msanchez's blog

The last forty days have been so excited and quite busy for all of the members of our team. By the way, I'm writing this journey from a place between Europe and Asia, while attending to some key meetings.

First of all March began with a COMHINA conference in Orlando, Florida. COMHINA is the cooperation of the Hispanic Christian community in the US. I had the privilege of attending to a conference where around 120 key leaders met to share about the tremendous opportunities of partnering between Anglo and Hispanic Christian organizations for mission efforts.

A week later Rosalia and I went to Panama invited by the Ibero American missions movement where we taught and lead a consultation about "Missionaries Training and Technology". We had a workshop where three groups worked around the topics: Virtual Libraries, Distance Formal Education and Continue Education for Latino Missionaries. 

Rosalia, Mauren and Regina went to Huehuetenango, Guatemala where 52 brothers and sisters representing 10 different languages and many communities, received the Oral Strategies Workshop during 5 days. They learned how to use Bible stories in a powerful way using natural oral skills, focused in evangelism, discipleship and church planting.

During this period of time Brendan and others have been creating beautiful websites, brochures and posters both for some of our partners and for us.

The Learning Center in New Horizons located in an isolated slum in Costa Rica became a reality where we are partnering with Christ for the City to bring hope and transformation to that needed community.

Mauren went to Spain in order to assist a Bible institute in the training of their faculty for them to continue creating high quality Bible courses to be taught on distance.

The last week of February I went to Ecuador to attend to the Latin America MAF managers conference where we had managers from Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Costa Rica and the USA sharing about achievements and future challenges. We had the great blessing of visiting Nate Saint house in Shell area.

Right now, Rosalia, Regina, some indigenous leaders and a Latin pastor are preparing materials, speeches and luggage to have an oral strategies workshop next week in a place in Latin America that I'm not allow to share the name here for security reasons.

In the middle of all of this Carina and Rosalia have been training 14 key pastors, leaders and theologians who are spread in different locations in the huge country in Brazil. They are equipping these dear brothers and sisters for them to create a distance education curriculum that is going to be used to teach pastors an leaders all over Brazil. This training is in Portuguese. Simultaneously, another course but in Spanish has been taught to key missions leaders from 7 different countries on distance as well.

Wow, long forty days. My hearth is broken as we walk with the Lord and face what He is doing all over the world. I've been sharing this week about our region and ministry to a group of God's servants who live on the edge in every corner of this world sharing the love and care of Jesus Christ to many people. No words. Thanks to all of you who pray and support this ministry.

On January the 24th we launched the Spanish version of the Virtual Learning Environments VLE course. This is a 9 weeks of duration course being taught online.
We have 19 people involved in 7 different countries: Spain, USA, Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
At the end of this course the participants will have a broader knowledge about virtual environments. These knowledge will enable them to create high quality content to be shared in their own countries and own languages.
The moodle platform that we are using is a modern good looking and very functional one. We are incorporating new technology advances which allow us to improve the potential impact among our audience.

What a challenge each day serving with Learning Technologies. The broad world of both Education and Technology do not find boundaries in an easy way.
Languages, cultures, time, distances and geographic barriers are overcame by Learning Technologies.
While I take some time to write this entry, several things are happening simultaneously in different parts of the world. Those are possible as a result of our team hard work: Haiti partners are producing courses in both French and Kreyol, Brasilian partners are preparing themselves to receive an Instructional Design distance course in Portuguese, Costa Rican partners are teaching high quality courses to students located in at least 24 different countries, meetings in Spain are being conducted to continue impacting Spanish and beyond communities, organizations are preparing to receive Oral Strategies workshops during this year in Guatemala, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica and Ecuador, wonderful volunteers are approaching to Latino communities and organizations to make an impact in that big group, professionals in our Costa Rica office are making the last arrangements to start a course on Virtual Learning Environments next Monday and far far away in the jungles of Colombia and Venezuela dear indigenous friends are bringing Hope to communities sharing and teaching about God.
One more thing is happening now in a slum in Costa Rica. Kids in the ages of 10 to 16 years old are learning how to think more logically and are being equipped with tools for their life through a Community Learning Center.