Here is what a normal day in Guatemala on the race looks like for me !
Monday –
Loving Arms & List/Shopping
• Loving Arms is a school that is just walking distance from our village that some of the kiddos go to. Some of them get sponsored and they get a wonderful education there. We get to come along side of the teachers and be there coping and laminating machines most days. We’ve prepared grocery bags for the kids to take home once and I’ve even gotten to run around and bring kids to the dentist (talk about being the barren of bad news).
• Getting the list and grocery shopping is what we do after Loving Arms. We get the opportunity to go cooking classes with women in our village and thanks to some of you guys, we have the funds to pay for these family’s grocery’s. We run into the home that we are going to on Tuesday and get a grocery list for them and then get to go to the “Walmart” here and pick up everything here. There’s even a sweet lady who works there that I see every week and she just takes the list from me and shops around. Sweetest thing ever.
Tuesday –
Teaching in Our Village & Cooking Classes
• All five of us get to teach english in one of two classrooms with the kids in our village. Colleen, Julie and Lily are in one class with the younger kiddos and Madeline and I are in the older room. I hear a lot of songs (head, shoulders, knees and toes) from the younger kids room but Madeline and I are on a different track. We get to teach them new vocab words, prepositions, long and short vowels and hopefully verbs. We’re hoping that they will be able to read and pronounce english better and hopefully wrote a full sentence by the time we leave.
• Now, the cooking classes we do are probably one of my favorite ministry days by far. One of our biggest prayers for our village is that there would be unity between the women there. The village has a lot of disunity and gossip throughout the town. Since there are only fifty families and you can walk the entire village in about three minutes, everyone knows everyone’s business. However, the cooking classes provide an opportunity for us to unite family’s and friends to cook a meal and then sit around a table together. The Lord is so faithful and keeps showing us that this is the right way to go about it. When we got to our “grandparents” house they just told us that they felt the urge to kill a chicken and eat a meal with us. WHAT ?!
Wednesday –
Loving Arms & TBD
• Read above for loving arms (:
• Our Wednesday afternoons don’t really have much, we usually do lesson planning and figure out what we’re going to do for teaching or go visit a few homes in our village. However, this past week and this upcoming week we have more cooking with women. They felt the urge to have us over and cook for us so we could all sit around a table together. The Lord knows exactly what that town needs and He is doing it despite what our schedule may say.
Thursday –
Activation & Beauty for Ashes
• Activation day is when we all stay back and worship together (my favorite, I cant wait to show everyone that when I get home), are taught by someone on AIM staff here, have personal time with the Lord and then take what we’re taught and bring it to our village. It’s the most common day (for us) that we get to witness the Lord do healings and work in crazy cool ways.
• Beauty for Ashes is a women’s retreat that we got the pleasure of doing the first two weeks we were here (and with our moms when they came for PVT). A Bible study, lead by our beautiful friend Roke (Rock-a), happens every thursday now between the women in another village. It is a safe time for healing, to talk about what can’t be talked about at home and most importantly, to laugh with one another and have a good community.
Friday –
Teaching in Our Village & Fun Day
• read above for teaching in our village (:
• Another thing that we like to do is have a fun day on friday afternoons. At first it started more so as a VBS for the kiddos but we soon realized that even getting all different kinds of members of the community together in one place to play soccer, paint little girls nails and make friendship bracelets, was a glimpse of heaven for us. So we are moving forward with crafts and games to play and showing what unity can look like.
Saturday –
FREE !
• Saturday’s are mainly my adventure days where I get to do some pretty neat things (and no these things are not what your fundraising money went towards lol). This past weekend Colleen and I (along with many other people just not on my team) went to a water park/amusement park. We get to spend the day feeling normal and not like we were on the race, which is a wonderful feeling. We’ve gone to the beach, black sand beach if I may add and hung out there for a day. Many of our teams birthdays have been spent on Saturdays. One weekend me and three other members of my team got the opportunity to climb up a volcano and spend the night there across from an active one. It was an amazing experience of the Lord’s creation and team bonding eating hotdogs and s’mores over a fire.
Sunday –
FREE !
• After a full week like that I like to stay back at the base on Sundays and just spend time in the Word, reading books, listening to podcasts, watching movies and getting things done like laundry and cleaning my room. It’s a good time to recharge and rest for the next week.
here are a few of my fan favorites that I enjoy doing but that don’t always happen in a typical week but that I do often :
• ice cream in town after ministry/grocery shopping
• wifi at the pizza place and maybe a good slice of pizza
• MEGA PACA !!! a huge thrift store that is literally amazing and all my money goes there and I love it so much
