Casa Esperanza de Golden?

Hi friends, thanks so much for reading our blog.  You have encouraged us so much with your comments, e-mails, phone calls and care packages.  Thank you!  It makes us feel like we are not alone, and that we are even not really so far away with the help of social media.

Today we've been thinking a lot about how incredible Casa Esperanza is.  Greg and I, and the boys too, have commented to each other, "Wow, it would be so neat to be like Daniel, Patti and Willie and support a place like Casa Esperanza."  Giving these girls a safe place to live and an education really does give them a hope and a future.  Without this, many of them would probably be out on the street, which is where many of them were before they went into Casa Esperanza (e.g., House of Hope).

One thing we have learned while here is that it is almost impossible to adopt orphans in Chile.  It is a 5+ year process to adopt, and people rarely make it through the process.  Daniel makes a point of telling us each time we are at Casa Esperanza, "Adopting Dylan is an incredible thing.  Here we cannot adopt.  When you adopt, you really change a child's life."  For Daniel to say really change a child's life with all the ways they are changing lives at Casa, this really made an impact on us.  It is a gift to be able to adopt children, and you're not to do that in all countries, like Chile for example.  What a shame, but what a good reminder to us of the importance of adoption.  Daniel explained that when people are looking at our family, it's not just because we are so obviously foreigners - but that a lot of it is because of Dylan.  People here look at our family and it stands out to them right away that we have adopted Dylan, and what a gift it is to be able to do that.

We wonder...could we do something like Casa Esperanza in Golden?  From what we've heard recently, you can adopt children in Colorado past age 18 (I forget up to what age...20 or something like that?).  What if we brought young men into our home and provided a safe place for them to live and the opportunity to go to college, or even a two year type program at Red Rocks?  Casa Esperanza de Golden?  We'd need another bedroom and bathroom in the basement!!

Here's what we did today...

Today we were hoping to go to Hogar to play with and love the younger girls (<18 years old).  Unfortunately we did not get approval to go in.  Our prayer request for today and into this next week is that we would get to go and play with and love these girls!  I saw one of the girls from Hogar yesterday at the bus stop, as we were going home from Casa Esperanza.  She was walking in front of us, probably going home or to be with an aunt for the weekend.  She kept turning around and waving to me, and I waved back excitedly each time.  We caught up to her at the bus stop and I got to give her a kiss (on the right cheek, which is customary in Chile) and asked her how she was (in Spanish).  I was so happy to see her, and was surprised at how happy she seemed to be to see us.  We had only gotten to play with her once last weekend at Hogar, but she seemed to know how much we loved her and that is amazing to me given these girls have been hurt so many times - her heart was still open and ready to love.

We made our daily trip to the grocery store, and there were some really interesting fish there today.  Not sure if you can really see in this picture, but in the back row of the fish are these shark-looking creatures (Noah thinks that these are big cat fish, but wow they are big).  They are about 3 feet long and have a big fin on their back.  The man with the yellow gloves on is the fish expert at the grocery store.  He always has a tie on and we see him almost every day.  In this picture he has our fish up on the scale and is asking Greg some questions about how we want him to cut up the fish.

After lunch we took the subway out to the farthest point east you can go.  The mountains here to the east rather than the west.  The volcano seems to be going pretty strong again, so we couldn't see the mountains that much better even though we were kind of right up against them (it was like being in Golden but not really being able to see the mountains).  The kids had fun chasing us around the playground and climbing a big, old tree.

Another great day in Chile!  Thanks again for reading.