Guatemala Mission Trip: Day Four

Our team had an amazing day at Safe Passage today!  We spent most of our time in classrooms working with students and it was a day full of joy, laughter, and deep engagement (both by our students and the students at Safe Passage).

This morning, we helped in English classes for several periods.  The English teachers at Safe Passage are all long-term volunteers – making a commitment for at least 6 months.  They are bright, enthusiastic, and deeply committed to the work of providing hope and opportunity beyond the garbage dump through education.  In the classrooms, our team is paired usually one-on-one with a student to practice English through games and activities.  Some deep connections have been made in only a few short days.  There are hugs and “Hasta Mañanas” (see you tomorrow) exchanged at the end of the class period.  Our youth have opened their hearts and arms to the students and have all been surprised how open the students at Safe Passage are to us.

Practicing English 

 One of the English teachers, Leah, has been particularly inspirational for our youth.  Leah is 19 years and came to Safe Passage just a few days after graduating high school (which she did early, by the way, so she could come down sooner).  She is remarkable to watch with the students.  Many of our youth have made the comment, “She is only a few years older than me!  I don’t have that kind of clarity about what I want to do with my life.”  Gaining clarity about our calling is the challenge for all of us.  Greg Murray observed yesterday that all of the people at Safe Passage are living intentionally.  That is certainly true, but they are living intentionally in a particular way.  We heard from the Program Director of Creamos, the social entrepreneurship program, yesterday.  When we asked her how she ended up at Safe Passage, we were all surprised to hear her winding journey. She is originally from Nicaragua.  From an early age, she had aspirations to go into finance and develop a successful career, wanting to eventually be a CFO of a large corporation.  She planned out her steps: education, experience, internships, and connections.  She studied abroad on multiple continents and received her master’s degree.  He degree was in Economics and Development – a program she thought would be more about the economic side.  But it was mostly about development, which she discovered she had a passion for.  She wanted to help others grow, she wanted to play a part in changing economic circumstances.  She has always been living intentionally, but the focus of her intentions has changed.  Where she was once intentional about her own growth and goals, she now directs her intentions towards helping others.  A preacher by the name of Frederick Buechner once said, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.”  Our challenge is to discover and discern where that place is.  As we reflected on our experiences over the last few days this evening, several of our youth expressed an inkling that they might want to give of their time and talent in a way similar to the long-term volunteers at Safe Passage later on in life.  Wherever God calls them, we hope that they live intentionally for others.

One of the English class teams with Leah (right)

After helping in English classes, we led our class projects with a seventh grade class and a fifth grade class.  We developed the projects several months ago while our team was away on a planning retreat.  They went great!  We did an egg drop with the seventh grade class and it was a ton of fun to see the students work together, get creative, and have fun.  Our youth were remarkable leading the activity – leading most of it with our limited Spanish and full of confidence in front of a group of strangers in a foreign land.

Working together to protect the egg! 

Getting ready to drop!

The fifth grade group led several math exercises.  The students were incredibly engaged and were excellent at math!  We even taught them fractions (and we did it in Spanish!).  We will be with the same groups of students tomorrow to lead different activities.  We are very excited to see the students again!

Who knew that math could be this fun?! 

Working out fractions with candy.  Everything is better with candy... 

When we got back to Antigua this evening, we had a thunderstorm and a lot of rain.  It is the rainy season here so that is not surprising.  What was surprising was the clap of thunder that sounded like it was right on top of us!  We ended our evening with a great dinner at Cactus, a taco restaurant in Antigua, and some great discussion in small groups.  Small group times are an important part of our time on mission trips to help us unpack and reflect on what we have seen and experienced.  Our youth are taking a lot in and are remarkably thoughtful.  There is certainly a mix of thoughts and emotions in us all: anger, joy, hope, helplessness, optimism, cynicism, and a confluence of just about every other emotion and thought you could imagine.  But even in that place of uncertainty and tension, we are all committed to pushing forward and seeking God in the midst of all we are experiencing.  The good news is that the work of putting our broken world back together again is not up to us.  That is God’s work and we trust that God is faithful in that…that the world is moving towards wholeness.  Our part is to find where God is working and join in.  That is exactly what we doing at Safe Passage this week.

Your continued prayers for health and strength are much appreciated.  We also ask for you to pray that we would encounter God and others in ways that change us so that we have more clarity about world, the God, and ourselves when we come home.

New friends

Guatemala Mission Trip: Day Three

Today was a very hard and full day.  We made our first trip into Guatemala City to spend the day at Safe Passage.  Today was full of tours, meetings with Safe Passage staff, and learning about all that Safe Passage does in the community around the Guatemala City garbage dump.

Our first stop was at the Guatemala City cemetery.  The cemetery overlooks the dump, which is located in a ravine.  We made a stop just inside the entrance to the cemetery to see something that illustrates the massive disparity of wealth in Guatemala.  In the picture below, the large pyramid on the left is the resting place of one person.  The stacks and rows on the right are called “los apartmentos” – or the apartments.  Each slot is the resting place of one person.  Unlike the United States where we purchase a cemetery plot and remain there, families in Guatemala must pay for their loved ones’ resting place every two years.  For families that have little income, this is oftentimes hard to do.  If families do not pay, their loved ones remains are removed.  There are conflicting reports as to what happens to the remains…some are likely thrown into the garbage dump, some are likely tagged and placed in mass graves where their families are able to retrieve them if they become current on payments.  Guatemala is a country of contrast – of extreme beauty and extreme devastation, of hopelessness and hope, of life and death, and wealth and poverty.  This became very real to us early on today when we saw the apartments.

The Guatemala City garbage dump is the size of 22 soccer fields.  It is a ravine that has been filled with trash since at least 1960.  Roughly 6,000 people work in the dump, sorting and collecting items to recycle or resell.  The dump is an extremely dangerous place to work.  Toxic chemicals, human waste, and high levels of methane gas take a significant toll on the health of those who work there.  There are also frequent landslides…or more specifically, trash slides.  The dirt you see in the photos below is not land, but rather trash that has been piled and covered with dirt.  There was a massive slide just a few weeks ago that likely killed several people…though the government is not concerned with keeping accurate records or issuing official reports about the people working in the dump so the exact number is unknown.  In 2005 there was a massive fire that started when methane gas ignited.  It burned for weeks.  Prior to the fire, the dump was completely unregulated.  Families lived in the dump, children played and worked alongside parents, and gangs controlled the dump and surrounding neighborhoods.  After the fire, a wall was put up around the dump to control access, all workers are now required to have a permit, and no one under the age of 15 is allowed in the dump.  Even though it is still a heart-wrenching thing to see, there has at least been a small amount of progress.

Immediately after the dump, we went to Safe Passage’s main location in Guatemala City.  We were greeted by more contrast.  We had just left a desolate, smelly, horrific place and walked into a beautiful building full of smiling children, joyful sounds, and loving people.  We spent most of our time visiting with heads of various programs at Safe Passage (they have four locations and many, many programs to serve the community).  We heard from the executive director, one of the English teachers, we learned about their adult literacy program, and heard from the Program Director for Creamos – a social entrepreneurship program that allows women in the community to make a living outside of the dump, teaches them financial literacy, and inspires self-esteem.  The women of Creamos make jewelry out of trash – primarily with beads made from paper from the garbage dump.  You can see some of their work here.  We visited the Jardin Infantil (preschool) location and were surprised to see references to the University of Washington in several locations.  The school of architecture at UW has made several trips to Safe Passage to help with construction of facilities and a remarkable playground structure at the Jardin Infantil.  Go Seattle!

Safe Passage's main location in Guatemala City - the Education Reinforcement Center (the CRE...the acronym makes sense in Spanish).  This houses their elementary and secondary classes, tutoring programs, and a health clinic.

Our team coordinator from Safe Passage, Charlotte, giving us a tour of the CRE

Executive Director, Todd Amani, sharing with our team

We had a fantastic lunch at Safe Passage.  Guatemala has the highest rate of malnutrition of any country in the world.  Safe Passage provides two meals a day to all their students which provide them with all the nutrition their bodies need.

The play structure built by the University of Washington school of architecture

In the afternoon we had the chance to help in an English class for one of their class periods.  It was so much fun!  We were each paired with a student and we practiced our English with a game of tic-tac-toe that is too difficult to explain here.  The room was full of smiles and laughter all around.

Our team with the students in the English class

As we reflected on our experience today, we were all quite hopeful.  Even though we had seen some very hard things today, we also saw immense hope.  We have spent a lot of time talking about the Kingdom of God – the way the world will be when it is put back together the way God intended it to be from the beginning.  The Kingdom of God is not just something in the future, it is here now…just not completely.  We saw a piece of God’s kingdom today at Safe Passage.  We saw hope and love and wholeness and health in a community where those things are hard to come by.  We are beyond excited to begin working with the children in classrooms at Safe Passage tomorrow so we can be a part of what God is doing in this community.

Our day ended with dinner at Monoloco in Antigua and Compline back at our hotel.  We are very ready for bed.  Please pray for continued strength and health for our team, and for eyes to see God at work through us and around us as we work at Safe Passage.

Guatemala Mision Trip: Day Two

We had a great day in Antigua, Guatemala today!  Because of flight schedules from Seattle, we arrived a day earlier than necessary so today was a bit of a “free day” for us to get acclimated and explore Antigua before beginning our work with Safe Passage in Guatemala City tomorrow.

We began our day with Mass at la Iglesia de San Francisco – a church that was completed in 1702.  Although the Mass was in Spanish, it was all very familiar to us and we were able to follow along with the liturgy.  It was a beautiful and heartwarming service, and an opportunity for us to realize that our faith spans countries and cultures.  We got a taste of God’s kingdom today in a way we don’t often back home.

The team at la Iglesia de San Francisco

The market that happens outside of the church  

Following church, we had the most fantastic lunch many of us have ever had at Rincon Tipico – a Guatemalan BBQ.  The chicken is roasted over an open flame.  It was a great taste of Guatemala!

Those chickens were AMAZING!  But we don't envy the person whose job it is to stand in front of open flames all day.

This afternoon, we did some final preparations for the projects we will do with classes at Safe Passage.  When we are working in the classrooms, we are responsible for the lessons.  We did some great preparation on our planning retreat back in May so today’s work was simply making sure we have everything we need and know what we’re doing when we get into the classes.  Our youth are remarkably smart and thorough in their planning!  After some prep work, we headed out to explore the weekend market and some of the shops in Antigua.  Although that is not why we are here, it was nice to begin our mission trip on a lower key note.  We had a fabulous dinner as a team where there was a lot of laughter and bonding.  

The group in front of the fountain in the Parque Central, or central plaza in Antigua 

Antigua is in the shadow of the Volcan de Agua (the Water Volcano)...a beautiful, but dormant, volcano.

We ended our day with Compline, the last service of prayer in the Daily Office…bedtime prayers as we like to tell our youth.  The Daily Office comes out of monastic communities that ordered their days around services of prayer in the morning, noon, evening, and night.  Our hotel used to be a Dominican convent in Antigua.  It was built in 1613 and many of the original walls still stand.  It was remarkable to pray Compline in the shadow of a wall that stood where faithful Christians have been praying for nearly four centuries!

Tomorrow will be a very different day than today.  While today was quite “touristy,” tomorrow will be very hard.  As we begin our time with Safe Passage we will be visiting the Guatemala City dump.  We will see a very different side of Guatemala than we saw today.  We welcome your prayers for eyes to see the ways God is at work around us and in the community we will be visiting, as well as for the ability to discern the ways God is calling us to be a part of God’s work here.

Guatemala Mission Trip: Day One

We’ve (mostly) made it to Guatemala!  Our team met at SeaTac Airport in Seattle at 5am this morning…we made it into Guatemala City at 10pm (9pm PST).  An hour later we arrived at our hotel in Antigua and are settled for the night.  It was a long day of travel and we’re exhausted.

Travel was not without its snags today…thus the “mostly” qualifier at the beginning of this post.  One of our team members left their passport on the flight from Seattle and we didn’t realize it until just before our departure from Houston to Guatemala City.  The youth and an adult stayed behind in Houston in hopes of finding that passport and, if that was not successful, returning to Seattle.  Long story short, God answers prayers!  The passport went from Houston to Miami and then back to Houston and it was still in the seat back where it was left.  Our two missing team members will be joining us in Guatemala in the morning.

Thankfully, tomorrow is a bit of a rest day for us before we begin our work with Safe Passage on Monday.  We’ll go to church in Antigua and spend some time making sure we are all prepared for our classroom projects with students at Safe Passage.  And we’ll rest.

Than you for your traveling prayers.  We ask for your continued prayers as we prepare for and begin our work with Safe Passage.  Monday will be a hard day as we visit the Guatemala City dump and are exposed to realities far different than our own.

Check back each evening for updates about what our team is up to and ways you can pray for us.  We promise to have pictures to go with words tomorrow!