Help our family at St. Innocent/ Project Mexico!

As you all know, Dean and I hold a very special place in our hearts for St. Innocent Orphanage and Project Mexico. Please read the copy- pasted letter below from their founder about the year end matching program that they desperately need your help with! Please contact them directly by using the address at the bottom if you wish to contribute, or there is a way to donate online as well, probably on their website.

Please pray for the success of
our year-end matching challenge!

Dear (Dean & Deena),

A blessed Advent season to you!

As misfortune (and the little lenten demons) would have it, our mailing house made a huge mistake when manipulating the data for our annual appeal mailing and the entire mailing must be sent again. This means a potentially huge delay in response time to our matching challenge from our donors/supporters. While the mailer did go out last week, the names did not match up with the addresses on the ones that went to private homes (as opposed to churches, businesses and organizations). Many folks, I'm afraid, will have thrown it out, thinking that it came to them by mistake.

Of all years for this to happen, this is certainly the worst. We're all feeling the pinch of the economy. Churches, charities and non-profits are feeling it most especially. We experienced a setback after September 11th but eventually we recovered. Although we saw this recession coming, we did not expect it to last this long, and the impact of it has been far worse than September 11th.

Please keep us in your prayers as we prepare to re-send the annual appeal. Pray that the hearts of our supporters will be moved to support the appeal in SOME way. A little help from many can add up to a GREAT DEAL for those to whom we minister at St. Innocent Orphanage and among the poor of our neighbor, Mexico.

If you would like to help in this effort, please forward this e-mail to your own e-list of friends and family,and consider making your own donation towards this challenge online or by regular mail. All donations received by December 30th (up to $45,000) will be matched one-to-one by several anonymous donors.

May God grant you a safe and blessed holiday and Holy Day season!

In Christ,

Greg Yova
Founder & Executive Director

Send responses to this e-mail to: gbray@projectmexico.org


Donations by regular mail can be sent to:
Project Mexico
P.O. Box 120028
Chula Vista, CA 91912

We have been loving our time here in the Chilean Patagonia!

Since our last blog we have traveled by bus to Puerto Natales, where we celebrated Thanksgiving! We really got lucky, Dean had read in his favorite magazine ¨Backpacker¨, like a year ago, about the best hostel place to stay in Puerto Natales, the Erratic Rock. We looked em up and booked Thanksgiving night and were pleasantly surprised to find that we´d be having a traditional Thanksgiving dinner : ) Helped us to feel right at home!

The next day we took another bus to Parque Nacional Torres del Paine, where we entered the park at the portion of the Circuit trek called the ¨tail¨, probably our favorite day scenery wise! We had excellent weather that day, with gorgeous sun and GUSTY WIND! (50 mph, no joke!) It was tough to walk through, but a great work-out nonetheless! We eventually made it to our first campsite that night which luckily for us had a nice enclosed shelter to cook and stay warm in before we went to sleep in our tent.

Next day, we took it a bit easier, to rest from our previous exhausting day of trekking and made our short walk to the next camp and then headed up to see ¨Valley de Frances¨. We then had a nice awakening the next morning to a few flurries, and headed out for another exerting day (15 miles or so) to our next campsite, Campamento Torres. We had another beautiful day, passing by many glacier aqua colored lakes and beautiful meadows, and then finally made our way up to the point where HEAT MISER and SNOW MISER were having a wrestling match! No joke (for those of you who don´t know your Christmas claymation movies, look it up!) summer and winter were trying to decide who would win this match! We were in the warm sun on one side, then peaked our heads around the corner and could feel the howling gusty, snowblowing wind! You could see summer in one direction, and winter in the other, with the turn of your head. Pretty awesome! but very hard trekking!

Eventually we made our way through our trek after one more morning of waking up in the snow! it was beautiful, helps us to get in the Christmas spirit! (Which has been hard, since it´s summer everyone that we´ve been recently!)

We are now back at the Erratic Rock and will enjoy relaxing till tomorrow when we head by bus to Argentina to see Perito Moreno Glacier and El Chaten, Mt Fitzroy.

Hope you all are well!

Ciao for now!