Bienvenido a Guatemala

I am one week into my NINE weeks in Guatemala! When I heard we were going to be in Guatemala for two whole months it felt overwhelming. Now that I am in Guatemala and have been here for a week already the thought of two months here in Guatemala is exciting me. So here is what life has looked like so far and an introduction to a little bit about what life will continue to look like here in San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Guatemala.

We arrived in Guatemala Sunday afternoon and our whole squad headed to “Casa De Agua” (A hostel) that one of our teams is staying at for their two months. Everybody stayed there for a night to get some orientation information/ worship from the Adventures in Missions team here in Guatemala. The next morning all our teams started filtering out of the building to head to their ministry hosts around the country. Fresh Fire (my team) had to stay however until Wednesday because our ministry host had to test negative for COVID after being in close contact. Tuesday a member of AIM, Junior, picked our team up to paint his house. It was a cool opportunity to see his community and being somebody from Guatemala he could give us an intro to Guatemala through recommendations, tips, Spanish help, and getting us traditional Guatemalan lunch.

Wednesday rolled around and thank goodness everybody had tested negative for COVID in our ministry. We got picked up around three, which gave us time in the morning to quickly head to Antigua for some food and a quick hike/ walk. We got picked up by our “host”, Jeofrey (@jeofreycarmona on insta), who is the founder and leader of Worship Room (@worshiproom.gt on insta) which is the ministry that we are working with. He brought us to the place we will be staying which was probably only like 10-15 minutes from where we were staying.

Our new home is in San Antonio Aguas Calientes. The people that we are staying with are I believe from the local church. Everybody that we get to interact with here has been born and raised in Guatemala allowing for us to be far more immersed in the Guatemalan culture than we were in Costa Rica. Luckily, they speak enough English to be able to interact with them, however. This family (Lico, and Eris (not totally sure how to spell their names)) was gracious enough to provide two bedrooms, two baths, and a kitchen to the six of us to live in the next two months. This place also has an amazing rooftop view.

The first night we were welcomed by our hosts and ministry with a traditional Guatemalan dish including eggs, beans, plantains, tortillas, cheese, and sour cream. Jeofrey also walked us around the town a little bit to show us what we need to know whether that was the store or good food spots.

Thursday morning it was go time. Jeofrey picked us up in the morning and we went and talked to two different local families who we will probably get to interact with throughout our time here. The first family is full of a bunch of super hard workers. The husband of the family left and comes by once a week to give them like 45 quetzals which is almost nothing. So, they are really struggling to get by, barely getting enough for food and not having really anything after that for anything else. This seems to be the case for many of the families living in this area that we will be working a lot with.

Thursday night is when Worship Room happens. So, worship room started small in coffee shops and has now grown to using a “farm”, I am not sure how many people ended up coming Thursday but there was expected to be 100+ people there. We worshipped for probably an hour and a half switching between Spanish and English throughout the night. Our host just let us enjoy tonight other than set up and clean up but typically we would be helping more probably with welcoming people and praying over people. There were three different World Race squads there that night because teams were here before us and are now swapping with us heading to Costa Rica. We had 4 of our 7 H Squad teams there as well because we are lucky enough to be close together.

After Worship night it is tradition to get dinner with the ministry team. They always go to this same place that is super affordable and serving great Guatemalan food. Was a moment where I was really grateful we are working with people from Guatemala to show us the spots to hit. We got back to our home at about midnight.

Friday morning, we were up and going leaving slightly before nine. The morning consisted of painting a school which was to help a ministry that supports schools that are not in very great areas to look super nice to allow these kids living in poverty to experience a nice school and get treated like they matter because they do. In the afternoon we got to play soccer with the kids that live in that community which I think we get to do every Friday.

Friday night we may have started a tradition where we head to one of our other team’s place about 20-25 minutes away to get laundry done, get some local food, hang out and worship. It is super nice to be able to see some other teams as we are coming from Costa Rica where we had five of our teams all living together to now just our team being together all week. So, seeing other teams will probably help us not go completely crazy these next two months.

Our week ended by getting a late night uber ride back to our place. Our driver spoke very little English, so I wasn’t really expecting to interact much at all. I then realized the music he had on was instrumental music from worship songs like “I Will Follow”, “Our God”, and more. So, the entire 20+ minute drive we were singing these songs, us in English and he was singing in Spanish. Was such a cool God moment! Ugh I am still hyped from it, was so fun. Tymon invited him to our worship nights on Thursday with Worship Room thanks to google translate, so we are hoping he might find a way to show up. This was one of my favorite moments this far on the World Race.

I did not realize I would have this much to say already, there was more introduction to Guatemala I wanted to give but this is long enough already so I will throw more into the next ones. If you can’t tell I am hyped about what is already happening in Guatemala and what God has in store for us.

Thank you for reading!! Also, my deadline is coming up for fundraising so if you would like to be a part of this journey, I would love for you to partner with me financially!

Much love y’all!!

JD