Guatemala Reports

I failed to do any further posting about out recent Guatemala trip while there, though I did manage to send a few brief email updates to the church during the course of the week.  I thought that I'd post those in the next couple of days to give some insight into some of the things we did.

Here's a report I sent on Monday the 14th:

We've had another good day with a few changes of plans. We were going to distribute bags of food in the area of the church this morning but did a quick change of plans when we learned that the school we were planning on visiting on Wednesday was going to have teacher training sessions that day rather than classes. We went and had a great time with about 400 kids (I think) in all. Afterwards, it was lunch time at church, followed by VBS, packing more bags of food for the families tomorrow, and then training tonight.

It turns out that we're delivering almost 200 bags of food at one time rather than individually tomorrow. I had been wondering how we were going to manage time-wise to deliver that many bags. It's a village in the mountains where we're going. Carol has warned us we'll probably have to hike the last part of the way up there. The other warning she gave us was that there are no bathroom facilities there and we're going to be there for a good part of the day. We'll be speaking in a smaller school there in the morning with about 250 kids, and then after a lunch of sandwiches that the church is preparing, we'll be sharing testimonies and a message with about 200 Mayan families who live there. Then we'll deliver the food. Because there are so many families, the food (beans and rice at least) were purchased in bulk (100 lb. bags), so we've spent a good deal of time with the help of church members weighing and packaging the food for delivery.

Also got to see Pastor Santiago from San Marcos today. He's the fellow who has taken in so many homeless kids and is teaching them carpentry skills and helping them with an education. He has a new young man with him named Sergio who's 18 whose parents were killed. He has never attended school in his life until now.

Had a good visit this morning with the leaders of the local pastors' association to assure them that Carol's departure from the convention and Roger's return to Nicaragua wouldn't curtail the BGCM's partnership with this area but that we would be working directly with the association rather than the convention.