Within my porcelain throne bore the testimony and witness of human progress.
Something has grown deep within me this last week.
Something inside me has changed.
Forgive me if there is confusion in the allegory, but I have intestinal parasites. Today is the eleventh day I have been on mission in Santa Cruz del Quiche, Guatemala, and I have been ill for the last seven. Not bed-ridden, mind you. Although I should say floor mat-ridden if we were to be given an honest testimony of the account. The first day in eight that I am without diarrhea. Not once before have I been so overwhelmed with relief to say that.
The first week here was not ideal for me.
My first two days of ministry I was moving boxes and heavy hospital equipment from one room within the hospital we volunteer at to another with one of my teammates, Nic. This task for me, to my own surprise, was a difficult one. The three local men, one of which married, we worked with took breaks often to cat-call the girls and drink pepsi cola. As I spoke in my confessional for the documentary, I became pretty frustrated with just tedious busy work. Retrospectively, I see that our ministry for that month was to pour into those three men and love them well. I was not up to the task in my own selfishness and as I became ill I began to lose my heart in the matter. The first few hours of the second day of ministry were filled with eager desires to abandon ship and return to America where I could do something tangible with my life.
I wanted to have comfort and security.
I wanted to be in an environment where I saw my friends and family, could dress to the nines and how I please, to eat what I wished. I was sick and tired from moving heavy equipment all day from one storage space to another, while parasites began to waste away my energy, life, and body.
The first weekend, this past weekend, I was spent sleeping or laying down trying to heal from the critters deep in my bowel while taking the first series of antibiotics. My team was in Antigua, a local city for backpackers and travelers, having the time of their life. This built on the anxiety I was feeling. Upon the return of all the squad mates the following Monday, I heard nothing but grand tales of adventure and times shared with joyful hearts while my weekend had been spent sleeping and broken apart.
As tears ran down my face, I expressed to squad mates how I felt Sunday night after dinner. The following day upon the return of my team, I expressed again what was going on. However this time was different. Sunday night I sent a few emails out to friends about what had transpired, and the next day I went to the local cafe and read the emails in response. Tough love and words of inspiration were received by close brothers and sisters on the situation. I received some really encouraging emails from people about how what I am apart of has inspired them to follow in my footsteps. It isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but it is what I have been called to do and the Lord has shown time and time again his provision and direct hand in this movement I am apart of.
Some really interesting things have happened here, and I am experiencing something that I would never have outside of the United States. A culture content with less, and people who are ecstatic to see gringos, white people. Everywhere we go people want to take pictures of us, which for me personally I am not a fan of but if my team mates are willing to, then so am I. I feel like when people take pictures of me when they see me walking down the street, or this used to happen at work, it is because of the way we dress, look, or are tattooed. It just didn’t sit well in my stomach. It is exactly the reverse of what I wrote about a few blogs ago considering cultural sensitivity to taking pictures of others.
The food here has been interesting! Their hamburgeusa y queso come with an actual slice of jamon on it. The fashion seems to be a mixture of aborigines and America. Extreme poverty living next to extreme wealth.
Here’s a fun fact, at the local hospital whenever they are finished with an autopsy, the blood and guts that come from within the people they have operated on, is dumped by the gallon down a sewer drain in the street. Open liquid flowing down into the sewer. True story.
My ministry has been moved to working on chairs, tables, and other various items in the hospital. Jason and I work outside with hand tools and power tools to take apart broken chairs, clean them, sandpaper the rust off of them, and then paint them good as new. I’ve worked two days in this ministry so far and it has had an incredible change in my experience here. During the day, Jason and I alone talk about life, politics, movies, love, religion, and everything else under the sun while working with our hands to fix things. Man stuff. We are working with a few local men who are pretty encouraging and fun.
In the second week, people around the hospital are remembering our names, and us theirs. It’s a good feeling. The gals on my team are serving by playing with orphans and the premature babies during the day. They are overwhelmed with happiness to play with the children and that same pleasure is reciprocated by them. Katie, Taylor, and Jessica from my team also get to share love, experiences, and the gospel with the mothers whose children are there in normal conversation without forced exertion.
The hospital is a pretty dark environment. Within the last six months things in Santa Cruz del Quiche have worsened. Human trafficking has ran wild here. We do not travel anywhere alone and the women in our squad travel in groups or with our men. Sexual oppression is crushing here. The local men cat call and treat the women here as meat, and it is hard to sit by and watch. The same is done in America honesty, but maybe I am just conditioned to it or do not see it as much in the South. Or rather I feel helpless to vocalize and defend the local girls from the local men here. Incest and rape are very common, which results in a lot of deformation and medical problems. The children here sleep in the same beds as the parents and are exposed to sexual intercourse at a very young age. Whenever the mother is out of town and the father wants to still experience sex, he will do so with the children.
That’s a hard pill to swallow.
Agape in Action, the mission we are working with, is dedicated to help treat the local women and men, and help them out with any maternal questions or challenges. Every tuesday there is a free class on how to take care of yourself during pregnancy and how to operate as a midwife.
Among the discouraging first week for me, there has been a lot of good that has happened. We as a squad have grown together and worked together through problems and challenges. Many of the other teams are painting hospital rooms, or volunteering with the local orphanage, some have manual labor in construction to build churches, some are helping folks at the local elderly home.
We have had an issue with the elderly home, however. The contact who runs the old folks home is in the process of running for mayor, so she contacted all the news stations and declared that she had brought these Americans in to help alone to get good coverage of herself. We had to pull out of that ministry for a few days and the documentary was almost entirely shut down in this country.
Overall it’s been hard. It’s been good. In the midst of a pity party I had entertained to myself, I attempted to justify my morose attitude with scripture. In 2 Corinthians chapter 1, we see Paul wrote to the church of Corinth about how he and his company experienced trouble in Asia.
“For we do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death.”
Yeah, Paul! I agree. This is how I am feeling on a much lesser scale. I am just in my emotions, I thought. However…
“But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.”
My broken spirit and body were not meant for me to rely on my own strength, but on God’s. We are weak. I am weak. He isn’t. The Lord humbled me by humiliation this weekend to realize that I absolutely cannot do this on my own accord. This isn’t about me. A loving father disciplines his children. The analogy in the ancient world is that of a shepherd, whenever a sheep would run away the shepherd would catch the lost sheep and break it’s ankle and carry it with him everywhere until the ankle was healed. Then the sheep would follow the shepherd closely henceforth. Maybe this was my broken ankle.
Thank you, my friends, for praying for me and being there in times of trial. I appreciate it more than you know.
With love and respect,
-J
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