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!

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