Guatemala: PhotoBombers, Foundations, and Birthdays

One of my favorite parts of this trip is the people God has placed in our lives to come alongside us in this journey.  It has been a real joy for our entire family.

The group from Ohio has completely adopted our family, and we literally feel like a part of their group now.  One of the things I like is that they have a worship team on the trip so every morning after breakfast we start with songs and a devotional.  And we do something similar after dinner...songs and talking about the day.

I like as well how light hearted and fun many in their group are.  Michael's wife Amanda dumped a huge bucket of ice water on him at the work site Tuesday....and he responded by threatening to throw her in the river.  Good fun.

Then one of the employees of HOLI came riding up on a horse and just made AJ and S's day by allowing them to ride around.

Another interesting person we met today (Wednesday) was the founder of HOLI, Carlos Vargas.  He took us on a tour of the entire property explaining his vision for the future.  I thought the site was huge but didn't realize just how huge it really is.  Only 700 of the 3000 acres are currently in use.  He took us to the back side of the mountain where the road leading to the top of another mountain has already been carved out of the mountain.

Andrew, Carlos, Rachel, AJ, Carlos' brother Sal

That road will lead to a Bible college he is building which will overlook a large pond with more missionary housing.  The water in that pond will be used 5 times....first for drinking water, second for beauty / fun / swimming / paddle boats, third for electricity as the water runs down to the fish farms, fourth is the fish farms, and finally for agriculture that is beyond the fish farms.

The electricity will power everything on the HOLI property and the excess will be sold to the power company to generate income for HOLI.

65% of the funds that come into HOLI come from revenue generation strategies (agriculture, fish etc) and 35% comes from missionaries.  He said they could run the entire operation solely on the funds generated from HOLI itself if missionaries no longer came.  What would change would be the amount of building.  He also has a succession plan so that when he is no longer here the organization will continue to serve the community.

As with any organization, Rachel and I didn't completely agree with everything Carlos mentioned but there is no question this man has done a huge amount of work for Jesus Christ in this area of the world and helped bring hundreds of thousands of people to Jesus.

One thing that we definitely agreed with is serving people's physical needs first and then after gaining trust introducing Jesus as the reason they are doing the good works that originally brought them into the community (water well, saving very sick children, building schools etc).  The last thing he builds is the church but by the time it is built everyone knows about Jesus and that is why the first service has over 100 people and none of the churches he has built over the years has faded away.

He has a vision to build 1000 churches over the next year.  Yes, 1000.  Love how big this man thinks.

He also knows how to make little boys really happy.....

Tuesday we continued working on the homes being built.  We learned that these homes were paid for by other churches who wanted the hard work / foundations done by someone else (read us ;)  and will be dedicated after we are gone.  A group can raise funds to build the homes and dedicate the buildings during their stay.  Our Ohio group was unable to raise the funds needed to buy the house, but was really joyful in being able to do this work.  There really is something satisfying in digging into the ground and setting the foundation.

It is a bit like anything worthwhile in life that you want to really last.  You have to set the foundation the right way.

This is what the houses look like when they are completed.  The neighborhood has its own church as well.  The recipients of these homes are usually single moms who have been abused.  There is a skills training class that HOLI sends these women to which is within walking distance of the neighborhood.  Once they have developed a skill and are making enough money to move into other housing HOLI  BUYS THEIR HOUSE from them and gives it to someone else who has a need like they once had.  Is that cool or what?  They build the house, give it to recipient (including the deed), and then they buy it from them when they are ready to move on thereby giving them seed money for their next home etc.

THE PHOTO BOMBER (aka Rachel)

We call her many names....most recently "The PhotoBomber"   Notice Rachel in the background of the first one and its pretty obvious in the second one.

She is so fun!

Wednesday we toured with Carlos in the morning and spent the afternoon in a village handing out food / aid packages and doing a Bible Study with the kids in the community.

The girls mentioned to us after this event that it was sad to see how people would use dishonest tactics to get more food for their family (send kids to get bags saying that mom wasn't there when she was in another line, erase the mark on their hand indicating they had received food and then get in another line for more food etc.)  Sad because they were that hungry and needy....but also sad because they could imagine back in the village the people who played by the rules had one bag of food while those who were dishonest seemed better off with 2 or 3 bags of food.  They mentioned how that might make people feel bad about each other or make them want to be dishonest as well to get more food.

I don't know if there is a solution to that when there are 400 people from 4 different villages showing up to this particular food distribution.  In smaller villages they have the names of everyone and literally mark off their family on a roster once food has been given but that was not practical in this situation.

We were disappointed as well that there wasn't some kind of prayer over something like a megaphone to connect the food being given to Jesus.  We asked one of the HOLI employees if the food was given by someone who made a stipulation that no mention of God could be made when handing out the food, but the HOLI employee said we could have done a prayer.  However, it has to be requested by the group doing the service.  Seems to be some kind of disconnect here as I'm 100% certain the Ohio group we are with would have liked to have prayed with these 400 people before handing out the food.   The devotional this morning was specifically about being prepared to witness to the people we would be helping this afternoon.

On a positive note, there were over 50 kids who participated in the Bible study and stayed after the food had been distributed.  AJ was a major, major 'novelty' as pretty much none of these kids have ever seen a little 2 year old American boy like AJ.  They were just fascinated by him.  The last child, Ramos, had a great connection with AJ and actually cried when we got on the bus.

Tuesday was my birthday and it wasn't hard to know that Rachel and the girls let pretty much everyone know.  Several of the orphans found me and sang happy birthday in both English and Spanish.  At the end of the song they count to the age the person is and had to count and count and count.

The girl on the right is named Michelle and she is a very smart 14 year old who has taught herself English by talking to missionaries every week.  She told us her story this evening of being put in an orphanage at age 4 because her mom never came home at night (probably drugs or prostitution or both), but nonetheless her greatest wish is to be re-united with her mom.  She has 4 other siblings in this orphanage as her mom kept having babies even after Michelle was put in the orphanage.  Michelle is mother hen of the orphanage.

Tuesday evening HOLI made several huge birthday cakes (enough so that everyone serving here could have a piece....there is another group of 75 people in addition to our group).  Everyone seem pretty happy as they were gobbling up their cake that someone (me) had a birthday....

Family picture after the 'birthday' celebration.  What is really funny about this picture is our new friend Erica who is in the green shirt.  When we saw the picture on the digital camera we started yelling "PhotoBomber!"   She came over and started laughing because what she is doing is telling someone else to duck down so they wouldn't be photo bombing our picture.  They ducked....she didn't.  LOL

Other fun memories / favorite photos:

We told the girls this evening how proud we are of how independent they are.  One of the reasons that you don't see a lot of pictures of H and V in the above photos is that they were off serving on their own throughout the past two days, helping disabled children and the rescue babies.  We were not there to take pictures of them!

S just loves the babies and Rachel was able to get this sweet photo of her when picking her up the other day.  S worked with babies Tuesday afternoon and Wed morning and worked on the house Tuesday morning.

AJ is just a major, major joy to everyone on this trip.  The Ohio group loves him.  Everyone in the group of 75 (called "Carpenters for Christ) knows who he is and calls him by name.  He is a blessing.

We ended Wednesday night with the Ohio group and a huge pizza party + movies for the orphans.