Dirt, Stoves and Hard Work

PHOTOS

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I'm really struggling to find words to write this blog. This last week has been such a mix of emotions: excitement, frustration, happiness, sadness and pure joy. 

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week we all took off our "normal" ministries to help out another ministry. We spent the days hoeing and raking a field that will eventually be a community tomato farm to help families get out of the poverty cycle by allowing them to have sustainable income. I think our entire team would agree that it was a really challenging ministry. Most of us hoed, raked, sat and stared at grass and dirt from 8am until 4pm each day. We were dirty, we were exhausted and we were sick of staring at what seemed like a never-ending field of grass and dirt.

In the midst of raking and hoeing, God and I had a lot of discussions. For the first time since I got to training camp and to Guatemala, I began to really question what I was even doing here. Like, am I truly helping anyone by doing this? Am I truly making a difference? What is the point of this? How is this showing the Gospel?

The verse that kept coming to my mind was Colossians 3:23, which says something along the lines of whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as if working for God and not for men. 

Every time I felt like giving up and just doing bare minimum, God told me to keep working. He reminded me that it's not necessarily about the work, but about doing the best I can in all I do and not settling for bare minimum. 

On Wednesday, a few of us were able to take part in another area of the ministry we were working for. Many of the poorer families use open fires inside to cook their food. The ministry, Loving Arms, researched and found that many of the babies in these families are exposed on daily basis to the smoke damage because their mom's just strap them on their backs while they go about their daily chores, which includes cooking around these fires. The smoke causes a lot of damage to developing brains and bodies, so Loving Arms has taken initiative and helped families build concrete stoves with chimney's in their houses to help promote a healthier life for everyone in the house. 

We were able to visit some of the houses where these stoves had recently been installed and paint the stoves with a protective layer of paint to help them last longer. We also were able to interact with the families, which was my favorite part of this whole week. So many sweet people live here in Guatemala and they loved to talk with us, teach us words in Mayan, give us Pepsi and tell us about their lives. 

Vivian, our guide, asked each family about their work and such and I was so humbled by their answers. One woman walks two hours one way each day to work in a coffee field. Another woman handcrafts blouses to sell. One blouse takes her 6 months to make, working 7 hours a day and only makes her 1,200 quetzales, or about $170 dollars. A 20 year old takes 3 months to make handcrafted belts working 7 hours a day, and only makes about 300 quetzales, or about $42 dollars. She's been doing this since she was 14. 

Even though these families have so little, they truly are so happy. They loved showing us around their homes and giving us pepsi and introducing us to their families. They are proud of what they have and they are so joyful. I know that's such a typical "mission trip" realization, but it hit me in Fiji and it hit me now in Guatemala. I am so blessed and yet so often, I am in want of so much more. It doesn't make sense.

I can't even fathom working so hard for so little. In talking with these families and hearing about their work, God really convicted me and showed me how much I was blessed to have a college degree and to live in a country where there's so many opportunities for me to make money. Even if they require "hard work" by American standards, I am so blessed to be in the financial and educational situation I am in. 

All in all, this week was a lesson in hard work that I desperately needed. If you know me, you know that I tend to slide by. All throughout high school, I rarely if ever studied and did the absolute bare minimum to get A's and B's. I did the same thing through college. I am the ultimate procrastinator and God has really been convicting me about my heart and about my work ethic in the last year. This week I really began to see what hard work looked like and what it looked like to work at everything with all I had.