When I got to Guatemala I was expecting I would be overwhelmed living with 7 other girls and I definitely was not expecting to be living with a guy! Strangely, I was wrong! My group of girls (Gen 7) and DJ lived in a pretty nice house, we had our own kitchen, a living room, a sunroom and two bedrooms. Our house is cute and tiny so we called it the sunflower!!! We had many good times and learned many lessons about how to live in a community.
Someone once told me “living with other people grows into a family” I didn’t believe that until now! In my case we weren’t just living together we where doing ministry together, which means we’re with each other 24/7 all the time! We had to learn how to live together, how to share things and responsibilities especially when it came to house keeping! We didn’t just learn how to do the basics, we saw the good, bad and ugly, we were living life together! We started off as teammates and are ending as family.
There our many perks to living together, for instance cooking together! We put on our PJs, blasted the music and start cooking! Having to cook for 7 people everyday is never easy and having to shop for food in a different language is always a challenge, you really never know what you’re getting or cooking. Sometimes it’s great food and other times it is not but being with my girls made it all worth-while! On the other hand having to share a bathroom in the morning was a struggle. We had to brush teeth, shower, others had to Neddy, there was a great deal to be done and cramming everyone into the bathroom could be fun and other times it could be stressful. In the end it makes some pretty great memories!
Keeping the house clean was something I really struggled with and at times it was down right stressful. We had ants everywhere so we had to keep the house clean ALL THE TIME, if there were one crumb the ants would all find it! We didn’t have to just keep the kitchen clean but we also has to keep the whole house clean, our host was renting it and people were looking at it to rent out when we left! We always had to keep it clean.
We never knew when someone who just drop by to take a look! As a team we had to really work together to keep it clean, every morning before we left it had to be spotless and every night it had to be spotless! It took us a couple months to get used to our chores but we finally got it down this last month! We have “team time” and it is a time when we spend 30 minutes to an hours hanging out with each other! Sometimes it was playing games other times it bible study and sometimes it was just talking about our day! Doing this everyday we really got to know each other, we have had lots of laughs, lots of cries and had many desserts during our team time!
I love the quote I mentioned early “Living with people really do become your family” they see all of you and they take care of you! They love you more than you deserve, they see the good in you when you don’t and they take care of you when you’re sick! A couple weeks ago a bug was going through our house and out of the 6 of us 4 become sick. It was truly amazing to see the remaining two take care of us. They went to the store more times than I can count! They made us soup and even stayed home from ministry to take care of us! Considering we only had a few weeks left to see our street boys, they still sacrificed there time with them to take care of us!
So what in the world did I get myself into living with seven girls, one boy, two bathrooms and one house. I made some pretty great memories, some stories I will hold near and dear to my heart and friends that will last a lifetime!!
