Thanks to everyone who contributed to this year's Lenten Offering, which benefits the Give Ye Them to Eat (GYTTE) mission in Mexico. A generous anonymous donor, who is very passionate about GYTTE, matched the funds donated this year, allowing us to send $20,735 to GYTTE. These funds will help families build earthquake-proof straw and mud energy-efficient homes, wood stoves that reduce lung-destroying smoke, and composting toilets that can be installed inside their homes. Funds will also support another program that trains village women as health educators who teach villagers how to prevent spread of diseases, improve sanitation, and safely conceive and bear children.

We have a long-standing relationship with GYTTE and recently sent a team to spend a week there. Thank you for the difference you are making all around the world!

More about the Lenten Offering:

Belmont UMC’s Lenten offering provides ways to directly help families and villages in rural southern Mexico move from surviving to thriving through the integrated and sustainable development program, GYTTE, Give Ye Them to Eat.

$6,000 funds an energy efficient, earthquake resistant modest home with a wood-saving stove and ecological sanitation system. Groups of families led by trained health promoters learn how to construct the straw and mud homes, a composting toilet and an energy saving stove.

$6,000 provides the materials and training by GYTTE’s health promoters to build 10 ecological toilet systems. The Dry Composting and Separator Toilet is the number one technology villagers request of GYTTE. Learning how to construct their own toilet system directly impacts villagers' health by eliminating the problem of open sewage and contaminated water sources. This technology improves their self-esteem and restores a sense of dignity to their lives.

$16,000 equips 15 village women volunteers to become community health educators and promoters, empowering them to prevent serious disease by changing the conditions which often cause disease and treating illness in its early stages right in their own community. The women attend 3, one-week-long, courses over an eighteen-month period at GYTTE’s integrated development training center. They experience and learn about a large variety of health issues, and even after the first course they are equipped to return to their villages and teach the topics they have learned. Every Spring and Fall health promoters meet regionally for continuing education, to report on what they have done, and gain new skills.

$3,000 funds five, 3-day Creation Care retreats for 60 people to learn about sustainable living and preservation of the environment through soil and water conservation and the sharing of technology alternatives like the ecological toilet and the wood-saving stove. They then become resource persons for their own neighbors and communities helping to improve lives through sustainable living practices.

Photos
Top left: Village dental health day
Middle left: Health promoter teaching dental care
Bottom left: Outdoor chapel on the hill at training center
Top right: Goat care, sustainable livestock program
Middle right: Sustainable home building
Bottom right: Belmont VIM team and GYTTE leaders