Use of an image other than a thumbnail on home page

[beautiful]

I am close to giving up. Using this theme has not been as easy it could have been.

Thumbnails don't work. I've gone through the turtorials thoroughly and used every variation of the image path I could think of. Other threads on here have pointed to the thumbnail creator tool and have suggested I get in touch with my hosting company and give some details to them and set something else to do with security. I really think this will confuse me and them a whole lot and I feel like I have spent so much time on something that is not working straight out of the box.


The site is http://www.havencottagesmombasa.com

Someone here has already been kind enough to show me how to show pages rather than posts on the home page.

Is there anyone that can help me with the code on home.php again, please? Instead of the thumbnail, I'd just like to use an image of a small size(upload it small in the first place)so my left hand box on the home page shows:

Page Title
Small Image
Text- either from the first few lines of text on the Activities Page itself or text I could hard-code on myself
Usual Read More link

Thanks and excuse my frustration; I feel like I can't make progress without the homepage being do-able. I am here with all this: