What does Guatemala look like?
Pretty similar to El Salvador. The air is always tinged with the smoke of cook fires. The majority of the women walk around in traditional handwoven skirts and blouses. Seems like all the women and girls are toting kids along with them. The houses are made of cinderblocks roofed with sheets of metal.
Here in Xenacoj we’ve mostly been spending our time with kids and widows. We split the squad between two schools here, and every morning we bring food to feed kids that otherwise might not get to eat much, either at school or at home. Some days we get to stay for a few hours to play with the kids and teach them English. Amanda, Kathryn, Katrina, and I have been in the 3rd grade classroom and we’ve been playing/doing an activity to teach them a few words (colors, body, fruit, etc.), and then try to end with a bible story from Amanda’s super awesome Spanish/English children’s storybook Bible. We also went our first week here up the mountain to visit some schools in some villages, hopefully we get to go back before we leave.
David and German have a huge heart for making sure the widows here are taken care of, since it’s so easy here for them to go ignored and forgotten. We’ve been going around to visit them and bring them food and to talk and hear about their families and how they’re doing and to pray for them, and to just let them know we care. It’s pretty fun, I like talking to older people; they’ve usually got lots of good stories. On a slighty different tangent, a few days after we arrived we attended a funeral for one of the widows, who also was a relation of Germans. It was really great that they let us come, and we got to sing and pray for her kids that she left behind. On a happier note today we drove to Santa Maria to put on a little morning service for widows who wanted to come to gather together and sing and talk and pray and eat, they really enjoyed that.
There’s some more randomness dispersed here and there but that’s a nice little peek of what we’ve been doing so far here in Guatemala.
