Tegucigalpa, Honduras

Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras is a city of over 875,000 people that is plagued with economic hardship. Honduras is, by far, the poorest of the Central American countries with a high percentage of homeless and hungry children. Our teams will be working primarily with these children and leadership at four local churches and two feeding centres which provide care, meals and clothing for local children on a regular basis.

Gateway Church & Compassion Canada: Partnering with Purpose
We are excited to partner with Compassion Canada through a focused approach to child sponsorship in Honduras and working with the pastors of four Compassion project churches. Gateway Church families sponsor more than 80 children from these four churches and look forward writing and receiving letters from them and watching them grow spiritually as well as physically. It is our privilege as a church family to pray for them and their families.

Our first team spent the week of November 4 - 12, 2006 ministering to the children with an exciting "Fiesta Day Camp" similar to the program we ran here at home that summer. They spent several weeks preparing craft supplies, music, dramas and games for the children and worked in cooperation with local pastors and their volunteers to present everything in Spanish!

Future teams may also focus their missions on family, youth and leadership training events. We are very excited to see what God has in store for us and the communities we will be working with!

Compassion's Leadership Development Program
We have the privilege of sponsoring Rosa Vasquez, one of Compassion's first students enrolled in the Leadership Development Program (LDP) in the country of Honduras. The Leadership Development Program has been designed to recognize qualities of excellence, invest in the students who possess them, and then filter those students back into the communities to help others.

We believe this is a valuable asset to our missions endeavours and fulfills the core values of missions at Gateway Church.

The cost to sponsor Rosa is $330/month. Please prayerfully consider making a donation to this portion of our missions budget. Please mark your donation "Compassion Missions".

Short Term Missions with Manos Extendidas Honduras
We have been blessed to work with the missionary team at Manos Extendidas in the city of Comayaguala, just outside of the capital city of Tegucigalpa. Manos Extendidas (Hands Extended) endeavours through short-term missions to assist the international global church family in fulfilling the Great Commission by instilling a passion in each short-term missionary for lifetime involvement in world missions.

Gateway mission teams have spent time ministering to street kids, de-licing and cutting the children's hair in their two feeding centers, visiting youth in the detention center and playing with the children in a local orphanage. Loving these children and being Christ's hands extended is the focus of this mission. We recently sent a construction team to help complete the bunk house where teams stay when they visit.

Future teams may focus on the needs of the young women, men and families at the church run by Manos Extendidas in the form of conferences and/or music events.

Trip dates

• November 4 - 12, 2006
• April 30 - May 6, 2007
• November 3 - 11, 2007
• March 4 - 10, 2008
• August 23 - 31, 2008
• October 29 - November 5, 2008