Guatemala City [Day 3]

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VBS

Vacation Bible School continued on day 3 in Tita’s school. The kids were LOVING our team and our team was LOVING the kids. It was awesome to watch them play, teach, and love the kids. The previous day, the kids made a cross necklace out of beads. On this 2nd day of VBS, the students made the “salvation bracelet” with the 5 colors representing the different aspects of the Christian faith.

• Yellow/Gold: God in Heaven on streets of Gold. He is perfect pure and holy
• Black: We are sinful and separated from him.
• Red: Christ (God’s son) lived a sinless life & became our atoning sacrifice
• White: This cleans/purifies our heart and allows us to one day spend eternity with our Savior
• Green: Like a seed is planted in the ground, God’s love grows in our heart as we grow in faith until we are united with Him in heaven

Construction

We actually met with the president of the POA! Really. Some other residents did not approve of our construction methods because it was foreign to them. They wanted us to use sheet metal and rods to hold the soil back. We wanted to build a weeping retaining wall with water redirected away to decrease pressure on the wall. The whole grown was going to go. Sheet metal would not hold. We were very blessed to have a landscape architect and two other guys with incredible construction experience! We just continued to lay the foundation and build the wall.

Home Visits

During lunch, the VBS team got to do home visits on the “Other Side”. This was our first outreach to the other side and laid the foundation for the next two days!

They visited the home of two boys who have been living alone for over a month so far while their mom was at the hospital! They had no food and were living in and on their trash. The team brought them some food and visited with them, invited them to the “Other Side” VBS. Then they prayed for the boys and their mom.

They also met with a lady who make Tortillas and sells them to others in the area. They prayed for her as well.

More days coming soon! Thanks for reading!

Guatemala City [Days 1 and 2]

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Hey everyone! Thank you so much for your prayers and support for our Mission trip to La Limonada in Guatemala City! This was an incredible week! We had an awesome team and the unison in which everyone worked was truly supernatural!

Day 1: We spent the day in Antigua getting acquainted with each other and the language! The architecture here is amazing. Originally settled by Spain as a colonial city, it really has a look and feel totally different from the rest of Guatemala. The streets are cobblestone and the horizons are volcanoes! & Yes… a few are still considered active!

This was our first day to see La Limonada. As we rounded the corner and started down the hill, the van became completely quiet. Our hearts sank.

We came to a wider spot in the road where we parked the vans and unloaded the 750 lbs of supplies that were donated to restock the school. It was still quiet. No one knew what to say. We were shocked by the poverty we saw. Once we were at the school we started sorting the supplies and getting ready for our first VBS. The school was completely different from the rest of the community. It was beautiful, safe, filled with laughing and happy children. They were so content and yet they had so little!

VBS

Every day the students were broken up into 4 groups and after a morning meeting they would rotate into a new center where they would learn something about God, play some sports, make a craft relating to that days lesson or work on a memory verse. Here are a few pictures from the first day of VBS. Click to see the larger pictures.

Construction

We went there with the intent to fix the railing on the bridge. When we got there, we found a more pressing need. There is a family in the commuinty that has been through SO much and they recently had a “new” small home (4 walls of sheet metal and a roof) built for them. Now, their “yard” was eroding away into the valley and on top of another home below them. This is a HUGE problem in La Limonada given the amount of rain and the type of soil in the area.

Our “job” was nearly impossible. We had to build a retaining wall in potting soil and it had to hold while allowing water to drain safely away form their home and any neighbors homes. We wheeled the supplies in down the narrow streets of La Limonada (countless trips) and carried them up to the home. Here are a few pix from the first day of construction after working to level a 1 foot strip of dirt so we had “room to work”. The wall would extend nearly seven feet over the work step that used to be a hillside into another home!

Days 3 – 6 coming soon!