San Salvador, El Salvador (December 2018)

I made a trip to San Salvador, El Salvador for a few days. It became the 85th country for me to visit in life and 21st country to visit in 2018.

The primary purpose of the trip was to meet up and brainstorm with Pastor Luis Morales on various BAM ideas. Pastor Luis is from El Salvador. He went through challenging times in his childhood, but thanks to God's grace, he managed to escape the country and migrated to the U.S. He became a pastor in the U.S. and now is shepherding the largest Hispanic church in Boston, MA.

He is also a BAMer. He has been engaged in business from 11 years of age and now is a businessman who owns several restaurant businesses personally while, through the church,engaged in running 11 radio stations in El Salvador, 3 radio stations in Boston, 4 eye clinics in El Salvador, preparing to open 3 more. He is also preparing to be engaged in growing Geisha Coffee and some other environmental businesses, such as efficient cooking stoves and plastic blocks.

The first site that we visited was the eye clinics in San Salvador. Pastor Dario was in charge of running the eye clinics. Pastor Dario has his son, Samuel and Sam's wife Pamela, and his daughter Nelly working at the eye clinics.

Pastor Luis has established and is running Heart of Life Foundation in the U.S. as well as in El Salvador to help the children in need. We visited a camp site where the largest church in the area is housed and many young people are gathering to be trained with the gospel. Pastor Luis has a younger brother who is running the camp site and the church.

Also, we helped deliver Christmas gifts to 40 or so children in the mountain area from 30 families involved in producing coffee. Pastor Luis delivered a short message about Jesus Christ who is the most wonderful gift of all we can expect.

We visited a few coffee farms and tasted the Bourbon coffee through a coffee farmer, Gabriel. The terrain was rough, but we managed to maneuver the area. I learned about the honey processing in which they dry the coffee cherries without removing the parchment to allow the honey in the parchments to be sufficiently absorbed by the green beans.

Pastor Luis showed us a few of his own retreat centers to take care of various needs. He was planning to do many things to help out Salvadoreans in need.

At a hill top, he built a house where the view of the surrounding areas was panoramic and breath-taking. One of the scenery pictures is at the top. Here we tasted the Bourbon coffee in various states of the roasting.

The plastic blocks are from Colombia and the idea is still developing.

We visited a radio station where three radio channels were broadcast. The plaza behind the radio station had a gigantic tree at the center and was full of sculptures donated by artists from around the world.

We were introduced to an engineer who has developed efficient cooking stoves with US patents. Oscar, the engineer, invited us to his home for dinner, to demonstrate the efficiency of the cooking stoves. Indeed, he was able to complete the cooking with only a small quantity of wood chips, which was quite impressive. Also, the dinner was wonderful.

But, he was expecting at least 3 million dollar investment without a business plan. Not a chance. We will see how things develop.

After the visit, I was not sure how we may develop the ways to collaborate since Latin America is not SfK's strategic foci regions.

Pastor Juan Lee volunteered to build a Latin America chapter of SfK Ministries. We agreed in principle to continue exploring the ways to collaborate. He agreed to attend the SfK MBA BCT to be held in Arusha, Tanzania as a faculty. While we spend time together for two weeks, we will brainstorm together to find a way. We will see. - Jeffrey