Wednesday afternoon we finally
arrived at Las Ministerios de Casa Verde(Ministries of Green House) and met our
contact Paul who has been here in Guatemala as a missionary for 4 years. We have been blessed from the very first day
having this place as our first ministry sight such examples are: Paul is an
American and has worked with the World Race before and knows where we come from
and the expectations of the ministry, We pay a very low cost for room and board
which includes having a woman from the community come in just about every meal
and cook it for us, we have 2 houses that we live in as opposed to the 1 small
house that we thought we were going to be sharing for the 13 of us, the people
in the community love hanging out here (especially the kids, who we can expect
to see just about every afternoon wanting to play and its so hard to say no so
that we can continue with the appointed ministries of the day), we are walking
distance to the grocery store called Maxi Bodega which is similar to our
Wal-Marts but on a much lower scale, and between the 2 houses we share living
spaces with Paul and 4 other locals who work for Shofar Ministries which is one
of the ministries ran out of Casa Verde.
A
few interesting facts about the community we are living in is that it is a Port
city which means there are a lot of commercial businesses that come through
here and one in particular is Chiquita Bananas, did you know that all Chiquita
bananas that arrive in America first come through Puerto Barrios. With any other high traffic commercial trade
comes with it the dark side of it such as prostitution near the bars as men who
stay the night in the port enjoy a good time on land, drinking itself is a huge
problem and one of the most sad things is that the Church here in Puerto
Barrios is quite divided and still stuck in the law and doesn’t go to the areas
where Jesus words of repentance and love need to be spoken the most. People in the church are looked down on if
they are even seen in that area even if that means that they were there to
witness to those attending the affairs in that area. A quick side note to mention about the condition
of Guatemala is that with most third world countries there is corruption in the
government and the same goes here. The people
who have the power to make change, choose not to and that makes a drastic
change on the environment that we are ministering to.
