Guatemala Mission Trip: Day Eight

Well today was our last day in Guatemala.  We’re leaving in the morning with full hearts, changed lives, and exhausted bodies.  It has been an amazing week and an emotional rollercoaster.  We’ve seen and experienced so much and have hardly scratched the surface of unpacking it all.

Today was an outing with the seventh grade class from Safe Passage.  Every class gets one outing to a water park outside of Guatemala City with a support team each year.  All week we’ve been riding around in vans.  Our drivers have been fantastic at getting us around and keeping us safe.  Today we had different transportation – a camioneta, or “chicken bus.”  Chicken busses (something only Westerners call them for an unknown reason) are all over Guatemala.  They are privately owned public transportation that travel on specific routes through the city.  Chicken busses are retired school busses from the United States that are, as kids say these days, “blinged out.”  They are painted in bright colors with all sorts of flashing lights and outrageous touches.  Owners of chicken busses take great pride in them.  It turns out one of our drivers for this week, Jorge, owns a chicken bus and we took it to the water park with the students from Safe Passage today.

Our transportation for the day.  We travel in style...

We got a great view of Pacaya, the volcano we hiked yesterday, on the drive to the water park

The water park was a lot of fun.  Our youth had a great time swimming and playing with students they had developed relationships with over the week.  We were all asking each other how to say things in the others’ language and there was a lot of laughing.

We ended our evening and time in Guatemala with a fabulous dinner to celebrate our time here.  Our team has become a family.  There has been so much love, care, compassion, and grace among.  It is difficult to leave, but we are excited to bring what we have learned and the ways we have changed back home.

Prayers are most welcome for smooth travels tomorrow.  We leave Guatemala at 11:50am and get back into Seattle at 9:50.

Thank you for following our trip here and for your prayers throughout the week.  We are overwhelmed with the support we have received from so many people.

Guatemala Mission Trip: Day Seven

Today was our day off of work with Safe Passage.  The staff schedules their meetings for Friday so they are tied up with their work – giving support teams a day of rest and time to enjoy Guatemala.  Our team decided that we wanted to hike and enjoy nature, and we certainly did!  We hiked the Volcan de Pacaya (Pacaya Volcano) about an hour outside of Antigua.  We left our hotel at 5:45am to get a head start on the many other groups that do the hike and to avoid any weather that might come up in the afternoon.  We were certainly dreary this morning but our day made it totally worth it.

5:45 in the morning on the streets of Antigua.  Volcan de Agua is in the background.

Under the famous arch in Antigua.  You can see the entrance to our hotel on the left!

Pacaya is one of three active volcanoes in Guatemala.  We had heard that it was a relatively easy hike…the internet lied.  It was a short but strenuous climb.   Even though it was difficult, we were struck with the immense beauty that surrounded us.  We have realized this week that Guatemala is a beautiful county – beauty in nature, beauty in culture, and, most importantly, beauty in the people who call this place home.

One of the many lookout points on the hike gave us amazing views of three other nearby volcanoes: Agua, Acatenengo, and Fuego.  Fuego is one of the other active volcanoes and erupts with ash and steam about every 20 minutes.  We saw an eruption with lava on Sunday night at dinner and saw eruptions today in the daytime.  It is spectacular to see!

At the spectacular lookout with Volcan de Agua in the center, Acatenango is the peak in the middle, and fuego is on the left.

When we reached the main crater of Pacaya (short of the summit which is not open to the public due to gases and other volcanic activity), we got a special Guatemalan treat: marshmallows roasted in volcanic vents!  It was amazing to stand in a crater that was filled by volcanic rock in 2012 and roast ‘mallows in little holes in the ground.

We made it to the top (or at least to the top of our hike)!

The eerie volcanic landscape near the top of Pacaya

Walking around the lava field looking for a good marshmallow roasting vent

Getting ready to roast!

This afternoon we went out and explored the main market in Antigua.  We got our shopping fix and even bought some things for our loved ones at home.  After dinner, we ended our day with Compline as we always do just as a spectacular thunderstorm rolled in.  Just as we prayed for God to “illumine this night with God’s celestial brightness, a large bolt of lightning streaked across the sky!

Tomorrow is our last day in Guatemala and we’ll be going to a water park with the 7^th grade class from Safe Passage we worked with during the week.  Every class gets to enjoy this outing with support team once a year so it will be special for us and for them.

Guatemala Mission Trip: Day Six

Today was a very special day for our team.  We’ve spent the last three days at the Education Reinforcement Center with students in 4th grade through high school.  Today we had the chance to be with the youngest Safe Passage students at the Escuilita (preschool).  We spent time with five classes and played with the students at recess.  The smiles, love, and connection were infectious today.  During our time with each class, we drew pictures of our families.  It was a joy to see our youth share about their lives with the students and learn about the students they worked with.  But the activity was not the most important part of today.  The most important part was the deep connections that were made in a short amount of time.  Honestly, I don’t know if every support team (and there are about 20 each year) has the same interaction with the students.  What I do know is that we saw real love, care, compassion, and connection between people of different ages and from very different backgrounds.  When it was time to say goodbye to the students, many of the students did not want to let go of the youth they had spent time with.  There were a lot of long hugs.

The majority of our day was deeply joyful.  During recess, the air was filled with laughter and everybody was smiling.  But if you looked closely, you could tell something wasn’t right.  The Escuilita is surrounded (like most buildings in Guatemala) with a cinder block wall and razor wire.  It is a protected space, signaling that there is danger just outside.  During recess, hundreds of vultures circled overhead as they looked for food at the garbage dump just a few blocks away.  The smell from the dump would occasionally waft through the air and make its way into our place of joy and laughter.

After we spent a full day with children who were so full of life and energy and laughter, we had the chance to sit down with Shannon, the director of the Escuilita and Nurturing Families program.  Shannon has been at Safe Passage for eight years and is wholly committed to this community.  Many of the other staff and volunteers we have met at Safe Passage talk about their time here as something temporary – even if they are planning on being here for awhile.  They have aspirations to go to college, to travel somewhere else, to experience more, and to do something else with their life after Safe Passage.  Shannon is here for the long haul.  She lives just blocks from the dump and talked about Zone 3 (the area of Guatemala City the dump is in) as “her place.”  She is full of passion, and love, and hope.  But she also shared with us the hard truths of Guatemala – particularly Zone 3 and the children we had just spend a full day playing with.  She said that most, if not all of the children at the Escuilita have experienced and continue to experience abuse of some form – physically, emotionally, or sexually.  They come from deeply broken homes and a deeply broken community.  Shannon talked about the violence and the gangs that are rampant in the community.  She talked about cycles of addiction and teenage pregnancy.  This is the world the children of Safe Passage live in.  And it is heartbreaking.

Our team has spent a good deal of time reflecting on the kingdom of God.  The kingdom of God is the world the way God intended it to be when it was created – full of wholeness and beauty and love.  It is a way of life and state of being.  As Christians, we believe that the kingdom of God has already emerged and is gaining ground in this world.  The Escuilita gave us a great illustration of that today.  In this midst of a community that is full of poverty, violence, abuse, addiction, and brokenness stands an oasis that offers a place of belonging, love, and compassion.  The Escuilita stands as a testament that wholeness is possible.  And just like the kingdom of God is growing in our world, the love, compassion, and transformation that happens in the Escuilita is spilling out into the streets of Zone 3.  When students go home each day, they take their joy with them.  They gain self esteem, the ability to make choices for themselves, and a voice to speak up.  Shannon also offers a program for parents called Nurturing Families that aims to break cycles of violence and abuse.  Most of the parents of students experienced abuse, neglect, and abandonment from their parents…as did their parents and their parents’ parents.  They are not malicious, they simply know of no other way.  Many have never been told by someone else that they are loved.  Many have never been hugged.  Nurturing Families immerses parents in a loving community where they can learn a different way of being – a way that, for us as Christians, looks a lot like God’s kingdom.

Tomorrow is a day off for us and we’re going for a hike!  It will be a very  early morning (ready to go at 5:45am!) but it should be worth it.  We’re hiking Pacaya – an active volcano about an hour and half outside of Antigua.  We’ll post pictures of our hike tomorrow evening.

We’re not going to ask for prayers for our team this evening.  Instead, please pray for the children and families of Guatemala City – particularly Zone 3.  Here are some of their faces.

Our team with Shannon (middle)

Guatemala Mission Trip: Day Five

Today was another fantastic day in Guatemala.  We are starting to get the hang of our routine and are much more confident getting around and using our Spanish.  Today was our last day at the Safe Passage CRE (Education Reinforcement Center…again, the acronym makes sense in Spanish).  We worked with the fifth and seventh grade classrooms again and did two new projects with the classes.

The fifth grade team prepared a game to learn about balance in an ecosystem.  It is a game many of our youth have played at Camp Orkila on Orcas Island.  The team did a great job of explaining the game in Spanish with almost no help from translators.  The students were very engaged in the game and had a great time.  The seventh grade team did made paper airplanes with the class to learn about observation and trial and error.  There were airplanes flying in every direction!

The projects we prepared and led were important for classroom learning, but the greater value for us has been the relationships that have been built in a few short days.  Nearly each one of our youth has a student of two that they have bonded with during our short time at Safe Passage.  One group of students wrote notes to several of our youth that said, “Best Friends Forever.”  I asked our support team coordinator if every team leaves with best friends.  She said no – a lot of teams don’t engage very much with the students.  That speaks volumes to how open and intentional our youth have been in seeking and serving Christ in others.  Classroom knowledge is necessary, but it is the relationships and memories that will last.

This afternoon, we had the chance to hear from two women in the adult literacy and social entrepreneurship programs.  Both are of indigenous Mayan descent and moved to Guatemala City from villages in the mountains during Guatemala’s horrific civil war.  There is still a great deal of racism and discrimination against Mayans in Guatemala.  The women shared their stories with us and taught us some words in a Mayan language (though I’m not sure which one…there are many).  As we left from our time with them, they gave us all hugs and it was a beautiful moment.  We had another chance to buy some of the jewelry made by the women of Creamos, too.

Some of the jewelry made by the women of Creamos.  The multi-colored beads are made from paper from the garbage dump 

Showing off the things we got from Creamos

Arne making a new friend

Dinner this evening was at El Frijol Feliz – a Guatemalan cooking school.  We had to work for our dinner tonight!  We had the chance to learn how to make some fantastic Guatemalan dishes: chiles rellenos, refried black beans, guacamole, and plantains with black beans and chocolate.  It was a ton of fun to talk and laugh together while we cooked and then ate the food we had prepared.  We have some chefs on our hands!

Making guacamole!

Our team with our cooking instructor (far left)

We will be spending our day tomorrow the Jardin Infantil (preschool) doing some projects with classes there.  It will be a change of pace and a lot of new faces for us, but we are excited!