I left the continent of South America in exchange for Guatemalan living. I am safely in my new home and loving it, from the cold weather to the volcano in the distance. My team is settling in after a much longer travel experience than expected. Through human error and a stressful situation, Jesus showed up. And he left us all in amazement at his goodness and grace throughout the whole experience.
It started with a uneventful flight from Lima, Peru to Bogota, Colombia. We got off that flight at 4am and slept in the airport till around 9am. At this point all 30 of us headed to our gate and hunkered down. To make a long story short, all 30 of us missed out flight. We were in a not great situation being in a connecting city with 30 people who would all need flights. My squad leader, Aly, and our logistics leader, Kori, worked tirelessly trying to book tickets and find us flights. While we sat in the airport, we received news that it would be $16,000 to rebook us all flights. That was $16,000 we didn’t have. At all. Our food budget in Ecuador is $4 a day to give you perspective of how tight our budget is (don’t worry we are fed well :). We were told to stop everything and pray in that moment that God would intervene. And we did. And guys guess what! Aly was told to call a certain number. She talked to an Avianca attendant who somehow began booking us all flights for free. $16,000 of last minute flights completely and totally free! The next problem was where 30 people would stay since our flights were stretched out over the next two days. One of my teammate’s family friend offered to take us all in (they had tons of snacks and soda for us when we got there! Most generous people). So now we had flights and beds. God’s goodness to us in the midst of this all was so evident. Even without all the blessings of tickets and a house, we could feel him in the peace he was granting everyone in the middle of such chaos. The Lord is good guys! He loves to remind his children of that and bless them just a little extra 🙂
I am living 20 minutes outside of Antigua! I have not yet been told my new ministry since we have been training up new team leaders from among ourselves. Our previous team leaders stayed with us for the first 3 months to teach us how to live on the field. They will be very dearly missed! In the meantime, I have been decorating our room for christmas and buying some sweaters since my clothes are for the jungle heat, not Guatemala winter 🙂 We went over the cultural history of the Mayan people that we will be working with. We learned about the beauty of their culture and the hard facts of extreme poverty and high illiteracy rates among them. I am so excited to get to work in their villages and get to love on and get to know these amazing people for the next 3 months. If you have any suggestions of places to see on my Saturdays off please tell me!
