As promised (I definitely just spelled that wrong like three times), this is a Friday post about what is going in my life. A.K.A the things I am actually doing with my time. So here we go, yeah?
Ministry-wise, I wake up every morning at like 5:30 and lay in bed for a half hour until I will myself out of bed and to my team’s morning bible study. We’re going through the gospel of Matthew.
Then I eat breakfast (usually either cereal or whatever one of the guys on my team has prepared).
Then I leave for construction by 8:30. Andy, Bryan, Russell, Rae, and I walk down the road and down another road and down another road until we get to the bus stop, where we hop into a van that will take us up the mountain to the village of Santa Maria. The entire village of Santa Maria is uphill, in case you were wondering. It doesn’t even matter which direction you go, it’s all uphill.
Once in Santa Maria, we work with Hector, Miguel, and Victor on the house for Juanito and his family. The guys are so much fun to work with and are ridiculously generous to us. And Juanito has an 18 year old daughter named Philomena who is one of the most generally nice souls I’ve ever encountered. I mean, neither Philomena nor any of the guys speak English, but that’s not really important. We all communicate fairly well and have fun times while building stuff and moving dirt and earning callouses. This is an every day thing.
Then on Tuesdays and Thursdays Bryan, Rae, and I leave construction early to hop on a bus to Antigua, then from Antigua hop on a bus to San Lucas, where we teach English to this guy named Andre. Well, his name is actually Enrique, but he prefers Andre. Such is life. Andre is twenty years old and is studying natural medicine and theological studies. He also plays the piano and the guitar and likes to cook. He likes to cook pasta, but he doesn’t eat it because it has too may calories. I know all this because in English class pretty much all we do is conversational English, aka small talk. This class is from 3-4. It’s good times.
So that is my ministry. It’s super difficult (and by difficult I mean impossible) to upload pictures to my blog from my iPad, but you can find pics on Instagram.
Freetime-wise, I usually do things with my team and this Guatemalan guy name Melvin, who works for our host Luis. Bryan and Andy and Melvin have a beautiful friendship that includes sleepovers and clothes sharing. They cute. Anyways, sometimes we hop on the bus to Antigua and just roam around. Sometimes we hit up this super cute coffee shop. Last weekend we (Bryan, Melvin, Andy, Olivia, Jodi, Jess, and I) went to Magdelena. the town where Melvin lives, and hiked up this mountain, then went back to Melvin’s house and ate the Pepian that his sister Yuly (pronounced ‘Julie’) cooked for us. Pepian is a Guatemalan dish consisting of chicken, rice, and “salsa negra”. It’s actually pretty good. I made a video of our mountain adventure if anyone is interested.
Other times I spend my free time writing blog posts for you fine people, or sleeping, or eating dry cereal, or reading a book called “Traveling Light” by Max Lucado, or praying that I don’t contract the explosive diarrhea that is sweeping through our house.
And that about sums up life so far. In a nutshell. Stay tuned next week for more to come.
Also, if you’re interested, you can follow me on various forms of social media.
email: [email protected]
Twitter: samjlacey
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