This past August, 24 adventurous people spent nine days serving in Guatemala City. We worked primarily in a small community school located in a shanty town along an abandoned railroad corridor. There children play outside dirt floor shacks, where waste water flows along and skinny, homeless dogs roam. Yet we were greeted with huge smiles and hugs, and had children helping us, walking with us, and handing out homemade cards.

We replaced the entire roof on the school, rebuilt a fence, repaired drywall, painted a huge beautiful mural, cleaned the grounds, and played lots of basketball, soccer, and Frisbee with the kids. Back at the church building a second work team cleaned out a store room, painted the walls, hung blinds, built shelves, stocked $600 of groceries, and committed to maintain supplies in the food pantry for the church to distribute.  We delivered food and visited with several disciples.
On Sunday morning Vanessa sang and Casto preached in Spanish, and Nancy shared about the friendship between our churches.

We brought down tons of school supplies, boxes of Spanish bibles, candy, soccer uniforms and balls, and returned with fresh roasted coffee beans from Antigua (see Steve Cicci to buy some!)
For fun we toured a coffee farm, climbed a volcano, visited a textile museum, shopped in an open air handicraft market, heard traditional music (and some real Cuban salsa), watched the sunset from a rooftop café, ate fresh baked tortillas and giant papayas, toured Spanish colonial ruins, learned about Guatemalan history, geography and politics.  

As usual, the group traveled to a third world country to serve and ended up receiving more than they gave. The Proverbs say “He who is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will reward him for what he has done” (19:17). Everyone would say that they have already received reward enough in the lessons learned and the friendships made. It was an amazing, wonderful trip.
For more details talk to Tony, Mary, Langdon and Marc Morris, Carolyn, Nick, Brittany and Jillian Stanfield, Brian and Aaron Marco, Steve and Jo Cicci, Kris and Jordan Bailey, Vanessa and Adrian Nash, Mark and Andrew Felsher, Casto Fernandez, Esther Bridger, Bill, Nancy, Kristin and Calvin Winfrey.