A Story To Be Told

By the time you receive this newsletter, I will have flown down to Guatemala City today.
I am catching a 6 am flight in Denver, so I can meet Kathy Price (director of Mission of Love) and a team of surgeons in Houston.
We will fly down to Guatemala together, and they will prepare for a week of cleft palate/lip surgeries.

eQuilter has supported Mission of Love's work for 12 years, and during that time they have made many trips such as this to serve those who have nothing in Guatemala,
Honduras, Isla Mujeres, and elsewhere.
Finally, I decided since we topped the $1 million mark with our total
charity contributions, it is time for me to go along to support the
team, to take photos, and tell the story.

Sunday a few hundred families will come to the hospital for the
assessment day, hoping that their child will be chosen for the
corrective surgery.
45 children will be chosen, and I can't even imagine how hard it is to
tell most of the families that their trip to the hospital was for
nothing.
Kathy tells me that many of them come barefoot, because they've never
had enough to buy shoes.
These are the people we will serve during this week.

Monday will be the first surgery day.
I am taking a 2nd suitcase stuffed with toys and plush animals, to give to the children after their surgery.
I will spend the day with the families, supporting them before, during and after the surgeries.
It is going to be a long day, but what an incredible gift to be there on such a day.

Tuesday we are hoping to spend a day in the country, to visit the building site of Way-Bi, which will be a children's hospice.
I will write about all of this in my newsletter Tuesday night.
I hope to have time to blog each day, and post photos each evening.

So I just want to thank all of you for helping us to get to this point, where we can give Mission of Love and our other charities dependable ongoing support, so they can pursue big projects such as this one.

A couple years after we adopted Sophie, I went back to China on a McCalls tour.
One day I slipped out and visited a local foster group home that cared for orphans who were receiving surgery in Beijing.
They had come from all over China, and were either waiting for corrective surgery, or recovering from surgery.
Until these kids had their surgeries, they were unlikely to be adopted.
Their little lives were on hold.

At the end of this week, 45 young Guatemalan
kids will have the rest of their lives to look forward to…thanks to
the generosity of the surgeons who donate a week of their life, and the
diligent compassion of Mission of Love.

I am proud to support this work, and I invite you to come along with me
on this journey, as we see what our eQuilter donated dollars can do to change the world…
for these 45 children.

We are collecting and posting photos related to our Hurricane Sandy quilt relief effort, and if you would like to donate a quilt (or many quilts!) be sure to check out the details on our project page.
The quilts are rolling in, and I know Friday one of our distributors
picked up 250 quilts to be handed out at a relief center this weekend.