Very late Saturday night/early Sunday morning, Dave and his team returned from the week they spent in Guatemala. It is nothing new to kiss Dave goodbye for a week, but this was the first time I've balanced single parenting with my job teaching. Our week went great and my kids were awesome about pitching in and "working as a team", as I kept telling them we were doing, all week. But even more than surviving our own week, we celebrate another great experience Dave had strengthening our church's relationship with this community in the remote mountaintops of Guatemala. His vision for this ministry to the people of Guatemala has always been the development of a partnership-- learning from one another, seeing what skills the people have and offering them guidance and resources for developing those skills. The team's first goal on this trip was just to keep deepening the relationship. The second goal was to break ground on a new medical center for the community, which currently has no access to any type of health care. Dave's team did not go down to build the center for them. They provided the supplies, got the foundation laid and then helped the people work out a schedule where each man takes a turn being the foreman and a rotating small group continues construction each day until it is built by them in about a month.
Dave has hours' worth the stories about how God was again at work and how cool it was to see old friends and make new ones in Guatemala. The following are just a few quick pictures, so our close family and friends can have some kind of idea what it looked like. (And I'm just gonna go ahead and write this for my hubby, since I know his busy work schedule won't have him sitting down to type out a blog post any time soon. Or ever.)
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We were so grateful Dave had internet access on this trip! Last year it was a full communication black-out for a week. This time we got to video chat with him every night. As we, Ella especially, were missing him, this helped tremendously!
One special thing Dave got to do was preach a sermon at a Wednesday worship service. He has never preached with a translator before and said it was definitely challenging. He was glad to share The Word, though, and spoke on the parable of the mustard seed.
This is Julio and Marceleno-- a few of Dave's little buddies, who followed him around all week. Some of his favorite stories to tell have been of the wonderful interactions with kids. They played soccer together. The team delivered cards our entire Sunday School program made for their friends in Guatemala. (The picture below shows everyone rushing the translator to eagerly ask, "What does my card say?") And Dave came home with a notebook where many of the kids signed their names for him to remember and pray for.
This just shows some of the ground dug up after their first day of work on the medical center. They dug trenches, filled them with concrete, and started pressing metal re-bar frame into the ground. Dave can't wait to see pictures of the finished product.
And here is the whole team. About half of them are women, which was a neat and powerful statement to the people of the community we work with in Guatemala. They saw and expressed how great it was that women could be leaders and do the same things men could do.
Over twisty mountain roads with many "curvas peligrosas", through long flights and layovers, and even during fever and digestive illnesses, we saw God protecting our team and bringing them all home with passion and excitement about this developing relationship with a people so far away and so different from us!
