I recently had the opportunity to represent COAH on a mission trip to Nicaragua along with 4 other churches. We had a total of 13 people in our group and we were the first group allowed to travel back to Nicaragua and stay at El Ayudante. After months of political unrest and travel restrictions, it was good to go back and be with our friends in Leon, La Paz Centro, and other places. I am happy to say that travel there is now very safe and we had absolutely no dangerous or scary encounters. It is almost as if nothing had ever happened in the country.

We traveled to 5 locations near Leon including La Paz Centro (our sister church), La Majada, Salinas Grandes, Las Parcelas, and Boqueron. At each location, the mobile medical team provided free basic medical screening and medications as needed, free dental exams with basic dental care as needed. In total 1017 medical and dental patients were seen.
In addition to the medical care, 100 Sawyer water filters were distributed among the communities to the most needing families to provide clean water.
We also provided to school-age children, 192 backpacks and 100 cinch sacks. Each backpack and cinch sack had notebooks, pencils, rulers, erasers, sticky notes, a toy and other miscellaneous items for back to school which starts in February.

I would like to extend a special thanks to everyone at COAH for the help in the funding of the backpacks for the children. It was a tremendous success and greatly appreciated by the children and parents. So many there do not have the resources to purchase basic school supplies with school starting back in February.

Joe Price