Getting Ready for Guatemala

So it has been several years since I've blogged. I was kind of surprised to discover it was still active though the last post was in 2012. But I thought a blog would be a good way to communicate about  our upcoming mission trip to Guatemala. We have a team of 11 going to work with a ministry called Hope for Home Ministries. My daughter Lydia made a connection with one of their missionaries when she was attending school in Antigua earlier this year. This is our first time working with them so it is kind of a "vision trip" to see if we might be able to partner together in the future.

So far all of our interactions have been great, and we are looking forward to being on the ground with them. Here is a video introduction to the ministry.

As you can see, this is a ministry to "the least of these" (Matthew 25:40). We leave Saturday, the 19th at 7:45am. We would appreciate your prayers!

GUATEMALA DAY ONE

We arrived safely in Guatemala yesterday (Sunday) and was picked up at the airport around 10:30 am Guatemala time. We picked up the other teams that are here. We learned that there is actually 4 teams here this week: the largest group is a youth group from a Methodist church in Maryland. There is also a group of 6 from Gillespie Ave. BC in Knoxville (including Kelly Woods nephew, Austin), and a family of four from Northstar Church in Knoxville, and our group of eight.

After picking up the other groups we all went to Antigua (Central America's oldest continuous city) for our down day. When we finally arrived back at the mission house, our team was exhausted. Most of us were running on 3 hours of sleep or less. We all slept well last night.

After breakfast this morning we headed to the village of San Mateo, a mountainous village about an hour from the mission house. Mike has partnered with a church in the village to do a "Character Counts" ministry for the local kids. We spent the morning leveling the ground in the church's courtyard preparing it for sod and seed. As it is, the dirt courtyard ground was sloped and drained into the building that housed their children's ministry. We leveled the ground (by hand) and tomorrow they will be bringing in sod. It is a real blessing to the church.

In the afternoon, we held a birthday party for the kids who are registered with the ministry center in San Mateo. There are about 55 children involved and we provided a pizza lunch, drinks, and balloon decorations. When the pizza was brought in, someone asked the children how many of them had ever had pizza before, only three out of the 50 or so kids, raised their hands. After the pizza party, the kids had a tienda, or toy store. The kids in the Character Counts program earn points by doing things like, learning memory verses, helping at the ministry center, helping at home, etc. At the tienda they can cash their points in for toys and games.

In the afternoon, some of the group went to the ministry site that we will be working at tomorrow. It is in a city call San Antonio, and is in the downtown area. A man and his wife operate a feeding center and an after school program for kids, but they don't have a kitchen to cook the food. Tomorrow and Thursday we will be building them a kitchen from the ground up. Today we cleared and leveled the area where we will be building. We also had to unload a ton of sand from a truck that was too big to fit through the gate of the place we are working. We unloaded it with shovels at the entrance to the gate, then we had to move the pile to another location so we could get in and out of the gate. It was a full truck load of sand and it had to be unloaded and moved all by shovel. Our groups will sleep well tonight.

Everyone is doing well. Brittany is battling a cough she had before she came down. She feels fine, just irritated with the cough. We'd appreciate your prayers for her. I'll try to post some pictures later on our Facebook page.

Continued

The mission trip is going great. This morning's post was a little hurried so I wanted to catch up on a few things - but first the good news, we had 34 decisions for Christ during VBS this morning! Praise the Lord His great work. I'll share more about the activities of the day later.

Yesterday we spent most of the day in the city of Antigua. It is the oldest city in Guatemala and at one time was the religious and political capitol for all of Central America. It was the home base for Catholic Missions and was the capitol for Guatemala until the early 1970's. It's a beautiful city nestled in a valley surrounded by mountains. At one time there were 38 catholic monasteries in operation in the city and the surrounding area. In the early 1700's sever floods damaged many of the churches. An earthquake in 1972 nearly destroyed the city and the capitol was moved to Guatemala City.

Antigua is a tourist city and we saw people of many nationalities. We spent most of our time in the open market in the city center. We would think of it almost as an upscale flea market. There were hundreds of merchants with beautiful products. You could purchase just about anything. They even had an open air meat market, but we didn't visit it. The people were very friendly and generous. We were warned about picpockets and we had a guide with each group, but we never felt unsafe.

Traveling to and from our destinations is a different story. There are not many "road rules". I've seen a few traffic signs but once you get out of the city, there are almost none. One phenomena that we've learned about is "painted trees". We noticed that many of trees in the countryside that were close to the road had white paint on them. We learned that the paint is reflective paint so that cars can see where the trees were at night.

Another phenomena is cattle along the side of the roads and the medians. Farmers tie their cattle to posts or trees alongside the roads to graze. Since most of the countryside is mountains, there is not a lot of places for cattle to graze.

I wanted to catch you up on some of the cultural stuff in this post. I'll update you more on ministry in later posts. Thanks again for the prayers.

First Stop

Our mission team is on the way. We left Magna View this morning about 8 am and are currently in Atlanta awaiting our flight to Miami. From Miami we'll fly to Guatemala, and arrive there around 8:00 pm Guatemala time (10 pm our time).

Several members came out to see us off this morning. We greatly appreciate the prayers and encouragement. We've been praying for the opportunity to touch a lot of lives for Christ, and we anticipate it will be a life-changing event for all of us.

Thank you to everyone who has had a part in this trip. Many people donated supplies and money for our mission. Many more have been praying for our safety and success. Though we will be the "boots-on-the-ground" in Guatemala, all of you are on mission with us through your generosity and prayers. I pray God will bless you for all you have done for the work of His Kingdom.

Mission Trip 2010

Tomorrow begins a great adventure. Thirteen people from our church will be leaving for Guatemala. We'll be working with missionaries Mike and Carla Parker and Clubhouse Guatemala ministries (check them out at www.clubhouseguatemala.com). We'll be meeting up with a team from Mt. Pisgah BC in Niota, and a couple of guys from Union BC in Knoxville. We'll be leading VBS for kids, providing school supplies for teachers, working in a feeding center, building chicken coops for families, and most importantly sharing the Good News and loving others in Jesus name.

Our church has faithfully supported this trip with financial donations, supply donations, encouragement and prayer support. One of our team members, Tonya, also received support from the school where she works. Teachers and students donated school supplies, clothes, backpacks and money to go to the teachers and students in Guatemala. One student raised $600 by herself for this project. God has faithfully provided through his people, PTL!

I can't wait to get the trip started. I'm most excited for my youngest daughter Abigail. This is her first "out-of-the-country" mission trip. She has been asking for a couple of years about when she would be able to go on a mission trip. When the Lord began to stir our hearts about going, she was determined to be on the team. She saved her babysitting money and paid for her passport herself. A few weeks after we decided to go, she rededicated her life to Christ. I can't wait to see what the Lord does through this little girl!

As much as possible I'll be blogging about the trip. It will depend mostly on computer and internet access, but I'll do the best I can.