From Rachel:
We are so very grateful for the generous donations to help purchase blankets for our October trip. We met our goal of purchasing 650 blankets!!! Also, thanks to Pat and Jack Endres for the beautiful handmade baby blankets. With the weather getting a little cooler, it's nice to know that our families have a blanket to keep them warm this winter. 

Here's a big shout out for the large donation from our friends at Church of the Holy Apostles in Katy, Texas, which will allow us to buy (in Mexico) all the soccer balls (800 of them!!!) needed for our Christmas trip. The kids will be thrilled!  Thank you for your generosity!!  Special thanks to Tom Egan and the Austin Senior Softball team for collecting and donating equipment for the older children, and  to Celinda Martinez, Debbie Hoch and Anna Wicker for their collection of stuffed animals and small toys for the younger kids. To everyone who has and will so generously continue to donate and help spread love and the Christmas Spirit to our brothers and sisters south of the border, may God continue to bless you and your families.  Gracias!

As we come into the Holiday Season, I wish you all a blessed Thanksgiving and a Merry Christmas!!!

If you plan to volunteer for our December Mission trip, please contact me at:
rachel.fannin@mtmaustin.org. 

Gracias!

Message from Father Tony

Amigos y hermanos,

Blessings to you from my home in Nuevo Laredo. Once again I thank you for your recent mission trip. Pope Frances has just decreed a Year of Mercy to start on December 8, 2015, but the Holy Spirit has been working mercifully through MTM for years. Thank you!

I write with good news and with a particular need. Those of you who have been on either of the last two trips have seen that on the grounds of the Chapel of Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles we are doing construction. We started with a storage building for you, our Mission to Mexico friends, because we knew that we would have to dismantle your wooden storage shed.

And why was that? Because we are constructing a retreat facility! Our Lady of Refuge Parish, the parish in which you serve, is the parish in Nuevo Laredo that evangelizes the most through retreats. Some years we have had as many as 15 retreats, and that does not include the monthly days of recollection and other retreats that only last a few hours. For many of these retreats, we have to rent busses and rent retreat facilities on the opposite side of Nuevo Laredo.

So we discerned in prayer and decided to construct our own facility. It has been dangerous during these turbulent times to bus youth across town; now we will have them closer to their homes. We also foresee that neighboring parishes will want to use the facility, so it will be of service to folks to all of the colonias on the west side of Nuevo Laredo.

We are doing the construction in a labor-intensive fashion in order to help as many families as possible. For example, to dig the foundations, we could have rented a backhoe, but we opted to pay a bunch of local men to do the digging by hand in order to provide an income for their families. (Some of us got in and dug as volunteers, too, of course.) 

We ask your help to continue the project.  Whatever you can muster will be well-appreciated. Any check, no matter how small, will be helpful, but just so you know the breadth of our need, we are currently spending $1,000.00 dollars a week just for labor. Checks can be made out to the “Society of Our Lady” and given to Rachel or sent to my U.S. address:  Padre Antonio Anderson, P.O. Box 6464, Laredo, Tx., 78042.  The building we are working on is a conference center and kitchen, with dorm rooms on the second floor. Each floor will be about 2,800 square feet. To build something like this in the States would be quite expensive, but we will keep it simple and economical.
 
Your servant in Christ, with Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles,
 
Padre Antonio Anderson, s.o.l.t.
Párroco (Pastor)
 
P.S.. To keep abreast of parish life here, “befriend” me on facebook:  Antonio Anderson

MTM Sponsorship Report from Melanie Fannin

NOVEMBER IS SPONSORSHIP RENEWAL TIME

Please be watching your email or snail mail for a renewal letter to be arriving soon. 

We commence our new Sponsorship year with the annual Christmas trip to the colonia, and are hopeful that if you currently sponsor a child(ren) or are interested in doing so, you promptly renew at least at your current sponsorship level. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, rest assured we have spaces available and would very much appreciate your participation.  

There are 202 smiling faces in the colonia awaiting your support!If you want to get a head start on your sponsorships or need information of any sort about the sponsorship program, please email our Sponsorship Coordinator, Melanie Fannin. And as always, you may renew online by selecting the Donate Now button and selecting a Sponsor Donation at www.mtmaustin.org. 

Sponsorship Update

We have been busy trying to get the new photos of the sponsored children uploaded to our website so the sponsors may view current photos of the child(ren) they sponsor. Unfortunately, none of the sponsorship team is particularly adept at computer tasks so we are very slowly accomplishing our goal. If anyone out there is willing and able to give us a hand and/or a tutorial, it would be very much appreciated. I do believe this may be a textbook case of not being able to teach old dogs new tricks, but because we have several younger pups also working on the project, there may be some hope of speeding this process up. 

We have just completed the task of putting "family photos" of the sponsored children in frames to present to their parents at our Christmas celebration in the colonia. It was such a joy to see the children and their mothers (two fathers!) gathered together for a picture not only of the sponsored children but also of their siblings and in some cases, grandparents. The photos were taken at the colonia in October when we photographed each child for a new ID; a process we undertake every two years. If the parents give us permission to do so, we will add the family photos to our website (if an angel volunteers to help us. See paragraph above).

December is also scholarship presentation time. The judges are currently reviewing four (4) scholarship applications from our college students using criteria developed by the MTM Board. Each applicant must submit a written application, grades, an essay and commit to twelve (12) hours community service assisting MTM volunteers during our six annual mission trips. The students and the Sponsorship Coordinator anxiously await the awarding of the scholarships as the awards may determine whether or not a student is able to continue her/his studies.

Finally, getting a head start on Thanksgiving, I would like to thank God for the blessing each and every one of our sponsors and volunteers are to the children of the colonia, but also to me personally. I love being a small part of a program that is truly making a difference in the lives of these children. While we have our failures and missteps, by and large the families and the children know that because of your generous and loving spirits, we are there to help them learn to help themselves. What a wonderful and caring gift you have given.

Thank you and may God continue to bless you and yours during this holiday season.