We had an amazing week in Antigua resting, climbing volcanoes, team bonding, and gearing up for our next month of ministry. Our Guatemalan contacts, Gary and Nancy Lengkeek, met us in Antigua and gave us a brief overview of all our options for locations and ministry here in Guatemala. After a lot of prayer, our team decided to move to Panajachel. It is along Lake Atitlan, and is absolutely beautiful! It´s a very touristy place because it´s kind of the ¨gateway¨ to the other 11 cities around the lake. We prayed alot about it and really felt God leading us here. Our ministry options here are pretty wide open, but we will most likely focus on building relationships with the people here. I don´t forsee us doing as many programs/services like we did in Mexico, but rather just getting to know the people here, learn from them, jump in an live their lives with them, and just love them. We´ve been here one day and have already begun to form relationships with hotel owners, shopkeepers, some tourists that we´ve met, and ladies from the church. It´s exciting to see how God just brings people across our paths and we get the opportunity to love on them, bless them, and pray for them.
We attended a youth service last night at the Baptist church we will be working with here, and were able to meet about 12 of the young people (15 – 20 yr. olds.) After spending just a couple hours with them, we could really sense the life and passion that they have for God. There is an enthusiasm here that is exciting and contagious. We want to jump into what God is doing in this place. It´s so encouraging, and we´re looking forward to getting more involved and figuring out how God wants to use us here.
Our living situation has been a little more complicated. We arrived here yesterday morning around 10am with no idea of where we were going to be living. Our first order of business was to take Team 61 across the lake to San Juan. Gary and Nancy needed to get them settled into their city as soon as possible because the lake gets really rough in the afternoon and travel becomes much more difficult. It was about a 30 min boat ride across the lake, and it was just amazing to see all the little towns scattered around the coast. I had forgotten how much I missed working with boats out on the water, but it was so much fun!
We dropped off the other team and made it back to Panajachel around 2:30 pm. We spent the next 3 hrs walking around the city looking for a hotel, hostel, or apartment that was within our budget and could accommodate the 6 of us for 25 nights. Our main desire was to have a kitchen available so that we can cook all our own meals instead of eating out all month. (This is critical when you´re living on $2.75/day for food!) We didn´t find anything, so after church we just crashed at a cheap hotel for the night and decided to resume our search this morning.
At 8am we split up to cover more ground and see what other places we could find. Ginger and I stopped at a Travel Agency and asked if they knew of any places that could provide what we were looking for. The tour guide (Roger) was very willing to help us and ended up walking us all around town, calling his contacts to find a place for us. We ended up finding a nice place that has exactly what we need (2 bedrooms, a kitchen, bathrooms, sinks for laundry, and decently close to the church). It also has a nice patio area that we can use if we want to invite people over for dinner, Bible studies, etc. The owner actually dropped the price to less than half of the original rate for us since we´ll be staying there for such a long time. What a blessing! We hauled all our bags across town and have finally settled into our new home for the next month.
Please pray for our team as we begin to learn the area and discover how God wants to use us here. It´s exciting to be somewhere new, but it´s also a challenge to be starting over once again.
We should have pretty good access to internet and other communication this month, and I´ll try my best to stay as up to date as possible with my blogs.
Much love!
