I love Central America. That might be somewhat of a blanket statement seeing as how I’ve currently only spent time in Mexico and Guatemala which is not even 30% of the countries in this subcontinent but I really like it here.
Guatemala has been an opposite world than Europe. The climate, culture, people and environment are so different. Our work and the way we minister here is certainly different. We are in Panajachel, Guatemala which is on Lake Atitlan. This month we have spent a lot of our time doing construction on an old run down “hospidaje” or hostel. The hostel belongs to Marvin and his wife Alijandra. They recently acquired ownership of the property from Marvin’s father and so we got to begin the renovation process which started with tearing the roof off and cleaning out the rooms and organizing what was salvageable and what was not. The hostel is not located on a road rather it is off of a back pedestrian alley that is sometimes used by motorcyclists and tuk-tuks (three wheeled motorcycle taxis). A lot of the houses here in Panajachel are off of small alleys like this but it poses a major obstacle when trying to do construction (or destruction). We’ve had to use wheelbarrows to cart load after load of trash out to the main street to be picked up by trucks after people have gone through and collected the small treasures they want from what we have discarded. One woman was so excited to find a piece of metal shaped like the end of a hoe to use in her garden from a wheelbarrow load that I took to the road. We also got to tear down one of the rooms that was really old and needed complete demolition. It was an interesting process to tear down a building made of mud bricks because with each swing of the sledgehammer came a huge plume of dust! We then had to cart all of the dirt out to the road in wheelbarrows. I am excited to be getting my “farm arms” and calluses back on my hands from all of this manual labor. Alijandra and Marvin have also been working along side of us and even though Alijandra does not speak much English and we don’t speak much Spanish we have been developing quite a friendship. We know how to make each other laugh and enjoy singing worship songs as we work. Another great blessing has been the children that congregate near our worksite. Jefferson, Augusto, and Alex are a few of the regulars that come peering in the windows and in the gate in the afternoon.
This week we had 800 cement cinderblocks delivered to our work site. We got to unload the truck and then bring the blocks to the work site by hand and by wheelbarrow. The next day we got 3 pick up truck loads of sand and 2 loads of rock dumped in the street that we then carted to our work site. An orange juice street vendor who goes to the church was kind enough to let us dump the rock and sand in his small wooden cover on the street so we didn’t block traffic for too long or upset the other vendors. Even little efforts like that are huge blessings to us.
