The high school and college group from Kennesaw First Baptist Church, in Kennesaw, Georgia will be traveling to San Pedro Sula, Honduras in July 2009, from the 11th -18th.  We will be led by Dan Moran with his international ministries, which is based in Birmingham, Alabama.  Dan leads several trips to Honduras a year.  He works with a ministry director located in the country of Honduras, who handles the logistics at that end, and matching the team with the need.  Some of the things we will be doing are:

Working with local feeding centers
Ministering in daycare centers
Working with our partnering church, Jerusalem Baptist
Crusades in local schools and at the new church site
VBS at day care centers and churches (possible)
Construction project with Jerusalem Baptist and their daughter church (possible)

My passion for missions is coupled with my passion for teens.  Especially for seeing teens involved in missions.  Involving teens in missions is a life changing experience.

This opens their eyes to the difficulties some people face, and the obstacles before them.  It opens their hearts to a life of service to other people.  Being involved in

mission projects help the teens and adults be more aware and grateful of the advantages we have, and thankful for our freedoms.

A website and blog has been created to support the mission trip to San Pedro Sula, Honduras.  It is called My Heart For Honduras.  We have a special way for you to help us accomplish this trip.  It has to do with CHRISTMAS SHOPPING!  Before you do any internet shopping for Christmas, please check out our site to see how you can give your heart for Honduras.

 Kathleen Couch

*Kathleen was asked to be a guest writer today on MFFO. We applaud and are inspired by her work and her passion. Kathleen was a volunteer youth director for a total of 20 years for several churches, depending on where her husband’s employment took her, Kathleen realized the best activities were ones that led teens to serve others.  At the present time she works with the teens in her church to serve others in mission projects.  Some of these are local, some in other places in the U.S., and some overseas.  One of the side benefits of this is the teens who participate have a life changing experience, and it develops them into a person who cares about his fellow man.

A brisk jog around the block? A nice hot shower? Or those three or four cups of coffee you simply can’t function without? If you’re among the majority, then it’s the coffee… After all, coffee is the second most valuable traded commodity in the world. What’s the first, you ask?

Oil.

In the United States, coffee is our largest food import and is consumed by more that 130 million consumers nationwide. That cup of Joe in your hand right now? It was most likely imported from small family-operated coffee farms located in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, Indonesia, Costa Rica, Peru, El Salvador, Ecuador, Venezuela, Honduras, Uganda, Thailand, Nicaragua, India, or Papua New Guinea.

So, what’s the problem here?

While the global coffee industry earns more than $60 billion annually, coffee farmers earn as little as 4 cents per pound for the coffee that they pick by hand, 25 million of those farming families depend on the success of their coffee crop as their only source of income, and larger-scale plantations are fraught with shockingly low wages and appalling child-labor. In Latin America, home to coffee farmers who produce more than 80% of the beans used for higher-grade and specialty coffees, families are living in sheer poverty. In Guatemala,for example, 70 children out of every 1,000 die before age 5; 51 of those children will not live to reach their first birthdays.

That cup of Joe not tasting quite as good as it was a minute ago, is it?

So, what can you do?

First and foremost, buy Fair Trade products as often as you can- especially coffee.

And then get involved with groups, such as Coffee Kids, who make it a priority to help improve the quality of life for children, women, and men in coffee-producing regions around the world.

The best part of waking up?

Knowing that you can make a difference.

Rocky (Head Mutha) and her husband, Jeff, are the proud parents to 6 beautiful children. My husband Tony and I are the equally proud parents to 4 adorable and energetic bundles of joy.

The first time I called Rocky on the phone, like a big nerd, I started crying. That, by the way, is just so typically me! I choked up as I confessed how much her posts on CafeMom had inspired me to “do more”. The truth is, I didn’t have the faintest idea of where I could even begin to make a difference in the world.

Little did I know, that the day I picked up the phone to call a stranger, was the day that would change my world!

I should point out that both Rocky and I are huge Oprah fans. Talk about being inspired! Besides, I’m from the Chicago area, and Oprah is one of our hometown heroes!

Rocky and I were both moved by Oprah’s Christmas Kindness Show that aired in 2005. It was about the children of South Africa and how Oprah brought them Christmas. I remembered the story well, mostly because I was challenged that same Christmas Day in 2005 by my mother in law. She questioned my desire to travel to South Africa to help the children of that region. I know her concern came mostly from the dangers of leaving the safety of American soil, but sadly, that is exactly the reason why so many people are afraid to stand up for the global community and become part of the solution.

So Our Search Began

Over the next several weeks we spent countless hours researching charities and not-for profit organizations that stand for what we both believe in.

One that stood out above the rest was A Child’s Right.

Every year millions of children die as a result of water related illnesses. Children die, because the water that they drink is contaminated with pathogens and bacteria. Water-related bacterial infections are the number one killer of children every year, globally. The sad truth is – they are all completely preventable!

Rocky and I have decided to team up with A Child’s Right to bring 10 UV water filtration systems to the children of Guatemala’s most needy. Our goal is to have them funded by the Spring of 2008. We chose Guatemala because it is the birthplace of Rocky’s two youngest children, and a region who’s children are in desperate need of the basic necessities of life.

We’re Almost Ready To Roll

Rocky and I have been busy organizing bone marrow drives in each of our areas, in memory of Trevor Kott, a six month old from Sacramento California. We have both been privileged and honored to help carry on the work of this amazing little boy.

As we finalize the details of our bone marrow registry drives, through the National Bone Marrow Registry in Trevor’s memory; we realize the importance of turning our focus once again to the work we’ve been inspired to do for A Child’s Right.

Plan on hearing more from both of us in the coming weeks and months, as we focus on obtaining the funds to supply water filtration systems to the children of Guatemala!

Mother Fighting for Others

I wanted desperately to do more homework on the subject. I wanted to read more ways I could help. But I wanted to give the post about Global Action For Children the time it deserved. I still haven’t dedicated the time I want due to the events of the past three days.

So after watching as much of this news conference I could find, I realized that I had received emails and personal messages from my friends and family wondering why I hadn’t posted anything about our final court date. So I wrote a quick little post about the day. Two less orphans in the world. That is right. It’s a great title for the post.

With all the reading, phone conversations, the truly dark places that I go to when dealing with orphans from around the world, child trafficking, and horror stories from war survivors, I was happy that my daughters would not be part of that possibility. Why? Because they are not orphans anymore. And yes, by law, they are were considered orphans.

If you do not know what life is like for woman and children in Guatemala, you have no right to fight me on this one. NONE! When I walked off the plane and into the airport pickup area, I was attacked by little children begging me for money. I’m not talking 9-10 year olds, I’m talking 3-4 year olds. They were pleading with me to give them anything I had. “Please Miss, anything you have, my children haven’t eaten for days” is one comment that I will never get out of my head.

What about this scene?

I was walking down the streets of Guatemala City, where there are dozens of mothers on the ground, with numerous children sitting close by, selling tapestries and jewelery they had made. My new daughter was in my left arm and we were picking out tapestries to bring home. The mother asked me if I was taking this little girl back to America. I said, “Yes, we are going home tomorrow.” What she said to me will haunt me for the rest of my life. She said, “Can you take my daughter with you? She is a good girl.” I obviously couldn’t. I was overwhelmed by sadness.

The idea that this mother was willing to give up her daughter to a complete stranger, another Mother, knowing, without question, that life in America IS that much better… it was more than shocking. It changed me. My desire to help end this started at that moment.

At that moment, I understood why there are so many adoptions from Guatemala. Of course there are the stories of bad adoption practices, that is tragic as well. But when you born into a country where 80% of the population lives in abject poverty, where there is no birth control available, where the rights of women are not equal to their male counterparts, life can be horrific to say the least. I have never seen so many children in the streets. They weren’t in school, they were begging on the streets. They had no shoes, hadn’t been bathed in a very long while, but were the most beautiful children I had ever seen.

You have no right!

Because you don’t know the history, the stories of why my daughters were given up, you have no right to say to me that they would have been better off to stay there. Until Guatemala can help it’s people, raise them out of the poverty, give equal rights to all its women, get blatant prostitution off the streets, until they can recover, fully recover from their horrific civil war, my daughters are better off here. I stand by that. If you have not seen true poverty, if you are not willing to look at it in its ugly, sinister face, then you don’t belong in this conversation.

Look at this through the eyes of poverty.

We live in a country where millions of illegal aliens fight to cross it’s borders, because life in America is so much better than what they escaped from. I can not tell you how many Guatemalan women I know who have left their children behind, so they could come to America and work, get paid, and send back money to them. Some of them have not seen their children in 10 years.

Living in America, having the opportunities to equal rights as women, to an education, are the gifts that their mother gave them. That is the ultimate gift.

Aren’t our hopes as mothers are to give our children things we did not have for ourselves? Their mothers in Guatemala gave them that gift. They gave up the most precious thing they had, their child, in hope for a better life. A life they know they could not give them. And they couldn’t because of the disease that they all have – poverty.

I don’t want to go into my fight about poverty in America vs poverty in all third world countries. I have done that before. If you are interested in reading what I have to say, please read it HERE. I also explain a little about my daughters’ stories there as well.

An adoptive Mother I respect wrote a thought provoking post, called The Perfect Storm. In it she said, “For that makes it possible for us to view a woman’s relinquishment of her child as heroic act, one to be praised and repeated.”

It’s not heroic, it’s necessary.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the world of true poverty, the relinquishment of a child is not a heroic act, but a selfless and necessary act if the mother wants her child to live. And until we, as mankind, stand up and try to make a difference in the world, until we try to make poverty history, there are no other options right now. Unfortunately, the only option for these Mothers, that includes LIFE for their children, is relinquishment. In the harsh light of severe poverty, how can adoption be wrong? These children would die… or worse.

Do I hope that all of my children are part of the change that needs to happen in the world? Yes, I do.

Do I hope that my daughters understand the opportunities that they have been given, simply because a piece of paper says they are Americans? Yes, I do.

Do I hope that they will then help do something to change the system that put them there in the first place? Yes, I do.

Yes, I hope all of my children will be part of the generation that will finally take the stand and make the right decisions to change the face of poverty.

Poverty, child trafficking, lack of education, adoption, are all part of a vicious cycle. And poverty is the root to all of it. If poverty wasn’t an issue, I would say that the percentage of adoptions would go dramatically down. Especially, international adoptions. I know that these women did not want to give up their children, they felt that they had to. It is a horrible thing to have to go through. But they have little if any choice until the systems change in their own countries.

And that is my goal. My goal as a woman, a mother, and as a human being. The reasons why my daughters were given up for adoption are the very same reasons why I write and fight against the atrocities that happen in the world.

If you are not willing to help the cause, to help stop poverty, to help make the changes that are so necessary in the world, then with all due respect, back off.

There are two less orphans in the world today. They are now Americans. Americans with a chance to dream a dream that they would of never been able to fulfill. They have more than the true basics of life of food, shelter, and clothing. They have a mom, dad and four brothers that love them to death. They have a family. They will also have the chance, the opportunity, to an education. They will go to a University one day. They will strive to be the best women that they can be. They will achieve greatness.

My hope for them is that they will become activists themselves. I hope they will go back to Guatemala and make a difference in the beautiful country that they came from. I hope that they will make their own mark in giving back to the world. They have been given a true gift from their birth mothers. Because of them, we, as parents, have been given our beautiful daughters. This is the true gift. My life is fuller since these two little girls came into my life. I know they will teach me things only daughters can teach their mothers.

I hope that I can teach them the world.

Peace My Friends,