Well, I finally made it to my last country, GUATEMALA!
This place is so much different than the other places I’ve been in the past six months. In Guatemala there are a lot of the familiarities of home; coffee shops, restaurants, shell gas stations, fast food, warm showers and lots of gringos (aka white people). In the past six months I haven’t seen a lot of these things, so in some ways this is a great place to spend my last three months.
In Guatemala, I am living at the Adventures in Missions base located near Parramos. Each team gets their own room. Each room has four sets of bunk beds with sheets, it’s own bathroom with hot showers and shelves to put all of our items. Because my team only has four people, we each get our own bunk bed and lots of space. Praise the good Lord. The base has a large common room that’s connected to a huge kitchen that we get to use on the weekend!
Monday through Friday, two Guatemalan woman cook us breakfast and dinner and for lunch we all make our own packed lunches for ministry. They feed us lots of fruit in the morning and lots of veggies and fresh salad night. There is hope to get “hot in guat’ ”. On the weekends everyone gets a budget of 60Q to buy there own meals. My team throws all of our money in a pot and we make meals together. So far we have made nachos, avocado toast and salad.
Ministry here new and different. In September a different gap year squad came to Guatemala for their first three months and the AIM staff started a new ministry here. Each team got a village in the area and they were just told to go in and make their own ministry. So, they did. Now my squad gets to continue going into these villages and building relationships. My team is working in a village called San Lucito and as we go we are kind of making up our own schedule. Here’s a rough draft of what we are doing. Our hosts here were able to build a relationship with a pastor couple here in San Lucito so we get to work a lot with them. Once a week they hold a Bible study for all the girls in their village, so we will get to be apart of that as well as teach all of those girls english once a week. All these girls meet in the pastors house which barely fits them, so the AIM staff made a connection with a woman in the village who owns a hostel. The pastors have the girls, but not the space and the woman with the hostel has the space, but no girls. Two days a week we get to work in a Christian Spanish school and teach english. All the other time will be house visits and ATL (ask the Lord) and just see where He takes us. **NOTE: A lot of this will be done without a translator, my Spanish is really growing here**
Guatemala is full of joy. I am loving life here, the connections I am making, the language I am learning and the sights I am seeing.
See you all in two months!
-Jo
