Guatemala. I’ve only been here for 3 days and I already love this country. Physically, it is absolutely gorgeous, surrounded by mountains, volcanoes and trees everywhere you look. There are dogs roaming all of the streets and through the houses, and just looking down the street at all the little shops that are lining the road is so beautiful to look at.
On our first day we got picked up at the airport after our 3 and 1/2 hour flight, and we started our 45 minute van ride from Guatemala City to Santa Domingo Xenacoj, where we would be living and doing our main ministry. We are living in this house with 4 main rooms, all open doors and windows, with a brand new attached piece upstairs that German (our host) had built for us. We have a bathroom with a shower that is only sometimes cold. We all have beds to sleep in (NO TENTS!), and in our upstairs room we have two of the three teams staying, so 15 people. Considering the fantastic food we’ve been eating and our great living conditions we are so blessed to be living here.
I’m starting to really realize how different transportation is here compared to back home in Canada. Coming to our new home we fit about 10 people in the van. Then yesterday we had to take buses into Antigua for a couple of hours of touring around. Our first “bus” was a van that we fit about 15 people into, I was squished between 2 people with someone else sitting on my lap. Then we got into an actual bus (an old school bus that had been painted), and we realized that having only one person sitting on your lap in a van isn’t actually the craziest way of travelling. This bus was absolutely packed before we even got on. I’m talking about 3 people per seat and about 15 people standing up in the foot and a half wide aisle. Add our 15 people to that and you can just imagine how insanely squished we all were.
We rode 3 buses like this just to get to the city, got to tour around a bit and I got to see an amazing Guatemalan market. Just walking into the building actually made me speechless, there was so much colour and handmade things everywhere we looked. After a while it was time to head home, and our bus rides only got crazier than before. The first one back we had a driver who was going about 85 km/h around all the turns on an extremely twisty road for about 20 minutes. We then had to switch buses, but the bus we tried to get into was too full to even have us squish in the aisles. So we rode on top. Day #2 I rode on the top of a bus. No seats, nothing except foot high metal rails along the edges. We climbed up a metal ladder to get up, and then rode about 20 minutes going again about 80 km/h on the top. It was absolutely insane, and I never had imagined that I’d ever do anything like this.
Today we all crammed into vans after breakfast and drove about 20 minutes away to a school in a little mountainside village. We got to the school as the kids were having there feeding program, so we got to go into their classrooms and try to speak to them in our broken Spanish. Shortly after they ate it was recess time, and so we got to go outside and play with them all. Today I really put my soccer skills to the test, as for a while I was the only girl playing with some of the guys on my squad and about 35 little Guatemalan boys. And I was playing in a skirt and flip flops. That only made the boys laugh a little bit!
Just being around all these Guatemalan people is making me realize how fortunate I am, and how ungrateful I for one am for all of the blessings I’ve been given in my life. A lot of these people are extremely poor, with 66% of them living on just $2 (15Q) a day. Yet when I’m walking around and saying hello to the people on the street all that I see is joy. They are always smiling, though some are starving, some don’t have shoes, some kids have parents who are away working 15 hour days, I still see immense joy, and you can clearly tell that they are thankful for the few things that God has provided them with. As I’m writing this blog, one of German’s kids is running through the room with this little homemade toy, that is a chicken that claps as you push it along the ground. They’re laughing, smiling, and absolutely having a ball, and I want to have their same joy. I don’t want to be complaining for little things when I know that I am incredibly blessed, and that I have absolutely nothing to be complaining about.
Thank you again for all of your support and for taking the time to read through my blog!
Cassidy
