Kristen & Joe’s Guatemala Mission Trip: We Made It!
Right now I am sitting at the cafe at Porch de Solomon. It’s a really cool place for people to gather. In addition to a full service coffee bar, it also has a pool table, a room to gather and watch movies, a restaurant, and a beautiful patio on the roof. Tonight, Lloyd (who is a founder of Porch de Solomon) is playing with his band, but more about that later.
Thankfully, the trip here was uneventful. We left E3 at around 4:15 pm on Thursday. We drove to Atlanta and stayed overnight in a hotel there. Before heading to bed, we worked on the bags we will be giving to the village kids. We crammed 5 of us in the room together, but only 2 snored so I guess that is good. We had breakfast at Denny’s before boarding the plane at 9:30 am to Guatemala City.
Guatemala is fascinating. The first thing we saw leaving the airport was lots of other volunteers. A couple things we learned on our 3 hour trip to Panajecal was that motorcyclists here are suicidal and that the Guatemalan version of construction cones are painted rocks piled on top of each other. We also saw many locals in their traditional clothes along the way. We checked into the hotel, and hung out at Porch de Solomon for the rest of the evening.
Today, we had a devotional time, then orientation about Porch de Solomon. In addition to having a great coffee house, Porch is responsible for many great things in the community: providing housing for people in the community, helping provide much-needed surgeries for babies with cleft palates, holding vacation Bible school for children, and helping raise funds so parents can send their children to school (you have to pay to go to school here).
After orientation, we went to the site where we were to help built a home for 7 women. I tied rebarb most of the morning and Joe made a new friend (a chicken).
Later that afternoon, we went to the local cemetery and walked by the lake. The cemeteries here are so beautiful and colorful. Many of them have paintings on them showing the deceased doing something they loved. Even though I couldn’t read them, it was easy to learn something about them just by looking at where they were buried.
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