Open Hearts Nicaragua - Farrington Family

And so everyone must have ice cream!!! Sheyla our long time director posted these fun photos the other day on our Club Esperanza facebook page. This page is a great way to keep up with all of the daily happenings at the club, we post lots of fun pictures and little tidbits of information. It is in Spanish, but if you don’t speak Spanish don’t worry, pictures are like math and fun…they’re all universal languages!

If you have followed our ministry over the years you might have heard about La Iglesia Hashem Adonai. Profesor Roberto, who is now Pastor Roberto, has been a teacher at our school in the dump ever since it began over twenty years ago. He has served for so many years faithfully to the poorest of the poor here in Managua. Almost five years ago now he felt a call into pastoral ministry after a couple of years taking seminary courses. Soon after we had a great conversation and Roberto started a church, meeting at Club Esperanza. Praise Jesus for that because God is using this little church to deeply impact hundred of lives!

Last year in the fall Roberto asked about the possibility of hosting a Men’s Retreat for his church. We talked and prayed about it. He had such a burden to get away with the men from his church and invest in them, encourage them, address their difficulties and insecurities head on, present them to the Lord and let God take care of them. The Lord gave us the idea to put on a retreat at Ruby Ranch during the winter break, but the details had to all work out. Well we put the word out to our home church Christ Journey Church in Miami and immediately we had movement on making this happen. Then just two weeks ago a group of men came down from Miami to join with a group of men in Managua to retreat together and grow closer to Jesus!

Krista and I want to wish you a Merry Christmas from Nicaragua! Our lives are full and we are blessed this season to be the parents to our four lovely and handsome growing children! We are also very thankful for you who pray for us and support us financially! We committed to living by faith as missionaries over 17 years ago and our well has never run dry. We praise the Lord for that!

Looking into the New Year we know God has so many amazing plans for our lives down here, the lives we have an impact on, and your lives wherever you are…so cheers to the blessings of God on all of our lives this new year!

From everyone in our extended families at Casa Robles and Casa Havilah we wish you a Very Merry Christmas!!!

Our Christmas party was such a huge success and we wanted to tell you all thank you so much for helping to make it happen! It was an incredible time filled with joy and fellowship, all of the children at Club Esperanza and their families felt so very loved. God is always encouraging us to push further and do better. We do all of this so that these little ones might be blessed, that they would grow in the truth and love of Jesus, and that they would be kept safe! Thank you for making this Christmas so special…

Hello family and friends. Today is #GivingTuesday and we want to take this day to say thank you for all of you who continue to support and pray for our ongoing ministries down here in Nicaragua. We are faith based missionaries and are supported entirely by donations. We are proud that 100% of donations you make come all the way down here to Nicaragua!

If you are considering giving today or in the weeks ahead to end the year please consider helping us in Nicaragua. Maybe you would like to become a monthly giver, that would be amazing! There is a box to check for that option via Paypal and National Christian Foundation Buttons. We would be very blessed by any donation this giving season. Here are three recent posts with specific ways to give…

Our donation information is linked here…or use buttons at the end of this post…Thank you!

We are very thankful to celebrate another Thanksgiving together! We have so much to be thankful for in our lives, but most important to Krista and I is our family. The last few years have had big challenges, but we know there are so many friends who have had similarly hard years. We try to see the Lord’s hand in any of our trials, we pray through them together, and we are thankful for another day we have together! Friends, we are so very blessed by you…your prayers over our family and your support for us as missionaries. God is so good, and we are thankful! Happy Thanksgiving…we hope you had a great one!

Christmas is the best time of year as we celebrate the birth of Jesus and the hope that brings to the entire world! The families that we serve don’t have the resources for big celebrations, so we would love to start Christmas in an exciting way for them!

Our Christmas party is the second week of December. Our goal is to have a Christmas present for each of the over 320 children that we serve…we will also be inviting their parents to have a Christmas meal together at Club Esperanza!

$15 will help to buy a Christmas present and a Christmas family meal…

One of the more difficult things we encounter down here is seeing people with steady jobs unable to make strides in life towards owning a home because of the lending practices and the incredibly high interest rates…30%,40%,50% depending on where you go. We want to share some stories from the past few months where the Lord has led us to help families overcome that hurdle. Please read until the end where we share how you can get involved to help!

God is merciful and when he gave us the idea to lend to families with no interest we got very excited, because He also gave us the idea that as they pay back the loan it goes directly to ongoing ministry projects down here. Basically, it extends a one time donation to our ministry into a monthly donation. At the same time we are lending a hand to a family to buy a home we are supporting ongoing ministry.

We wanted to share an update on weekend camps that have been going on out at Ruby Ranch. You may remember we shared this post in the Spring about the exciting new possibilities with the construction of two bunk houses. Well it has been six months full of camps and Praise Jesus it has been outstanding! Brinson and Todd have been in a constant rhythm of hosting and facilitating at the Ranch.

It is a strong burden we have to make Ruby Ranch available to local ministries, and sponsoring camps is an amazing way for us to join supporters who may not be able to be on the ground here in Nicaragua with local churches that are leading people into a personal relationship with Jesus!

Click here to partner with Ruby Ranch by sponsoring a youth camp…

Yes, Yes, Yes, playgrounds are amazing! The thing is, down here we don’t have access to the incredible playgrounds that are in just about every school in the United States. So, when our friends from Hope Rising Church in Pennsylvania made the trip down earlier this month to install new playgrounds there was sooooo much excitement, and it did not disappoint!

God orchestrates things in interesting ways. Our friend Pastor Randy and Feed the Hungry organized an amazing blessing to our ministry. They worked stateside with Kids Around The World to get two playgrounds donated and shipped to Nicaragua for Open Hearts, such a huge blessing. Then COVID hit and the playgrounds sat disassembled…for two years! That made the arrival of Pastor Harry’s team from Pennsylvania even more exciting! As I said, playgrounds are amazing!!!!

Assembling the playground at Club Esperanza was quite the endeavor. Sometimes you have to improvise and we used that tree branch you see up there to get the roof up and on to the four poles! It was amazing and maybe just a little not so OSHA approved LOL! Even more amazing was that the team was able to do miraculous work and finish this playgrounds installation in only two days!