Good-byes...

Good-byes are difficult in the best of situations; this is not the best situation. We have worked shoulder to shoulder this week with Americans and Guatemalans who have become good friends in a place where a good friend has your back, literally. They keep you out of harm's way, they cook your food, they carry your baggage (literally and figuratively), they care about your feelings, they protect your health, they encourage you when you are overwhelmed, and they share their faith and challenge you to share and stretch yours. Good-byes can be painful.  Each team members knows there is a very real possibility they may never see these friends again.  Even those who plan to return know that life doesn't always unfold the way we plan it, and that some things change with time.  This makes today difficult.

Life in Guatemala seems to perch on the edge of a precipice.  It may not be a comfortable place to live, but it sure is real, and real is powerful.  Our time in Guatemala has been real and powerful.  We have been blessed with an opportunity to see the world from a new perspective and react to what we have seen and heard.  God has blessed our time here.

Thank you for your interest, support, and prayers this week.  We leave tomorrow morning at 3:30 A.M. and hope to arrive in Detroit Sunday evening.  Again, thank you for taking this walk with us.

Blessings,
Sarah, Laura, Renee, Jenna, Gail, Sam, Emily, Emily, Kara, Emma, Jeannie, Kelsey, Lonnie, Jordan, Nick and Sally

Questions

Gonzales Park

What surprised us the most about our week in Guatemala?  What disappointed us?  What did we learn?  Where did we see God this week?  These were the questions we wrestled with tonight and instead of wrestling with the answers in the blog, I thought you might like to see the answers.  I don't know how many photos I can post before the blog implodes, but we would like you to see what we have seen that has hopefully changed us for the better.  More tomorrow...

Sally and Chochi

Sarah, Gail, Lonnie, Nick and Gail with Sandra on house visit

Daniel and Judit

Jenna and friends

Sam and friend

Sandra and Laura

Jeannie and friend

Turns out Jordan is great with kids.

Emily in her element with Carmen and friends.

Kara reading to the younger children

Nick as Pharoah

Rolando and friends

This was on the roof this morning with the Guatemalan missionaries.

Emma and Ana

Emily and Fatima

               

Gonzales Park

Great day today!  It was an all-round great day. We took a group picture with the Guatemalan ministry leaders at lunch, and I think it captures our feelings.

Gonzales Park is a well-worn slab of cement between two cement block buildings in a well-worn section of Amatitlan about 45 minutes from Guatemala City. Our morning began with home visits; we set out in three directions from Gonzales Park.  I know the home visits sound kind of weird, but I have been trying to figure out how to help you understand what they are like.  The Guatemalans we visit are generally people known by the ministry.  They are folks, like most folks here, dealing with BIG issues and for the most part, are homes headed by women struggling to keep it all together.  They seem to desperately need to talk about their struggles with people who they consider sisters and brothers. They ask for and we offer God's words and our own words to help give them the strength to carry on.  You should see us scrambling through our Bibles to find just the "right" words.  (The Guatemalans are masters at this; we are works in progress.)  This morning Lonnie thought of a verse that he had discussed in a religion class at school but could not remember its location in the Bible; Jordan recognized what he was describing and found it. Katarina was asking for strength and comfort since the blinding of her father in a shooting; he had been the primary bread winner in a very large 4-generation family.  It was a sober but loving experience for all of us.  An increasingly common theme at visits has been the apparent rise in violent attacks and their impact on families.  Happily, another group had a wonderful experience visitng a family that makes and sells corn flour tortillas over an open fire in their home.  The rest of us listened to blow by blow details on the success of americano attempts to pat out uniformly thick and round tortillas.  These women can hand make 200 tortillas in two hours and sell them hot to make a living.

We never go anywhere without the Guatemalans guiding and looking out for us. They "manage" the visits, but Sarah really found her Spanish voice today, and it enabled her to have conversations during visits with more depth than those of us limited by high school Spanish.  She became the voice for all of us as we worked to understand each family's circumstances.  We are touched by the strength required by these families to survive, blown way by living conditions, and moved when they welcome us as if God himself had brought us directly to their door.   (Yes, I know.)  The Guatemalans in the ministry understand; we are just willing participants in a ritual that is beyond a privlege in which to participate.

We took our PB and J lunch to nearby Lake Amatitlan today.  It is a beautiful setting but may be among the most polluted bodies of water in the world, and that may not be an exaggeration.  It is electric green and leaves scum on the shore that looks like thick green paint.

The afternoon was a rush of music, at least a couple hundred kids and adults, beads, costumes, stories, frisbees, hugs, and prayers.  Kelsey and I had our turn with the children we sponsor and their thoughtful mothers; it was so touching to see how a relatively small amount of money can change a child's education and a family's life...and ours.

Gail continues to enjoy the medical clinic and works with Guatemalans Anna, Ruth, and Julian.  I think they have developed a mutual respect and appreciation for each other.

We are all on a bit of a high today...and it was also cooler which was good for the gringos.  God has been very good to us, and we are grateful.

Blessings and good night,
the 2012 Guatemala Mission Team

Buena Vista

It's 7:00 A.M. and we are off to Buena Vista.  It takes about two and a half hours to get there, but the trip is breath-taking.  At present we are driving along side volcanoes Fuego, Agua, and Pacaya.  The fog that surrounded the base of the volcanoes yesterday now encircles their tops.  These mountains are covered in tropical, green vegetation except the highest ones where only rock emerges beyond the tree line.  We are heading west toward the Pacific Ocean and lower elevations...and of course, heat!  Today will likely be the hottest day by far; and this is the day we step into National Geographic.

Buena Vista is a "village" that is cut from a sugar cane field on the left and a rubber tree finca on the right. There is no running water and no electricity.  The people who live in the most basic/primitive of shanties, are wonderfully friendly, but desperately poor.  We had lots of fun seeing familiar faces and singing and teaching our lessons, playing soccer on the machete-cut field, and working on crafts with large-ish, engaged, appreciative groups.  Our lessons improved today thanks to a bit of editing last night and our many able team members and Guatemalan translators. We also may have gotten to the heart of the problem with our craft with the adults; we discovered today many of them couldn't see well enough to actually string tiny beads on a series of safety pins because of their aging eyes, just like mine,  but unlike me, they had no glasses.  Emily and I were both approached about giving up our glasses, permanently.  I was temporarily dumb-struck; all I could think about was how I could possibly explain "graduated lenses" to these deserving women living in the middle of the rain forest.  It was another lesson in humility.

We were so lucky to have the day in this place with these people. The K-6 school was interesting for Laura and I to visit, but it was also one of the day's true low moments.  It was dark, poorly equipped, in disrepair (that is an understatement), but worst of all it appeared to be completely ineffective. The photo illustrates the best the school had to offer. It is hard to illustrate it in a photo, and it was hard to get our heads around it.

A high point of the day was a meeting between Sarah Alverson on behalf of her cousin Alyssa Voiland and her  sponsored child, Wendy.  Wendy is in eighth grade and must take the bus to school on Sunday for her one day of  studies, but to get to the bus for the hour ride to school, she must walk an hour and a half on a desolate dirt road through sugar cane fields. There are increasing incidents of robbery and worse on that road and her mother tearfully explained how frightening it was to send Wendy off to school each Sunday.  We sat outside her shanty and listened to her share her torment.  It was heart-breaking to appreciate the risk Wendy ran attempting to continue her education and what it might mean for her life if she did not continue.  Another humbling lesson.

I wish I could write more tonight and do a better job of it, but I must admit we are starting to wear out just a bit, or maybe that is just me...  We continue to be healthy and feel blessed to have this opportunity to share our faith with people that daily face more challenges to their faith, than most of us will ever face in a lifetime.  As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I suspect we are the ones who are really being served.

Blessings, thank you, and take care.

El Rincon

This may not be the best time to write the blog; I'm writing on a paper plate in the van on the way back from Amatitlan.  We are sweaty and wet after an extremely hot day in the tropics that came to a close with a tropical drenching.  I am looking out at volcanic mountains, some active, their bases dressed in billowing white fog.  The temperature has dropped 20 degrees in the past hour and the van reeks of sweat, dust, random hand sanitizers, and diesel exhaust which remains in the air even after the downpour.  Guatemala's natural beauty is substantial.  However, its human  struggles are too.

This morning we were up early, and it was off to an area outside Amatitlan called El Rincon (the corner).  El Rincon is a rural area just outside of Amatilan.  It is breath-taking except for the level of extreme poverty suffered by its residents.  Again, today, we broke into groups to visit shanties.  We all started, however, in the home of Carlos and his friend Margarete.  Many of us have visited this home in previous years, but it is always a pleasure to be welcomed to their shanty, cut into the hand-planted corn fields that surround it.  It sits at the base of a volcanic mountain which heats the water they pull from their well for washing but cannot be drunk.  It's "bano" (bathroom) is four bamboo polls with cloth wrapped around them.  (I guess you can picture the center.)  The kitchen is an open fire in an open section of their one room shanty made of plywood and corrogated metal in various conditions.  I have been there seven out of the past eight years and have seen Carlos improve due in part to the care provided by the family with which he lives and the medical and spiritual support of Groundwork.

Other visits included one to the shanty of a sweet, 20-year-old girl who was eight months pregnant with her fourth child.  She was illiterate and lived with her 35-year-old mother who cared for even more children including a deaf nephew. It was tragic but moving to spend time with her. After a lunch of peanut butter sandwiches, tortilla chips, and Cheekys, we taught adult and children's lessons at the El Rincon "salon".  Okay, it did not go perfectly, but there will be an executive meeting of the team when we get back to do a bit of tweeking.  Our craft, a great one, turned into "the craft from hell" when it got seriously lost in translation...we will fix that before tomorrow.

I wish you could be in my head right now.  I am in the van listening to six different conversations of Americanos nortes desperately trying to improve their Spanish by repeating to any Guatemalan who will listen the full extent of their Spanish vocabularies in an attempt to improve their pronunciation.  (Let me tell you that I'm not sure it's working.)

Days like today are exhilerating.  We did the best we could.  We met and established relationships with folks we otherwise would never have been bleassed to know....meaningful experiences for all of us.  God is blessing our time here.

In the interest of needed tweeking for tomorrow, I will end by attaching photos that hopefully capture some of our experiences today.

Blessings and thank you,
The 2012 Gutemala Mission Team

Only a Child, the "basura," and home visits

Okay...where do I start?  It has been an extremely busy day with experiences that will probably be with us for a lifetime...and I still don't know where to start.  We began our day with a trip to Only a Child's woodworking shop.  Only a Child is a ministry for street boys begun about 18 years ago by George Leger, a pastry chef from Boston.  He felt called to Guatemala after working with Guatemalans in Boston and reading a story about the tragic end of a young boy's life on the streets of Guatemala City.  Many of you already know the story of this ministry as you have boxes made by his boys.  George encourages woodworking as a means to teach responsible work habits and enables the boys who work in the shop and live at his shelter to return to school.  There are many impressive success stories as well as frustrations in rewriting the stories of young boys who have been gang members, been neglected by their families, and in many cases have been forced to leave home in order to survive.  The boys range from very young to not so young at all.  Some are studying at the university and others are in their 20's, in the fifth grade, struggling with waining desire to complete their educations.  Hearing their stories and George's was compelling and impressive.

Our next stop was the Guatemala City Garbage Dump, by way of General Cemetery.  Each year the team makes a trip to a very large cemetery that looks out over the ravine that is the Guatemala City Garbage Dump.  And each year we are shocked at the changes that have taken place in the twelve months since our previous trip.  The dump is the sole source of income for hundreds of families who are forced to live in the shanties that surround the dump.  Those working in the dump recycle plastic, glass, and cardboard to provide a living for their families.  To get the complete picture, you need to understand that the infrastructure in Guatemala City is less than sufficient.  As a result, toilet paper cannot be flushed, ever.  Instead, the toilet paper goes into the bathroom trash which in turn goes into the dump.  Now picture hundreds of men, women, and teenagers rifling through the dump in search of a living.  It is toxic, it is not vented, and it is unstable.  These families are some of the 300 to 400 families Groundwork serves each week and the home of most of the Guatemalan ministry workers who work tirelessly to lift their own people. To say it is humbling is an understatement.

Finally, our afternoon was spent doing home visits.  We broke into two groups: Jenna, Kara, Renee, Jordan, Laura, Gail, Emily C. and Sam; Sarah, Nick Lonnie, Jeannie, Sarah, Kelsey, Emma, Emily R., and myself. We were accompanied by at least three ministry leaders in each group, and we visited families served by the ministry or other folks who desire a visit.  It is the expereince that never leaves any of us.  The extreme poor in Guatemala tend to desire a visit from a rag-tag group of locals and gringos.  They are are so welcoming and seem to desire the opportunity to share what is going on in their lives and look to us for support, God's word, and a prayer on their behalf.  If you have a mental picture of Jehovah's witnesses pounding on your door, lose it right now!  There is nothing to compare this to in the U.S.  These Guatemalans share stories that are almost unthinkable in our country, and they are completely unthinkable in terms of their frequency and severity.  One of the women we visited spoke of the disappearance and murder of her husband on the road to El Salvador recently.  Unfortunately, these kinds of stories emerge in many of our home visits.  Gratefully, the other group had more upbeat visits.  Both groups experienced culturally unique afternoons.

There is a lot that goes on here that is so meaningful it defies a quick mention in the blog.  Today was one of those days.  In the interest of tomorrow's lesson and work that still needs to be done we will call it a night.

Blessings,
All of us

Iglesia Sendero de la Cruz y mas

Dear family and friends,
There are many reasons we like to blog when we are in Guatemala.  One is to assure families of team members that we are alive and well; we are.  Another is to share our experiences with interested friends and our many church supporters.  We also use the blog to thank each of you for your support, donations, and prayers; they make a critical difference for us and Groundwork Guatemala and the hundreds of people they serve.  Finally, we use the blog to communicate our realization that people around the world on the surface may appear to be different than us, but for the most part they are just like us.  Their struggles for the most part are our struggles, and as any of us are raised up, we are all raised up.  The Internet may connect the world, but the opportunity to establish face-to-face relationships with people outside our immediate surroundings is a gift for which we are extremely grateful.  God has given us an opportunity this week to reach out to a brother or sister, and each of us is grabbing hold of that opportunity.  Even before we have begun our work here, Guatemalans have reached out to serve us with friendship, Christian fellowship, and a sense of commonality.  Those connections are what we want to communicate through this blog.

Most of the blog today was written in church this morning...I know that sounds suspect, but we joyfully participated in lively contemporary praise music and watched liturgical/interpretive dancing for 60+ minutes before the service really got underway. Once the service began, it was "all over" for those of us who have only mastered Spanish I.  The Spanish was flowing faster than most of us could process it.  So instead, we read any Bible references we could catch or journaled about the experience.  I ended up reading the entire book of Colossians, which isn't very long; it turned out I had time to read a much longer book, but each of us used the time to watch what was going on around us or record our impressions.  The experience was moving; we were treated as valued guests... hugged, kissed, and blessed by Guatemalans we had just met this morning.  It was a humbling time together in worship.  It was also a reminder that this trip blesses us as much or more than it does those we serve.

This afternoon we worked on our lessons and had an opportunity to go to a municipal park to play soccer or just take a walk.  This is the only time in Guatemala we will have an opportunity to get out and "play".  The park is filled stem to stern with soccer fields and armed guards. They took one look at us and we were relegated to a small grassy area where young children and mothers gather.  I believe I heard a comment by a guard that only serious teams can use the fields.  Our team has a college soccer player (Renee) and two high school soccer players (Sam and Kara); nevertheless, we pitted our best against Manuel's (Guatemalan ministry leader and driver) teenage boys.  Some of us walked the perimeter of the park, which is cut from the top of a mountain with some fairly sobering vistas on three sides. We were accompanied by Kevin Holmes, one-half of the American side of the ministry staff, the other half being his wife Ginny.  In addition to their work administering Groundwork in Guatemala, Ginny has taken it upon herself to cook for the teams that come to Guatemala.  She is a master of delicious, nutritious, thrifty, and for the most part vegetarian meals. We are truly grateful for her culinary skills.

Tonight we gathered "upstairs" with Ginny and Kevin for an orientation meeting and a time to just talk about the experiences that will come this week.  Some are a bit nervous, but all are looking forward to the experience.  Sarah and I still have work to do on the adult lesson...what would a trip to Guatemala be without a last minute adrenaline rush?  Laura and Jenna are working through the kinks in the children's lesson with the rest of the team.  I wish I had photos today, but we are unable to carry our cameras because of the risk it creates for the team.  Tomorrow Kevin will take photos for us and I will have the opportunity to upload them tomorrow night.

It is a great team of folks.  We are enjoying each other's company and looking forward to a week of service and personal growth.

Thank you all for your continued interest.

Blessings,
Sally, Laura, Jenna, Sarah, Gail, Renee, Kara, Jeannie, Emma, Emily R., Emily C., Sam, Kelsey, Lonnie, Jordan, and Nick  (Someone in this list snores and has been threatened by HIS roommates.  I'll keep you posted on this situation as it develops.)

Arrival in Guatemala

We are safe and sound in Guatemala.  This photo was taken from the window as we were landing in Guatemala City.  We promise more photos and tales tomorrow; we are exhausted and will start fresh in the morning.  Our flights were good, there was very little down time in Houston, and with the exception of a few customs issues here and in Detroit, we arrived without incident with all 28 checked bags and 32 pieces of carry-on luggage.   After sorting supplies and a dinner of mac and cheese (with hot sauce), almost all of us are remarkably ready to crash for the day. (It's 9:00 in Detroit but 7:00 here...the boys are disturbed by this fact.)

Again, thank you for your support and prayers.

Blessings.

We are ready to go! We have 28 bags/duffels to check filled with the supplies needed by Groundwork Guatemala, generously donated by all of you.  Our biggest struggle at this point is fitting our personal items in acceptably small carry-on luggage.  Our mantra is, "less is more," at least that is our public position.  The truth is we are trying to take as much as possible in smaller than usual bags...ugly!

The photograph was taken yesterday at our last packing meeting.  Starting in the front, from left to right, Kara Hecker, Sam Uppleger, Jeannie Skirpan, Jenna Thompson, in the back, Gail Sellers, Sally Buss, Emily Racey, Kelsey Soenen, Laura Elmshauser, Lonnie Taylor, Emily Collins, Renee Hecker, and Emma Eskelinen.  Not able to be present were Sarah Alverson, Jordan Schinkai, and Nick Pendergast.

Trinity, thank you for your continued support and prayers in this endeavor.  We are blessed to have this opportunity.  Hopefully, we will be able to blog about our experiences each day; the internet is not as reliable in the developing world as it is in ours.

Blessings,
Sally and every member of the 2012 Guatemala mission team