JoAnna's Guatamala Trip

Going by boat on Lake Atitlan from Panajachel to Santiago. JoAnna, Julia and Janelle. (I won the splashing contest!)

As many of you know, I traveled to Guatemala this summer with my mom Maryanna and her partner Elizabeth on a pilgrimage with Faith at Work (http://www.faithatwork.com/) to build a school. Faith at Work works with PAVA to help bring potable water to villages, build schools, etc. This year we built a school in La Chusita.

During the rainy season, the road to the village becomes impossible to take by bus. We were given the choice to walk the last 2 kilometers or ride in the back of a truck. I chose a truck for couple of days. It felt so strange to be able to stand in the back of a pick up truck, and we hung on for dear life!

I was very excited to be able to go not only to visit the Mayan villages but to work on my Spanish after so many years. We landed in Guatemala City and then traveled to Antigua to stay. It was a 3 hour ride each way to the village of La Chusita for the days work. The village was on the side an active volcano which burped several times while we were there.

Maryanna showed her strength on the final day, as they were making the cement to put in the trenches. Not easy work by any means, and you had to keep at it once the cement mixer was working.

The first day in the village, David welcomed the group with a song. He is an extremely smart child, and when he realized I had an English/Spanish dictionary, he wanted to look up words to learn English. Many of the villagers wanted not only to know Spanish (their second language), they also had a thirst for learning English. I was asked by a mom in the village to bring her a book in English. I quickly found a bilingual book in a bookstore in Antigua, and took it to the village the next day. I sat with some young girls and read it with them, they read it to me in Spanish, and I read them the words in English. Soon after some older boys came over and also read the book, in English and Spanish. We seem to take learning for granted here in the states, what a welcome it was to experience children with a real thirst for knowledge.

How wonderful it was to be able to use my Spanish again after so many years. Sometimes laughable (especially on the first day in the village when I was surrounded by so many moms and young children), but always appreciated.

Mi amiga favorita! She checked on me often during the work day. Whenever I looked up from bending rebar or shoveling, she seemed to always be there, sometimes alone, sometimes with her younger sisters. This was on a day when I had to take a break because I was weak from being a little sick from the stomach thing. How special it was to get to know her!

What amazed me the most about this pilgrimage was knowing that everything will turn out okay, and will be wonderful in God's eyes, and most of it already is!! I hope to not be so wasteful with my day to day use of things, seeing as how in the village even watermelon seeds were a blessing to find in a freshly cut watermelon, because one seed is replanted for future growth. Amazing how we like everything seedless here, from watermelons to cucumbers. I think we have forgotten how important every little seed is! A good parable for life also!

This was truly God's tierra (land), and the people were truly a blessing to me, more so than they could ever imagine.

To give credit where credit is due, the pictures from this trip were taken by others in the group.

Below is a link to another slide show from the trip. Go to the link http://faithatwork.com/events/Guatemala_Pilgrimages.html and select the 2008 slide show. It was put together by Kris Herbst and has some great captions.