Star Wars Part 2 - Explore Archived World Race Alumni Blogs

The title is courtesy of Brittany. 🙂

This is it. Month 1 of our race. I am in Guatemala. And I haven’t freaked out.

I seriously love it here. There is so much culture and beauty all around you.

This month, we are staying with Agape in Action on the hospital grounds in Santa Cruz Del Quiche. They have running hot water, electricity, stoves, laundry facilities, dorms, western style toilets, etc. To say the least, we are so blessed to be staying here this month and huge shoutouts to the AIA people for being hospitable and allowing us to stay together as a squad. It isn’t that easy though: we are staying in our tents on the grounds and one of the washers just broke yesterday (just as it was my team’s turn to get laundry done!) But we are still so blessed and I’m finding that I am very appreciative of the quiet time in the tent alone. The weather here is great and no humidity!! It gets so cold during the night and the air here is pretty chilly (similar to VA this time), but the sunshine instantly warms you up.

Grounds of Agape in Action

The town of Quiche has a pretty big market and Chichicastenango has an even bigger one! The first day we were here, we got fried plantains YUM! Bananas will never taste the same to me now in America…they are just so good here. 🙂

Brittany and her fried plantain

My team: Aletheia, is working with team Sweet Aroma this month about an hour and a half away in the mountains outside Chichi with some missionaries named Sally, Irvin, and their daughter Sarah. It has been such a blessing to be working with them and serving them and their mission here in Guatemala. Sally is a midwife and runs a clinic near her home. We have cleaned out one of the rooms and painted it for them to be able to use it now. All the kids in the area know that “gringos” are here so they come to see us and we get to play with them whether its with balloons, duck duck goose, braiding hair, or drawing. Next week the two teams will be able to stay with Sally and Irv so we won’t have to spend half our day traveling so we can serve them longer. I think we will also get the opportunity to go to the school at the bottom of the mountain to help teach English to some of the students there. I am excited about where this month will lead us all.

looking up from the road

looking down from the clinic

Tomorrow is Guatemala’s independence day so there is a lot of commotion! Haha. People are everywhere and there have been fireworks going off in all directions each night. Because of the celebration in Chichi, we were not able to make it to Sally’s, but instead we stayed around Quiche and were blessed to take part in the prison ministry another team has been a part of this past week. We held worship and had a sermon and about 5 guys gave their lives over to Christ!! It was a beautiful moment of the Spirit moving in that place and so many of them are no longer bound by the chains of imprisonment, but are set free in Christ!

before the inmates came to worship

Please continue to keep Quiche and Chichi in your prayers. There is a lot of darkness here with the Mayan influences. There are churches in the middle of the towns, but at the bottom of the steps of the church in Chichi, there is a place where they sacrifice stuff to they mayan gods. Sally also showed us the mountaintop where they used to do human sacrifices (they no longer do human sacrifices, but still all kinds of livestock and stuff there). There is also a lot of poverty here as well. The streets and rivers and everywhere is littered with trash and dogs roam everywhere and people are sick and hurting and cannot afford healthcare. Its really sad to see and I think that’s where there are a lot of missionaries in this area because of the such great need.

Don’t forget: I still need about $3,100 to be fully funded for the year. If you want to help in other ways, talk to my mom and dad as they are helping take care of some things for me in the states. I love you all and thank you so much for helping me get to this point!!