El Shaddai Childrens Home

New EL Shaddai 2 House

Just returned from a 6 week trip to see the family in Thailand. They have been struggling with the lack of a yard for the kids to play in. The Lighthouse building is just about totally rented out, which means no room in the parking lot for cars never mind kids to play. Many mornings Ter and the kids had to push vehicles around in order to leave the parking lot. Many times when we came home someone would be parked in our reserved spot, so we’d have to track them down and make sure they knew it was reserved for the Children’s home.

Anyways Ter saw a house on one of her many trips home from school and told Mark that that was our house. Mark said “it’s not our’s there isn’t even a sign for sale or rent”

To make a long story short in a few days a sign for rent appeared and Terry called to see if we could rent it. The owners said whoever brings a damage deposit first can rent it. But they wouldn’t let Ter drop off a deposit, instead they had two other people interested in renting. The first one wanted to park heavy equipment in the yard so they turned them down. The next couple they didn’t like for some reason so they didn’t rent to them either. They weren’t really excited about our children moving in but after talking to our Ministry staff who told them “this mom won’t let these kids wreck the house” So they rented it to us. The house hadn’t been actually lived in for many years so now we had lots of cleaning and paintint to do. The owners thought the paint was beautiful, but to us it looked dirty and old.

 

Beautiful paint job

Before any cleaning etc.

As you can see from some of our pictures this is some of the work we had to do. It meant cleaning tons of jinkgo poop out of the window openings, cleaning all the screens, windows, security bars of large accumulations of dirt.

Naomi and Ruth cleaning windows and bars

We had lots to clean, fix (like windows leaking water inside the house) and paint everywhere before we even started to move anything over from the old place. The yard stuff, playground, cement table, benches and bamboo hut we moved with the help of some of the Bible College students and our kids of course.

moving stuff

The house is only a 4 bedroom and 2 bathrooms so we had to build a bathroom out back for the boys so we had to install another tank for the toilets and run drains for the showers and sink. So the boys got to dig a big hole (amazing how they all turn it into a fun time!) for the tank and pipes.

Digging the hole for the septic tankEven the little ones want to dig.