Summertime!

Things are heating up across the country and around the world as summer finally settles in.  Houses are going up and being rehabbed; the Bicycle Adventure cyclists are on the road and The Fuller Center for Housing is hard at work.

I got to do a little real work last week.  I went up to Atlanta and visited two of their sites.  In the Lakewood neighborhood, the Fuller Center of Greater Atlanta is working on seven houses.  Five are Greater Blessing rehab projects and one is a new house that was vandalized when the builder lost it to foreclosure.  I also visited the McDonough site where volunteers were working on another six Greater Blessing houses and a couple of community projects.

What was remarkable about the Atlanta projects was the volunteer support.  There were 60 volunteers in Lakewood from the Home Depot corporate offices along with another 70 young people from the First Baptist Church of Richmond, VA.  The kids were working on a neighborhood clean-up project.  Over half of the houses in Lakewood are vacant, and the young folks from Richmond managed to pick up almost all of the litter (and there was a fair amount!) and were painting murals on the plywood sheets covering the windows of the abandoned houses. 

In McDonough there was a group of 130 young people from Georgia and Alabama churches, hard at work roofing, painting and generally fixing things up.  All told some 260 volunteers were helping make Greater Atlanta a better place to live.   What an inspiration!

Visit the Project McDonough website here.

Haiti and North Korea

On other fronts, things are moving in Haiti.  Our in-country Director, Billy Ponko, is on the ground.  He has his hands full!  We have a work team, let by FCH board member Jeff Cardwell, heading there in mid-July to work on the first four houses at out Saintard project.  This project is in partnership with Sundouloi Ministries International, who have a long history in Haiti.  Their director, Frank Williams, will be leading the trip with Jeff.

Billy is also getting things ready for our work in Leogane.  There are still some land title issues to work through there, but we’re looking to start on some in-fill projects with our partner, Lott Carey Church.  The work we’re doing now will set the stage for our full-blown recovery effort.

North Korea has been much in the news of late, but our work there continues.  I’ll be traveling back soon to finalize plans so we can start building houses at Osan-Ri.  It’s been a long road getting to this point, but there is great will on both sides to make this effort a success.

Most all of this work is being done by volunteers, who are giving of their most precious asset—their time—to make lives better around the world.  There’s no way to adequately thank them for their sacrifice, but I’m confident that they’re building up blessings in heaven.

Learn more about our work in North Korea.

Learn more about our work in Haiti.    

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