Hey Family and Friends,
Sorry it’s taken me so long to post a blog. My team is spending this month in a town called Xenacoj and I am loving every minute of it. We don’t have WiFi, so we have to go to the Internet café and wait to see if there are any available computers. There is running water every other day until about noon, so we have to fill up a large plastic drum to hold us over till the next time we have water. We live in a little house that has 3 small rooms, but is really one big room because the walls don’t go all the way to the ceiling and when one person talks we can all hear. So who’s ready to join us out here? We all could not have asked for a better first month, truly learning what it means to live in close quarters and being respectful of 7 different ways of living.
While we’ve been here we have been visiting widows and going to schools in the morning and serving breakfast. There are about 200 widows in the town and they light up when we come to visit them. We love getting the chance to talk with them and learning about their lives, their pains, and their joys. Most of the people here in Xenacoj live very humbly. Go! Ministries, the organization we are working with this month, helps kids get a meal at school. It’s not uncommon when the kids come to school that that might be their only real meal of the day. One of the hardest things for me is leaving the schools and still realizing how many kids aren’t in school, and how many children aren’t being fought for.
Last Tuesday we went to help a mother and her 5 children move into a new home. All of their belongings easily fit into a simple white van. Amazing! The mother’s name is Linda, 31, her oldest is Aura, 14, and then there is Carlos, 13, Alex, 9, Aldolfo, 7, and Juanito, 4. After we helped them get settled into their new home we sat there with them talking and getting to know them. Aura told us how much she enjoyed studying, Alex told us his favorite animal was a rabbit and Aldolfo’s favorite color is black. I had such a great time getting to know them a little bit.
The next day was the first day of school, which mostly meant that was when kids got enrolled in class. We spent most of the day visiting widows in Linda’s new neighborhood and ended up passing her house. We popped in to say hello and it was then that my heart first broke here. German (our host) asked if she had gotten the kids enrolled in school. For a while she tried to dance around the subject, but at the end she confessed that she just hadn’t done it. My heart broke, Linda was so young when she became a mother that she doesn’t really know how to be a mother. She doesn’t understand what it means to fight for her children. And it’s not just her, but everywhere I turn people aren’t being fought for.
But God’s showing me that even when I think parents aren’t fighting for their kids or children aren’t fighting for their widowed mothers, God is fighting for all of them. No matter what he will always be there, standing beside us, fighting for US.
