Every time I get together with Dina to work on emails or foundation requests, I leave feeling so encouraged! Every new story is one more piece of the puzzle that spells out “God is working RIGHT NOW.” It’s incredibly cool to be a part of something that is forming from scratch….if you can call HD “from scratch” when it has been a dream of Dina’s for seven years.
The last time I blogged about HD, we had just found our house through some-might-say miraculous means. In the weeks since that announcement, so much has happened!
- For one thing, we’re going by HD now. I suppose they always were, but I Americanized the name into “H of D.” No more! For the sake of consistency, I’m going to refer to our organization as HD from now on.
- We signed a 3-year contract with our building’s owner, and renovations have already begun! The offices should be done around March 15th, and our goal is to have the rooms for women ready by the beginning of April.
- Dina has multiple meetings every week, and she is nurturing a vast network of people invested in helping women who are fleeing sex trafficking. She knows a midwife who will give educational training to women about childbirth and nursing. She knows a gynecologist, general practitioner, and a dentist who are all willing to give free services to our women. This week she is meeting with the manager of a local bakery to see if he will provide free food for our women every week. Dina is a networking guru, mostly because she legitimately cares for every person she interacts with. When she told me about the bakery manager, she said “I’ve been praying for him for over a year now.” And that’s a SHORT amount of time compared to some of the people she’s invested in. HD has been on her heart for seven years, and it is so cool to see how God is using people she met five years ago to meet our needs now that the dream is becoming a reality.
- MOST IMPORTANTLY: we have (probably) found our first woman! “A” is a Romanian woman who wants to stay with us. I got to meet her briefly this past week. Now we just need to finish renovating and furnishing our building so that she can move in!
What will it take for that to happen? Well, we need money, and even more: we need prayer! I am not a great prayer, but Dina’s faith and commitment to bringing everything to God and actually, like, trusting in Him to provide is really making a believer out of me. So please, if you cannot give financially, then give a few minutes of your time to talk to God about HD.
- As it stands, we are using the $16,000 set aside for start-up costs to cover renovations. That means we need to raise $16,000 to, you know, cover start-up costs (like furnishing rooms and stocking the house for the women). That is our IMMEDIATE, URGENT NEED.
- We will also need ongoing donations to cover the monthly living expenses of the women who will stay with us. Right now, those costs are: $1,000/month for a woman and $500/month for a child. Hopefully these amounts will decrease as Dina finds people willing to donate food and/or services to our girls.
If you would like to donate to HD, you have two options! You can either give directly to our bank account, which gives us the money more immediately and totally. However, this form of donation is not tax deductible. (If you would like to donate this way, please leave a message or email me and I will send you the bank information.)
The second option is to give to AMG International’s HD page. This will allow your donation to be tax deductible, but there is a month or so delay before we have access to the money, and AMG takes a small cut of the donation for their own expenses.
So much is happening! I am so glad that I am in Greece now, and that I get to be a part of seeing HD launch. I’m so grateful that God brought me here and allows me to use my writing skills to make Dina’s dream a reality. I cannot wait to see what He does next.
It Is Trish 