Thursday, February 3, 2011

The Final Stretch....

Wow... I can't believe we'll be leaving Guatemala for Texas in 8 days. This outreach has gone by so fast! I have loved the time we have spent here in Guatemala City!
Tomorrow we are leaving here to spend a week in Puerto Barrios, which is on the coast... hopefully we'll get a chance to hang out at the beach. I'm pretty tan now, but it would be nice to just relax at the beach :)
We have spent time at a lot of really cool ministries:
YWAM Guatemala, Casa Shalom, a soup kitchen....etc.
We were really able to be fairly consistent in our ministry because we got to return to the same places every week, so we really got to know the people we were hanging out with. 
The places that affected me the most were definitely the orphanages... wow! What precious children! If I had the means, i would be coming home with like, five kids. Each time we went to an orphanage or the garbage dump, i spent time with a precious, darling little child, and it broke my heart to leave them. The kids from the garbage dump were really dirty and starving for attention, and some of them were so emotionally wounded... I spent 2 hours trying to get this little girl to smile, and she had been hurt so badly by someone that she barely looked at me, and at some points she looked like she wanted to smile but she didn't know how. :( I finally convinced her to let me pick her up and swing her around, and she told me she liked it and wanted me to do it again, but you couldn't tell that by her face. Then I told her she could come sit in my lap, and she was really really hesitant... it was so sad. I told her i was her friend and i wasn't going to hurt her, so after awhile, she let me set her in my lap. She was sitting up straight and rigid for a full 15 seconds, and then she relaxed and leaned back against me, and eventually started petting my arm. That was one of the best moments of outreach!! I got to show that little girl that someone does care for her, and that God loves her. wow... still really makes me cry :)
There was a 1 month old little boy that i met at an orphanage, named Diego. His face had little white bumps scattered on it, and he had a few crusts on his head...i wiped him off as best i could, and just held him for three hours. He fell asleep, woke up hungry, i fed him and burped him, then he fell back to sleep. and he was the most precious little boy with the sweetest little baby laugh, and he was really ticklish :D I just prayed over him the whole time, that God would be preparing a family for him and keeping him safe... he was so sweet.
Before this outreach, our team was praying, "God, break our hearts for what breaks yours."
and he did. :) and we will never be the same!


Soup kitchen serving line :)

My friend from Tierra Nueva Daycare :)