The Land of Many Trees

We’ve been in Guatemala for about a week and a half now. Guatemala has been absolutely amazing. It is absolutely beautiful and so colorful here. Our whole squad is staying together at the Adventures in Missions base. Each team on the squad has their own room with a bathroom with drinkable and hot water. This is a massive upgrade from our tents and shower trailers during training camp. We also have an amazing kitchen staff at the base who makes us amazing food for breakfast and dinner everyday.

During the week each team is split up to work with a different ministry here in Guatemala. Our team is working with an organization called One Way Community. It has been awesome working with One Way. Most of the staff is guys around our age who are really fun and they also have a couple former girl racers volunteering with them. On Mondays and Tuesdays our team is split with half of us going to a town called San Lorenzo and the other half in a town 2 hours away called Comalapa. Wednesdays and Fridays our entire team goes to San Lorenzo together. Thursdays we don’t work with One Way and rather have something called Activation Day which I will explain later.

In San Lorenzo our ministry consists of mainly house visits as well as picking up trash and cleaning up the ministry locations in the mornings. During the house visits we will go to the homes of some of the kids who are part of the One Way program. While visiting we will hear some of their stories, give them a word of encouragement, and pray for the family. House visits are awesome because it allows us to understand the kids we are working with better and be able to connect with them more. In the afternoons we help out with their soccer and tutoring programs. They will split our team in half with half of us helping tutor and the other half helping with soccer. With tutoring we get to hangout with elementary school aged kids and do things like teach them some english, do crafts with them, teach Bible stories etc. During soccer we get to hangout with middle school and high school aged kids and help the coaches run drills and play soccer with the boys, we also occasionally do devotionals with the team. The team is currently training to go to Guatemala City where they have the opportunity to play in front of some European scouts where they can potentially get recruited to train in Spain. I have really enjoyed doing ministry in San Lorenzo and getting to know all the guys as they destroy me in soccer and getting to know the kids through my broken Spanish.

Currently our ministry in Comalapa is building a house for a family in the village. I’ve been to Comalapa once to work on the house. It was a lot of fun but also very challenging. It was a far different experience than building a house with Samaritan’s Purse. We have way less tools and the people instructing me on how to build the house speak a little amount of English. Regardless of these setbacks we are currently on the way to Comalapa for the dedication of the house, even though we only started building it last Monday. The best part of our ministry in Comalapa is when the family we are making the house for makes us food. We take a break half way through the work day to enjoy some delicious Guatemalan cuisine that the family made for us. They made us a delicious stew with chicken and vegetables along with tortillas and tamalitos, which are basically miniature tamales. There was also a mystery beverage included, I’m not exactly sure what I drank that day but it was delicious.

On Thursday we had activation day instead of our regular ministy. For activation day we will be learning about a new one of the five fold ministries each week and then going out and practicing it. This week we learned about evangelism and then went out into Parramos and did street evangelism. We had a translator, who we called Papa, who made the evangelism process much easier. We walked around the streets of Parramos and spoke to whoever the Lord highlighted to us. We spent most of our activation day talking to one lady whose grandfather had just passed away. She was very curious and many questions to ask us. She was catholic and believed in the Lord but we still laid out the gospel for her clearly and gave her a lot of encouragement as well as prayed for her. After our activation day had ended we decided we would just walk around Parramos and explore. We were not expecting to do any more evangelism, but 10 minutes into exploring we got approached by a man named Brandon. Brandon was 28 years old and let us know that he had not eaten in 3 days. We no longer had our translator with us, so Me, Jackson, Sam, and Nick had to use our little Spanish knowledge to communicate with him. We offered to take him out to lunch and he was very surprised and appreciative. We told him to not worry about the price and that we would take him anywhere. He took us to this burger place. The burgers were not the greatest but it was still a great time getting to know Brandon. We were able to communicate pretty well with him, but as we got into more spiritual conversation we had to begin to use google translate. We talked about God and his relationship with the Lord. It was really cool to see how much he still loved the Lord and trusted in Him, even with the little that he had. He then told us how his parents lived in an Antigua and he didn’t have enough money to get back to them so he has been sleeping in different places. We offered to give him money for a bus to get back to his family. He began to cry which caused us to tear up as well. We then encouraged one another and talked about how we would all see each other again in Heaven one day. We paid for his meal and then gave him enough money to get back to Antigua and a little extra to buy dinner when he got back. We then all hugged and said our goodbyes. This was a beautiful moment and it was super encouraging. This was definitely one of my favorite days so far in Guatemala.

I have absolutely loved my time here in Guatemala so far, and am so excited for what the Lord is going to continue to do. Please continue to pray for my squad and I. You can specifically be praying for my team and the work we are doing with One Way. Pray for the people of San Lorenzo and Comalapa, and that the work we are doing can be an encouragement to them and draw them closer to the Lord. Also please pray for our ministry host at One Way. They are all volunteers and do not get paid for their work, so please pray that they can continue being faithful to the Lord and that they may be able to experience the Lord’s provision financially and spiritually. Thank you so much for all of you guys support and prayers. May the Lord bless you.