This month, my team is living at a girl’s home in Mazatenango, Guatemala. There are 27 girls in the home between ages 3-18 who have been removed from their families due to abuse and neglect. The girls have been extraordinarily sweet, kind, and welcoming to us. Communicating in Spanish has been much easier than I anticipated (Kathy, you would be so proud!) This is what a day here looks like.
May 3, 2016 – Tuesday
5:45am Wake up to my watch alarm. I can already hear girls outside doing chores. I get dressed, go to the bathroom, and wait for the breakfast call (a spoon hitting a metal pole).
6:00am Eat breakfast with the girls, our host Lauren, and the team. Breakfast is black beans and an egg-veggie mixture.
6:30-7:00am Meet with Lauren and the team for prayer time. We pray over the home, the girls, and ourselves.
7:00-8:15am I learn how to use the washing machine from Seno Pati, one of the caregivers. It’s a typical machine, but you have to manually refill the washer using the hose three times during the cycle. Twelve-year-old Maria helps me, and we sing some songs while we work. She leaves for school with the rest of the girls around 8:00.
8:15 – 9:00am Personal devotions/hammock time with Jesus.
9:00 – 10:00am Team Time. Alex leads us in a Bible study of the first chapter of Titus.
10:00 – 11:00am Alexa, Kris, Shannon, and I continue working on our big project – sorting and organizing the many clothes and toys in the storage room. To whom it may concern: Please stop sending crap to foreign countries! I’ve thrown away so many stained, ripped, holey clothing, it’s not even funny. Rule of thumb: If you wouldn’t wear it in public or put it on your children, don’t send it to Africa. Or Guatemala. Thank you. 🙂
11:00 – 11:20am I take a break to eat some pretzels and put on some sunscreen.
11:20 – 12:30ish More sorting. At one point, a giant cockroach comes scuttling out from underneath a pile of clothes. I try to kill it with a flip flop from the piles, but I close my eyes at the last second and miss. Alexa tries next and only succeeds in pushing me at the cockroach. Kris finally takes a turn. Success! Dead cockroach.
12:30 – 1:00pm Back to the hammock! I read White, an amazing book that’s part of the Circle Series by Ted Dekker.
1:00pm The girls start getting home from school. We hang around, waiting for lunch.
1:30ish Lunch. It’s rice, black beans, and a mixture of cut hot dogs, pieces of ham, and vegetables.
2:00 – 5:15pm Spend time with the girls. I sit with the girls while they do their homework, which mostly consists of copying words and numbers in their notebooks. I do some informal English tutoring for the girls who ask. We also play a version of volleyball and Around the World (they have a basketball court here, complete with two hoops!) We also play clapping games – Mariposa, Chocolate, Kit Kat Bar. I help the cook, Levi, make tamales by folding the dough of ground corn into banana leaves. There’s a bit of drama when 13-year-old Ruth kicks her bare toe on the asphalt basketball court and ends up breaking the nail of her big toe. It’s a bloody mess. Fortunately, we have Shannon to deal with it.
5:15pm Movie time. We start “The Princess Diaries” (in Spanish). It’s interrupted about fifteen minutes later for snack, which is mangoes. We go back to the sala (main room) and watch the movie until dinner. One of the girls turns it all the way up so we can hear it over the sound of the rain hitting the roof.
7:00 – 7:15pm Dinner. It’s a soup of rice and vegetables.
7:15 – 7:30pm I chat for a bit with Lauren, Kris, and James.
7:30 – 8:00pm I decide to go up to the girls’ room when the littles and mediums sleep. Amarilis is awake, so we read some Bible stories from her bilingual children’s Bible.
8:00 – 8:30pm Return to the room I share with Shannon, Lauren, and Alexa. Shower and get ready for bed.
8:30 – 9:40pm Crawl into bed under my bug net. Journal and read.
Before 10:00pm hits, I am sound asleep.
It’s a beautiful month. Tiring, simple, and beautiful.
