Celebrate!

We finished our time here with a celebration with Pastor Oscar, Judy, his wife and their 6 children. Pastor Oscar has been on several of the outreaches with us and has been a great blessing to Nancy and I. We decided to do something out of the ordinary for them so we bought Pizza Hut and brought a birthday cake. It was a real treat for them and so fun for us.

We sang Happy Birthday so many times that the candles melted into the cake. We danced and sang many songs together. In between the pizza and cake we installed a water filter in their home.

My time in the Peten has been a time to see old friends and meet new ones. Although it was not without challenges. The day to day things in itself are complicated and are a thousand stories in itself. The heat, the bugs, the water, the stomach flu and finding things; like the orthopedic surgeon after Nancy broke her foot. Asking directions, for those of you who do, is more complicated due to the language barrier. Even sometimes you just want a pretzel and they are no where to be found! Things we take for granted, normal every day things are not the same outside our borders.

Celebrate your life today! Thank God you have running water, bug spray, medicine to stop the stomach flu, a Doctor who speaks your language. Signs that point you in the right direction and people who you can understand and they understand you. It is even good to be thankful when you eat a pretzel!

Thanks for sending me to the Nations! Next stop Romania April 1.

More Photos

Overview

The sights the sounds the smells of Guatemala. So many things to share and so little space to write. In the last week I have made my last trip to Colorado, bringing 2 more water filters and saying goodbye to all my new friends. I have so many photos so many stories I don't know where to begin or end. Once again the turn out in the village was tremendous! The filters serve as a tool for better health and opens the door to the gospel.

While the team of interns installed the filters I hung out with all the kids when they got out of school. We colored pictures and gave rides on the dolly used to transport the filters. It is a great way to learn Spanish, hanging with kids. They are so patient and will repeat what they are trying to say 1000 times until I understand. They love for me to take their pictures and pull out all their tricks just for a photo. In the afternoon it rained off and on and the 3 hour drive on the dirt rocky road was a mess! 4 wheelin at it's best!

Saturday at the lake we washed the truck and enjoyed a beautiful day in the Peten. We met 2 guys from Canada who were staying in a Cooperative village. We decided we would pay the village a visit on Sunday after church.

On Sunday we went to Hands in Action for church, we sang songs together while Dennis the President preached. Afterwards we made our way to the Co-op village were we spent 3 hours learning all about the village from the leader who was a guerrilla in the Guatemala war and found ourselves in a very interesting position. Needless to say we will not be retuning but it was quite an experience.

Monday we took time out to meet with a very awesome family here in town. We had lunch with them and enjoyed our day together. Lorraine is a Social Worker. The family is very special and will help Nancy in the future make water filters and take them to the village.

Tuesday we went to Remar which is a wonderful organization, self sustained by the goods it sells. It houses orphans, un-wed mothers, abused woman and helps drug and alcohol addicted in a rehab program. It is a great place for Stepping Stone Missions to partner with in the future.

Oh and one day we delivered a coffin to My Sweet Refuge as one of the elderly has died and another was ill and in the Hospital. We also found out My Sweet Refuge has lost all it's government funding and will be going to the Capital Sunday to protest on the steps of Parliament and try and get their funding back. They will go with a bus load of workers and elderly and Stepping Stone Missions contributed food and funds for their trip. Please pray for My Sweet Refuge as they have a responsibility to feed 65 elderly everyday and no funding. God is a big God and will provide!

Today was a great day and I will share more on that later. We are changing lives here in Guatemala! Thanks for sending me to the Nations......

Hands in Action

During my time here we have been spending alot of time at a woman's shelter that just opened up January. It was the heart of one of the Nationals here. There have been 3 families in the short time I have been here. One young woman with 5 children, another with one small baby, who recently left and one that we picked up from another shelter last week.

We went by the shelter on our way from visiting My Sweet Refuge and there was a Mayan lady with her 4 children waiting for someone to come and get them. She said she had rented a room in another persons house but she did not have transportation. The shelter she was staying in ran out of funding and was closing. We called the Maria who is in charge of the Hands in Action shelter, near our home and she came.

It is like every country in the world...The same problems, just different culture and language. Here we have a woman with 2 girls, ages 7 and 5, a boy 3 and one in the house maybe 2 years old and a baby on the way. No job, no house, no food. My heart breaks for the lack of direction for her. We asked if she wanted to come to the other shelter or take her to the house where she rented a room. She had no answer. She does not know what she wants or how to get there.

My heart broke for this family. I asked the oldest girl about school and she said that she does not go to school because her mom did not tell her to go. Where would they go? What would the mother decide to do with her family? After some time, she decided to go to the shelter, Hands and Action. We loaded the small pick up with everything this family had and moved her to the shelter. One full bed, 5 napsacks of clothes, one potato sack of toys, some plastic dishes and an ax. There was a few other things but not much.

It was a ride I will never forget looking in my rear view mirror and the faces of this family in transition. We stopped and got some sweet bread and unpacked their things in the new room that they would be staying in. The total time to move her was less than 45 minutes from start to finish.

I pray that this family will get the counsel and care they need at Hands and Action. The vision is to teach the woman skills so they can get jobs and the first business is to open a day care at the shelter. In the meantime, they have been a huge blessing to us by helping us with the water filters and going with us to the villages. The children were on summer break but are now back in school.

I pray on what God will have me to do before I leave for these families. Anything and everything is needed but I pray...God what do you want? Please stand in prayer.

Stoves, Stoves and more Stoves...

It seems this time I have been invited into many homes for a bite to eat. I have seen many ways in which the food has been cooked and found it very intriguing. It is amazing how many types of stoves there are to cook beans and tortilla's. Even though the food taste the same it is where it is cooked that is interesting.

My Sweet Refuge

Yesterday we delivered the truck load of medical supplies we brought from Guatemala City to the Peten. My Sweet Refuge is the first and only Nursing Home in the Peten or Guatemala for that matter. Sonia and Roberto Rivera started the project 4 years ago in there home and had to move to a bigger place when they had over 30 homeless men living in a 2 bedroom home. No man was turned away and every man died receiving Christ. Sonia and her husband gave each person who passed a respectful funeral with a box instead of a plastic bag.

Now it has grown to over 60 people and she has a full time staff and a new building. God has done so much from 2 years ago when I sat in the kitchen of her house talking about the vision God gave her and not having enough money to feed the guys, as a rat crawled across the electric cord in the rafters. The Guatemalan government has notice the success and gave a grant to build 13 more homes all over Guatemala by 2010 using My Sweet Refuge as a model.

After we delivered all our medical supplies I heard two of the residents here playing the guitar and worshiping God. I grabbed my camera and asked them to start again and they graciously started from the beginning. (I will download soon) The old guitar had a old rusty nail tied with a rope for a capo and they sang their hearts out as another old man sat on the bed and wept, while then other guy shaved his face, without looking I may add, and shouted Hallelujah.

My Sweet Refuge is a modest place and makes our worst Nursing homes in the states look like a five star Hotel. Just the laundry washed and hung on the lines is a huge day to day task. But even though it is modest it is full of love and grace and it really is their Sweet Refuge.

Before and After

Victor Luis

Now that I caught you up with a recent story, I will go back to the times I missed. I think last Sunday we went with the Calvary team and had church out in the village of Neuvo Se Satul. This is a village that Calvary has been working with for 5 years. They have done many projects there, water catchment systems, latrine projects and stove projects. It is a very special village to me as when I was here in 2006 for 3 months we worked in this village once a week and got to know the kids and families very well. Since that time I have been back on several visits.

The young boy in the picture above was born 10 days prior to my first visit in the village, he was very sick as well as his mother. We prayed for them and here he is today almost 3 years old in August. His name is Victor Luis. Last year he was not to fond of Gringo's and this year his mom asked him to say Cindy and he did! It has been a blessing to watch him and the other children grow over the past 2 and a half years.

It took a few minutes for the word to get out that I was there and plus they did not recognize me with short brown hair, but as soon as they did they were very warm and happy to see that I had returned. Which in itself makes me happy!

I have to admit that sometimes being out here is just plain ol' discouraging. You prepare and pray and believe something spectacular is going to happen...I don't know like blind people seeing and deaf ears opening, arms and legs growing back. Thousands of people falling to their knees asking Jesus to help them. I don't know, you know something big! Like you see on TV or your see on the movies. What you read about in the Bible. Stuff Jesus did! It says we can and I still believe we can and it will happen but when?

I can drive myself crazy thinking about that and really get discouraged but now as I write I think of Victor Luis, now that is a huge miracle! A boy born in a village 2 hours from the nearest hospital, mom loosing so much blood she may not survive and a boy who can't survive without his mother. A boy who did not receive a name until he was 3 months old for fear he might not survive. And then...A team of missionaries and people from the local church show up, lay hands and pray for them and 2 and a half years later that same boy is sitting in a church service on his mom's lap being encouraged to say an American girls name. Now that is the stuff missions is made of!

Why can't I get past sitting here and just saying that? Why do I feel I have to say something spectacular when it is all spectacular? Sometimes it is just the same ol' hum drum stuff in a day, making concrete filters that crack before you get them out of the mold. Taking your vehicle to get a quick oil change that takes 3 hours and you get a car wash you did not ask for. Going to 3 stores to get all the items you need to cook for a week. The everyday mundane things you do to get to the spectacular things. Really the accomplishment of the mundane things are just as spectacular out of the country as Victor Luis.

Here's the cows!

Anything can Happen in Guatemala!

We loaded the our little Toyota truck with the teaching about clean water and two buckets of clean sand to teach and fix the filter that was not filtering very well. We stopped and picked up Pastor Oscar and off we went on the rocky dirt road to Colorado. There was great anticipation for what would happen this day.

The ride was long and uneventful as we drove through village after village of tiny huts with wood walls and grass roofs. Children playing in the streets, chickens, dogs, pigs and horses grazing along the way. My mind drifts from the cramped cab of the pick up as I stare out window amazed at the hard life the Guatemalans live. I have been here several times and still it perplexes me. Everything here is a challenge, it seems so primitive but simple. It works for them, but is it because they lack knowledge or because they like it, or don't know any different. I pray silently, "Lord, what is the way you want to reach them?" Knowing that our American ways are not always the best way. Is running water best? Is electricity best? Are those things the blessing? I ask again, "what do you want for them? I know it is not what I think they need but what you Lord want for them. Show me, teach me help me learn from them."

Along the way we stop and pick up a woman and her son, an older man with a cowboy hat, a young man with a market bag. They pile in the back of the truck and then knock on the roof when they want to get out and come to the driver asking, "how much for the ride?" We shake their hand and tell them God bless and they smile with gratitude and off we go to the next stop. It really is amazing.

When we arrive we are greeted with smiles and then find out the town was expecting us at 8 a.m. and it was already 11:30. The town had scattered for lunch. (We are lost in translation often.) We then make arrangements for the rest of the afternoon with the Mayor and are invited for lunch with the local Pastor. We ate beans, tortillas and coke.

We headed to the church to set up the movie on clean water and we handed out pictures for the kids to color. Good thing I brought a fat color book because they kept coming. I bet over 100 kids came and then the adults came, in 30 minutes there was over 250 people in a 20x40 church. It was amazing! I think they came from 2 other surrounding villages. People were standing in the doorways. Nancy showed the movie and then preached about the importance of clean water and good health, that Jesus wants us to have good health and wholeness. She did awesome and her Spanish was so good people shouted, "Amen and "Glory to God!" It was the first time she preached in Spanish, and that is saying something since she never preached in English. Pastor Oscar and Nancy felt it was not the right time for her to have a altar call as she is a woman and we are new to the village, and we honored and agreed.

We are scheduled to come back on the 13th for more teaching and 2 more water filters. It was an unbelievable day and the miracle is that 250 people came. Unbelievable! They are excited for us to come back and they will be followed up in March with a medical clinic and prayer team.

On the way back we found out there is a strong Islamic force in a village 2o minutes away. Then our car stopped because the cable that was shoved into the battery came out, we fixed it by shoving it back in. (Maybe that is why our headlights kept turning off and on.)

Finally, when we hit the paved road it was just past dusk and we saw a heard of shadows headed straight for us on a the highway. First motorcycles barely lit and then a huge heard of something...We stopped and began to back up quickly and then as the shadows got closer and we heard whistling and yelling through the quickly closed windows...What in the world? A riot?! Oh gosh, we were in big trouble...We just sat in the truck in shock and not knowing what to do as the shadows began to come closer...closer...closer...Your heart beating and (now you begin to really pray) then through squinted eyes trying to get just a little glimpse of what was coming straight for us in the pitch darkness....First a motorcycle then a horse, oh no, now the 100 or more shadows are getting closer...

Ahhh...a sigh of relief...Oh that is what it is...Just a heard of cattle coming down a main highway being herded by motorcycles and horses. After all this is Guatemala! (That photo tomorrow)