(Not So) Extreme Makeover: Cherne Home Edition

If you have been following our newsletter, website, and staff blogs over the past month, you have probably been reading about the Eicher Home kids moving to our new Duterte Home and our Cherne Home kids moving to the Eicher Home. You are probably wondering why all of our kids are moving around willy nilly and how our newly built home got occupied by our existing kids. If you haven't had the chance to visit here (yet!), the logistics of it all probably wouldn't seem to make much sense. There is rhyme to the reason, however.First of all, our brand new Duterte Home is a much different facility that our 1992 editions Eicher Home and Cherne Home. It serves several new purposes, is quite a bit larger, and has a larger load of responsibility along with it.

Expanding our ministry by an additional home means hiring new houseparents to be the authority figures in that home for both the children who will find a home there and for all of the childcare workers employed by us there. It is a tremendous amount of new responsibility for any new houseparents (there really isn't any such thing as hiring experienced houseparents since it is such a specialized job) that requires at least a two year learning curve to begin to feel comfortable with the job. It would be very unfair to ask any new houseparents to take on the responsibility of a home that is much larger, specializes in the care of children with special needs, and has the additional functions of a storage facility and game room for the rest of the compound as well. We felt that one of our existing houseparent couples would be better suited to the higher level of responsibility of the new facility so that our new houseparent couple could start off in a bit lower-key facility.

But why all of the additional shuffling kids around? Well, we are taking the opportunity to do makeovers on our two original homes, the Eicher Home and Cherne Home. Having just completed and occupied the new Duterte Home leaves one of the older homes unoccupied for the next few months. It gives us the chance to do a comprehensive overhaul of both homes. That's why the Cherne Home kids and houseparents moved over to the Eicher Home for a couple of months. We have the opportunity to clear the house of everything and do some very dirty and messy work, work that we couldn't do with a house full of kids. We will do the same for the Eicher Home when the Cherne Home kids can move back to their own home, hopefully the weekend before Christmas.
In both homes we will be resurfacing floors, re-tiling bathrooms, painting all rooms, fixing grout, repairing any termite damage (a constant battle), upgrading the kids' closets and personal storage cubbies, replacing part of the kitchen counter and sinks with a new stainless steel unit, and adding more ceiling fans and lights. It's a lot of work, but we've gotten a good start already.
We're making the most of a good opportunity and look forward to having three fresh facilities to use for the care of our kids as we expand the number of kids we care for early in 2010!