The Leave a Little Room Foundation Global Outreach Ministry builds bridges between people in various parts of the world.   Most of our projects are sustainable -- i.e., we work with local folks to help solve a particular challenge, and when we depart the local folks own the solution and move ahead to make any subsequent improvements that are needed.  Our projects during 2000 - 2008 primarily involved education, healthcare, housing, and technologies for electricity and Internet access.  Many of our volunteers were friends, family, parishioners from the Cure d'Ars Catholic Community and from other church communities. In Tanzania, working with the Capuchin brothers, we installed solar electricity at a number of hospital clinics and schools.  We also installed satallite-based and cellular-based transceivers to connect hospital and school laptops to the Internet, solar-powered vaccine refrigerators, and a water line with a pump to bring water from a stream to a hospital clinic about 2km away.  Each time we worked on an installation, we learned something new.  For example, we learned that if you lay a PVC water line from the stream to the hospital clinic, grazing elephants will walk through the area at night and trample your PVC into small pieces.  It's better to accept help from the Maasai warriors who, in a couple of hours, can cut a deep trench the full 2km with their machete-type knives to put the PVC in the ground.    Our work in Uganda was focused on addressing the malnutrition among children, caused by the ongoing and  tragic civil strife.  We studied and then implemented a pilot program for manufacturing Plumpy'Nut, a therapeutic baby food designed to reverse the tide of malnutrition in developing countries.

In Tijuana and Ensenada, Mexico, we teamed up with Mexican families and Youth With a Mission to build houses for five years.  YWAM has a great system so that each team of 20 volunteers can build an entire house (no plumbing) in two days.  In the summer of 2006, we completed our first healthcare-related Global Outreach project in Mexico.  We partnered with Hospital Infantil de las Californias to remodel a double-wide office trailer for use as a pediatric medical clinic in Nido de las Aguilas.  The clinic is setup adjacent to an elementary school, so the children can receive vaccinations and other healthcare in the context of their schooling.  Our projects in Mexico have brought together hundreds of volunteers, and about half of the volunteers on each trip have been youth.     In the Mississippi Delta, one summer we worked at Booker T. Washington Elementary School to improve the resources available for education -- we scrubbed walls, painted, installed new floors and plumbing, and hooked up computers.  Some of our volunteers were so inspired by helping schools elsewhere, they asked if we could help a school in Denver.  So, the next summer, we took on the task of painting the interior of a local Catholic school.  We learned that we never fully appreciated the surface area of long school hallways until we painted every inch.  Our local outreach in Denver has been rewarding in many ways. Throughout the 2000 - 2008 years, we thoroughly enjoyed teaching computer classes for seniors in Denver, robotics classes for kids, and conversational Spanish classes for folks in-between.  We sponsored youth baseball teams, trips to Barnes & Noble Bookstores, and youth excursions to see the Rockies and Nuggets play ball.  Our youth, in turn, have been present and hardworking when the time came to harvest our community garden (we delivered over 600 pounds of produce to the Samaritan House homeless shelter), and pick apples every other fall.

Hurricane Katrina and the hurricanes that followed devastated thousands of lives.  Our calling was to help people put their lives back on track.  We listened to what was needed by people in small coastal towns in Mississippi and Louisiana.  We gathered the needed supplies and started shipping and trucking supplies to those destinations.  Again, our youth  proved themselves immensely responsive -- loading boxes and trucks, collecting shoes and school supplies, getting incredible things done to make a difference.  As one small town, Pascagoula, Mississippi, continued to rebuild, a team of our volunteers went there for a week to help remove rotting wood from one house to prepare for installation of new floors and walls.  Local Outreach has always been a part of each year.  We continue to sponsor sports teams for kids, teach electronics and robotics to excited elementary school children, and encourage young church musicians to share their musical talents.        We give all of the glory and honor to God, through Whom all things are possible.  With faith and duct tape, solutions have emerged to replace problems and doubt.  By leaving a little room for God in our hearts, we find that amazing things happen.

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