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Schools

Medfield Teens Take Part in Mission of Hope to Nicaragua

Sisters Anna and MaryEllen Krah travel to Nicaragua as part of the Mission of Hope.

Two Medfield sisters were recently on a mission ... a mission trip that is.

students, MaryEllen and Anna Krah travelled to Nicaragua
with the Mission of Hope from Plattsburgh, N.Y. during their February school vacation in hopes of making a difference to the young children and their families.

For as long as MaryEllen and Anna can remember, they have been summering with their family at Schroon Lake in upstate New York, and for quite a few years, while attending church in that area, Sr. Debbie Blow has spoken  at their church about the “Mission of Hope” in which she is co-founder.

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But this time around they not only heard about it, they signed up to take part.

MaryEllen is a junior and Anna is a sophomore at Medfield High School. Neither one had ever done anything like this before, but this year just seemed like the right time to go. Both girls applied to take part in the mission trip back in September and were two of just 46 people accepted to participate in the trip. They both did some fundraising by sending out request letters to friends and family and both used the money toward sponsoring a child.

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Their sponsorship dollars paid for a school uniform, school supplies, school tuition and school lunch for one child for an entire year. Each girl sponsored a child; a six-year-old boy and his eight-year-old sister. 

The Mission of Hope group flew out of New York to Nicaragua. The trip took almost 22 hours. The girls spent over one week there helping to build small homes (as most people there live in cardboard huts), distributing food (mainly rice and beans) to the neighborhoods near to the mission and worked at the local children's hospitals scraping and painting walls. They also handed out stickers and stuffed animals to the young patients.

The hospital Anna visited was in such bad shape, even though it had three floors, the top two floors were unusable and was considered unsanitary.

In addition to going on the mission trip, Anna collected 318 pairs of glasses to bring along that had been donated to her. She said that the Nicaraguan people are so much in need of glasses that the day she was there, the mission gave out 1,000 pair of glasses and they ran out. She said the people in Nicaragua were very thankful for the donated glasses. 

The Krah sisters are hopeful that they will go on the mission again next year.

To learn more about this mission and for information on how you can help, log onto http://www.ncmissionofhope.org.

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