1 Million Steps of Gratitude for La Casa de los Ninos - El Camino de Santiago La Casa de Los Ninos
September 9, 2015

La Casa de los Niños, a USA 501(c)3 nonprofit, is a free after school enrichment program for children ages 6-15, who live in and around the small village of Lo de Marcos, Riviera Nayarit, Mexico.

 “La Casa” was founded and established in 2005 by David & Patricia Martinez and Jim and Dulce Heinrich as a memorial tribute to their children. The program’s intention is to provide a safe place for the children to play, learn and dream. “La Casa” has a staff of 4 teachers from the local community and volunteers come from throughout the World to provide their special skills in working with the children.

We have our boots, our packs, our sticks, our El Camino Passport. We have our plan, we have taken the time, we have our intentions of walking every day for 40 days …across the North of Spain,, over the Pyrenees and through the dale, into churches, speaking Spanish, walking on a path that has been traversed by thousands over hundreds of years. We are preparing to take an epic journey ….we know it is impossible to know what all this really means, but we are ready and willing to find out.

We feel it is time to walk through this transition to some kind of transformation. We have been finding our way over the past 10 years through the terrain of grief and survival. We are grateful that we have been able to focus ourselves in ways that have brought us joy. We have found our way to be of service during this time and through this we have continued to heal. We realize that we have used the energy of shock and survival to make it through to this point. We are hoping that through this journey, we will be getting our feet back on earth in a new way. It is time…..and we are ready.

We are dedicating our 1 million step Pilgrimage to La Casa de los Ninos and all the many blessings we have received and given over the last 10 years. What is clear to us is the importance of the continued sustainability of La Casa through fund raising through a variety of events and efforts.

Through rally.org we will chronicle our Pilgrimage with insights and photos. We invite you to join us as we take these 1 million steps of gratitude. We also invite you to donate to La Casa and in turn we will match these donations dollar for dollar. And In this way we all move forward.

Progress as of yesterday, September 8, 2015: "We are in the beautiful village of St Jean Pied de Port in the French Pyrenees near the Spanish border. Tomorrow we begin the pilgrimage, planning to walk about 15 miles to Roncesvalles up and over the mountains."

Follow along with us at Rally.org.

The Camino de Santiago (the Way of St. James) is a large network of ancient pilgrim routes stretching across Europe and coming together at the tomb of St. James (Santiago in Spanish) in Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain. The most popular route (which gets very crowded in mid-summer) is the Camino Francés which stretches 780 km (nearly 500 miles) from St. Jean-Pied-du-Port near Biarritz in France to Santiago. This is fed by three major French routes: the Voie de Tours, the Voie de Vezelay, and the Voie du Puy. It is also joined along its route by the Camino Aragones (which is fed by the Voie d'Arles which crosses the Pyrenees at the Somport Pass), by the Camí de San Jaume from Montserrat near Barcelona, the Ruta de Tunel from Irun, the Camino Primitivo from Bilbao and Oviedo, and by the Camino de Levante from Valencia and Toledo.

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