Alex in 2004

Alex came to Casa Shalom when he was about 1 year old in 2004.  Here’s a picture of him shortly after arriving at the home. His name is actually Julio Cesar Agusto, but we didn’t receive any information about him when he first came.  So he was given the name Alex, and it’s stuck ever since. He’s always been such a special kid, and I’ve always looked forward to seeing him when I would come to visit in the past.

In 2009 there was a really good chance that Alex was going to be adopted by an American, but Guatemala was going through a time of restructuring their department that handles adoptions to try to eliminate the corruption that existed.  So they stopped all adoptions for a while.  Unfortunately because of these changes (and I’m not exactly sure what happened), Alex was never adopted.

He’s grown up in at Casa Shalom ever since, and he’s now 7 and in the second grade. Alex got pretty sick back in January, and so Yuli and I visited him to pray with him and we told him that when he was better, he was going to come stay with us for a weekend.  Well, he’s now better, and we had a wonderful weekend with him!  We had so much fun together, and we were impressed with how helpful he wanted to be and help us cook and clean up after eating.  We had such a great time with him that our first thought was: when can he come stay with us again???

Here’s a few pictures from our weekend together:

Together at Casa Shalom

Alex helping make pancakes on Saturday morning

Eating lunch with Yuli’s nephew