So I realized that I haven’t really explained what I’m doing here in Guatemala so I wanted to take a moment to share how it goes! Or, like the title, “A Day in the Life.”
Monday through Friday is ministry. However, it looks different for us all, because we don’t all do the same thing together everyday. There are 47 of my entire squad here in Guatemala, so we definitely can’t do ministry as a squad.
We are split up into teams of 5-8 people, each team having an alumni team leader(someone who has already gone on the race and came back to lead us), so each team has a different ministry than the others. We all go to different
locations of Guatemala. My team, team Esther, goes to this town called Bola de Oro. We do a variety of things there, we do house visits, teach English to kids, play games with kids, teach a Bible class to kids, and we do a women’s
conference for all the mom’s of the kids that we teach. Every day of the week looks different for us, but every week we do the same things. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we do house visits in the mornings, from 10am to 1:30pm. At 1:30pm
on Monday we teach the kids that show up English until 3pm. Tuesdays we have a planning period from 9am to 11am, where we stay on our base to plan for our classes for the next week, and then at 1:30 we go to a church that’s about half
way from our base and Bola de Oro in a town called Chimal. There we teach 2 English classes, one from 2-3 and another from 3-4. This week we had some adults show up to learn English, which is really cool! Wednesday after house visits is
when we do the women’s conference and at the same time we teach the kids. However, we can’t do 2 things at once, so we bring another team along with us to teach the kids for us while we do the women’s conference. Thursdays we have this
thing called activation, which is basically a church service for our entire squad on our base, but after activation we go out to Bola de Oro (each team goes to their town they do ministry in) and we do this thing called ATL. ATL stands
for ask the Lord, so we will take a second and ask the Lord to show us something to look for to lead us to someone to pray for or to lead to the Lord or whatever God has in store for us that day. It’s really cool actually! I’ve done it
before in school, youth group, and church and God really shows up and blows my mind every time! We all got something last week and they all ended up matching up, we went to one house and prayed for a family and all the colors and objects
we saw were there! It was amazing! On Fridays after house visits we play games with the kids, and they really love games! They can play the same one game for hours at a time!
Every week day, we end at 3pm (except for Tuesdays) and dinner is at 5:30 every week night so that’s basically our curfew. We don’t have to go straight to the base after ministry but we do that most of the time. We pass a lot of shops
while walking to bus stops and such so sometimes we’ll stop and get ice cream or go to the grocery store for a few things we need or want. When we just go straight back to the base we just kind of chill till dinner time.
Side note: Before leaving the states for the World Race I heard that Racers get a lot of free time. I was like oh cool! Didn’t really know what exactly that meant and man, I know what that means now! We really do have a LOT of free time!
I brought a lot of movies to watch because we were told to bring things to do your hobbies and my hobby is watching movies. I’ve watched maybe 10 movies since I’ve been here and it’s only been 2 and a half weeks!! Lots of free time!
Saturdays are our adventure days, so if we want to hike a volcano and tent camp on top of it for the night we can do that. (there are 3 volcanoes here that we can see and hike up) Or we can hike up one and roast marshmallows over the lava!
Super cool! So far I haven’t done anything super adventurous like that. I go to town to find a place with WiFi so I can contact my family and friends and update my blog for all you lovely people that Jesus loves so very much!
Sundays is our sabbath day. Have I actually used it for a sabbath?? Nope! Like Saturdays, I go to town to get WiFi to talk to my family more. I did however find a good church that does an English service (weird to say and think about I know
but no one speaks English here because it’s Guatemala!), and by ‘I found’ I totally mean my squad mates found it and I followed them there.
Here’s a basic rundown of my day during the week: I get up at 6:20 or 6:30am (which is 8:30 South Carolina time) and get ready for the day. Breakfast is at 7am everyday, and devotions are at 7:45 everyday. Sometimes devotions is personal
devotions and sometimes it’s what we call Deep Dive with our base host, Kevin. Devotions or Deep Dive ends at 8:30, if I don’t make and pack my lunch between breakfast and devotions I do it after devotions. My team leaves for ministry
at about 8:45, sometimes 9 and it takes about 45 minutes to an hour to get to Bola de Oro. When ministry ends we usually go straight back to the base and do what’s called team time. Team time is where we spend intentional time with our
team and it’s different everyday. One day it’s worship, another day it’s storytelling (which is time to work on blogs), another day it’s feedback for each other and or the whole team (basically constructive criticism but not as bad as
criticism), another day it’s this thing called The Bible Project (we read scripture together, answer some questions, watch a video, and then answer some more questions and talk about it as a team), and another day we answer some questions
that are to be turned in for our squad leaders to know how things are going and what they can pray for for us. We line up for dinner at 5:30, praying before we get our food of course. After dinner everyone disperses and does their own
thing, which looks like lots of different things. A lot of people hang out with each other in hammocks we have hanging on base, or the guys will play soccer and get as many people to join them as possible, or there are board games to play
so that’s what some do. People play card games, talk, watch movies together or alone. There are lots of things to do with or without people. We can all go to bed at whatever time we want but we have “quiet hours” at 10pm every night.
My weekends however change just about every week because it always depends what I do based on how I feel or how my team feels because we always do things together. We do always have to go places with a buddy though because that’s safe and
it’s the rule.
Feel free to ask questions, I know some people haven’t been able to comment because my blog is attached to Facebook but I think that’s fixed and it’s no longer attached to Facebook.
