On Wednesday, August 1st, we left from Tegucigalpa, Honduras on a big bus for Guatemala at 6 in the morning. We passed through El Salvador for a border crossing and then we had one more border crossing, which was when we had made it to Guatemala! Our 14-hour bus ride had come to an end. We stayed at a hostel in Antigua for the night and my team explored the city the next day before our contact picked us up at 4pm at said hostel to head to Parramos.
The Lord has already blessed us immensely in this ministry.
Here we are expecting to stay on the property (which has no room for all of our tents, by the way). We were supposed to live on the property, which has no electricity, no regular toileting situation other than an organic one, and water only ran from 7am-11am. Not to mention we are in rainy season right now in Guatemala, so our tents would have been covered in mud and we would have been forced to be in our tent from dark until dawn, due to no tables for us to sit at.
And the Lord straight up hooks us up (pictures later, internet is a bit hard to deal with here) with a house to stay in when our contact offers the guesthouse to us after us needing to stay there the first night that we got there due to torrential downpours of rain and not being able to set up our tents in it. We now have a kitchen, a back porch, a common room, some of us have bedrooms, and we get to all be together more. I think it was definitely on purpose for us to stay here in this guesthouse. We have already come up with a different activity for us to do each night as a team, since it's only us this month.
The guesthouse is a bit away from the property so the plan is to walk to the property in the mornings and the afternoons and the guesthouse is near the center of Parramos where all the little shops are.
As far as ministry goes, so far in the past 2 days, I have already worked as a gardener and as a manual laborer shoveling land to level it out for the future clinic that they are working on building here at Loving Arms! I can say that I absolutely love gardening. Friday, the first part of the day, three of us put corn cobs in big bags filled with mushroom seeds to put in a dark house to cultivate mushrooms. Afterwards, we planted seeds in tomato plants and weeded out other tomato plants that had already been fertilized while the other four put up some fencing. We also set up lining on chili plants so that they would grow correctly and I found myself loving using my hands to work on grounds. Shoveling yesterday, not so much, but I still enjoyed being outside and seeing the fruits of my labor. Ministry this month seems to be headed towards alot of manual labor and also we will be working with surrounding villages doing food distribution, so alot of walking. But I am already enjoying this ministry and am once again pumped for another month of ministry.
If there was one thing that the Lord keeps reminding me of for this particular mission, it would be to drop any and all expectations. If I've got high expectations, I need to drop them. Low expectations, I need to drop them too, because I will never know when the Lord might want to do something different. The only expectation I need for my race is for the Lord to do a work in me, and that's it.
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Financial update: I still need $1400 to stay on the race for the full 11 months! Click "support me" on the left hand side to get me fully funded!
