A Day In The Life

Will someone please tell time to stop going so quickly? I have six days left here, a few days in Antigua, a day in Atlanta…and then home. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very excited to see you all again…but I am so not ready to leave.  Let me tell you about the things that happen daily in my life here.  I wake up, force down another bowl of Frosted Flakes mixed with Corn Flakes (with no milk…because their milk is made from powder, and typically warm, which I can’t handle), spend time worshiping with my team before we go out, then some kind of crazy thing goes on…going to the garbage dump and being with the people that work  and some who live there, going into bars and praying with prostitutes, playing with the beautiful children in orphanages, and an assortment of other things. Thrown in to this mix would be all the little fun things that only happen in Guatemala: seeing almost anything you can imagine being transported on the back of a Moto…like a TV, a piñata, or even just four grown men and a baby, getting on a bus that is already packed, and then having people cram in after you, chickens casually hanging out in the little tienda where you buy your coke, (oh yeah, I now have a coke addiction…and I mean Coca Cola.), watching a father give his 5 year old child coffee as he eats dinner, and being hissed and barked at by the “gentlemen” you have accidentally wooed with your pale skin, blue eyes, and all the other nastiness of being in a state of continuous sweating.

I’ve also seen things that are not so…amusing. I’ve seen children wandering around in flip flops through mounds of trash, looks of desperation and brokenness in the eyes of prostitutes, a little boy wandering around selling things of marijuana, a little girl who has a family, but is in an orphanage, because they don’t want to deal with her special needs, a pastor and his family who are struggling to make ends meet because they are trying to spread the Gospel in a truthful way, and just an insane amount of poverty all around me.

So at the end of the day, after devouring yet another meal of beans, rice, and tortillas, another time of worship and then laughing and practicing Spanish with our amigo who lives with us, and a freezing cold shower, I lay in bed and try to process and comprehend all that I have seen, and how I’m supposed to react to such things.  There is such an overwhelming feeling of helplessness and sadness. What I think makes it so one is able to conquer all the desperation is the hope that is breaking through in this place. It isn’t extremely obvious yet, but it’s there. When I think about the way a woman lit up when I told her she had beautiful eyes and that I remembered her, or the teenage boy who works in the dump who wants to be a writer someday who writes about God, or most beautiful laugh of a precious deaf girl in an orphanage, or even just in the work that Christ is doing in me and the girls on my team, I feel hope. Being able to even just tell one girl that God loves her and will provide for her is reason enough for me to spend two months of my life not eating cereal (with real milk) and all the other adventures that have happened while I’m here. I’m so blessed that I’ve gotten to do life in this place, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget this time.