Every year we have to reregister our school feeding programs with the government. Our schools are a part of a grant feeding program in Nicaragua where we get our food free for the whole year for the students, but we must pay for a full year of transportation for them to bring the food to our schools. It cost us $2500 each for 3 of our schools; which is cheap when you think about us feeding between 1300- 1500 students a day. This cost us $7,500 to do this every year. Then for the School curriculum for all the school books, we also get a special government rate because of us providing FREE education. However, it is still expensive. We have to pay $12,000-$14,000 for it all, but it is thousands of books. The normal price for a private school would cost around $35,000 for that many books. So, we need to raise about $20,000 above our normal operational monthly expenses over the next month or so to cover all this for 2018. We appreciate all your faithfulness to make this happen for the children that are loved and served in our schools. We Praise God he has given us such AMAZING, LOVING partners!! We love you dearly!!
Reaching the Nations,