This past week has been a blur. It's hard to believe a week ago I was still in Atlanta, Georgia…roaming the streets and praying for strangers with my team. (Kinda cool, huh?)
We are currently trapped in Quiche, Guatemala. Literally. It's monsoon season here and the main road has flooded and been shut down by the government. However, this hasn't seemed to bother any of us as we have yet to fully dive into our ministry here for the month.
The next few weeks we will be living at a compound at the national hospital in Quiche with missionaries that have been here for four years. We are literally right across the street from the hospital, where some of us will be working for the month. The tiny hospital of just 120 beds (Quiche has a population of about 1 million) is always full, and there are always families waiting outside and around the compound for a chance to get in or even get one opportunity to visit a loved one being treated.
One afternoon we got the opportunity to play with the sweet abandoned children and talk with a couple of the moms in the "NICU" with premature babies. It was difficult to see the pain and sickness they were experiencing shadowed with a big cloud of hopelessness. It breaks my heart to know that most of these babies won't survive, and that most of the abandoned children will spend the rest of their lives in a foster home. I am anxious to go back and spend some more time with these beautiful people. (The NICU is a small room with about 5-6 beds where the babies lay with their moms and receive little to no care. One mother in the NICU is currently sick herself but can't receive attention, so she lays motionless with her tiny, tiny child…with only a surgical mask that doctors wear preventing her from spreading her illness to her child.)
Today is the national holiday in Quiche and we just finished watching the parade through the town square. Tonight we will attend a church service with the locals. This will be the third service I've attended in Guatemala…this is only our fifth day here. It seems they have church or some sort of worship service almost every day and it has been such a blessing and joy to be able to worship with our 'hermanos and hermanas' despite our language barriers. Thankfully my 7 years of hardly paying attention in Spanish is actually proving very useful as it slowly returns to memory.
Please pray for my team and I as we dive into our first week of ministry tomorrow. We are excited and ready to see what the next couple weeks hold!
**Side note: I can't figure out how to upload my photos onto my blog as it seems to not be working well today. Please check out my photos on Facebook to get a little taste of the culture here in Quiche, Guatemala!!
