Happy New Year!! I made it home to Florida on Christmas Eve, and have since been enjoying some much needed downtime over the holidays with my family and friends. Of course, while I rested, Mama Lucy has continued to work at breakneck speed. A few days ago, she forwarded this blog entry to keep us updated on her amazing progress:

“This is incredible! It’s unbelievable to me. The dark days of almost a year now have changed to bright days with good hope for Shepherds Junior thanks to the efforts of Epic Change.

The month of December 2007 has so many things to be remembered and cheered for.

• With the loan provided by Epic Change, we were able to purchase about an acre of land and begin construction of the new school! The land is beautiful with a stream on the property and it is conveniently located to many of our current students who live near that area.

• On 15th Dec, the architect and an engineer visited the land. The architect was able to finalize the blueprints on 18th Dec, and the work of digging the foundation for 4 classrooms started on 19th Dec.

• As the land has many banana trees, clearing the property for building and for the access road to the site was not an easy task. It took more than 4 days to clear the site for initial construction and we are still trying to make it better.

• While some were busy with the work of building classrooms, others continued with the work of building a small bridge across the stream so that the construction trucks can easily reach the building site.

• We built a storage room for keeping building materials such as cement etc. in 3 days.

• Now we’ve laid 3 rows of bricks for 2 classrooms!

As you can see from some photos, the work is quite encouraging! Special thanks to those who made their donation to Epic Change which made all these possible. While we’re making progress, we still need your support so as to achieve our goal of completing necessary buildings.

Thank you so very much for your continuing support. I’ll continue to inform you of our progress!”

We hope you’re as excited as we are to see what we’ve been able to accomplish together our non-profit status was approved by the IRS in September. In less than four short months, we’ve raised nearly $30,000, made our first loan to purchase the land and have started construction; thanks from the bottom of my heart for all of your help in 2007! With your continued support, 2008 promises even more success . . . I can’t wait to see what this year holds for Leah, Naomi, Glory, Gideon and all of the beautiful kids at Shepherds. As we begin the new year, we’ll be sharing more of their incredible stories here, so stay tuned . . .