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)