It’s hard to believe that our month at Loving Arms is over. We had a wonderful month serving alongside this ministry, meeting the local ladies and children they serve, and building friendships with the staff. We miss our friends, the cozy compound, and the beauty of Guatemala.
This month we took two adventure days away from the compound. One day to Antigua to visit the rest of the squad and surprise Joy for her 30th birthday. We started our last week at Panajachel and Lake Atitlan. Beth has been to Guatemala before and had told us about this beautiful lake so we planned from the first to spend a day in Panajachel. Wow! Lake Atitlan and the volcanic mountains around the lake are stunning. We girls decided to go zip lining to get a more elevated, exhilarating view of the lake. Then we all spent the rest of the day like tourists lunching, shopping for souvenirs at the street market, and chatting in a coffee shop. It was a restful day off and got us energized for the busy week to come.
Each month of this Race has presented opportunities to challenge my assumptions of what missions and missionary life is like. This month our ideas of ministry were challenged. We have been on the Race for nine months now. We have prayed over people, learned to ask the Lord and then follow Him to divine appointments, preached and taught small groups and whole congregations. This month about 75% of our ministry was manual labor. Manual labor ministry provided opportunities to confront and defeat pride (more on this in my newsletter). It also showed us that sometimes what a ministry needs most is servants not preachers.
Maggie, Mercy, and Simeon were really the construction/manual labor crew of the team. They did the most outside physical labor including mowing part of a field with machetes and building an addition on a house. While I did get to paint and helped with some of the hoeing in the lawn the first day, most of my manual labor was inside: cleaning the kitchen, bathrooms, floors, windows (lots of windows and repeat, repeat, repeat), washing plastic tables and chairs, oiling the wood features, and organizing. We organized the craft and school supply room, the library, and all the jewelry, sewing, and knitting supplies.
The other part of our ministry was classes and helping children with their Christmas sponsor letters. Loving Arms runs a sponsorship program for children and abuelas in Parramos and local communities. Each year the sponsors receive an updated picture as well as a Christmas letter from their child or abuela. We help the children write their letters, and Simeon took their photos.
Additionally, Loving Arms provides supplies and a market for women to sell hand crafts and jewelry. They have jewelry, crafting, and knitting/crocheting coops and classes. Beth and Callie ran the jewelry and craft classes where they were able to put to use personal jewelry making hobbies and crafting skills they learned in South Africa with the Zimele ladies. The jewelry class learned how to make paper beads, using pretty scrapbook paper, which can be used to make bracelets and necklaces, and the made dozens of extra beads in many colors so that the ladies will be able to continue making jewelry for many weeks. Crafting class sewed four types of Christmas ornaments – trees, stars, angels, and ornament bulbs – that Beth and Callie designed with felt and traditional corte fabric. I was able join them one day to stitch a few myself. A grand total of 100 ornaments were completed to be sold in Canada. Finally in knitting and crocheting class I had the opportunity to teach four ladies how to knit. It was fun sharing this hobby that I have only recently learned myself. They continued to improve over the month and began experimenting with the stitches and yarn. They also brought their crochet needles and taught me how to crochet the last day, much to everyone’s amusement. Currently, one thing holding them back is that all of their knitting and crochet patterns are in English. However, they are excited to be practicing and picked up knitting very quickly.
Each afternoon most of us had the opportunity to teach English to an energetic fun group of kids. Until my knitting class took me away, I was one of the teachers for the older kids. They were so much fun and we all laughed through each class. In the later weeks Tori really stepped in as the head teacher and introduced Bible stories to English class along with some hilarious games to learn food words. The little ones love the stories and coloring to practice their color words.
Overall this has been a wonderful month with Loving Arms. We went from serving alongside but not really knowing the staff and interns to pizza lunch and a goodbye dessert. Laughs brought Loving Arms and Racers together as friends. We will miss them all and are so glad to call them brothers and sisters. Our last evening in the big blue house Alica gave us Hebrews 6:10 as a thank you for our work. She said that our work was very appreciated, and that every act was ministry. Thanks for the reminder!
