Guatemala 08 Preveiw

I had the opportunity to go to Guatemala in September. I ahve not been able to blog about it so much due to my schedule and the fact that I am still processing what I encountered. I went with four other guys who would be interested in taking teams down to work with the missionaries we met. The purpose of the trip was to get an idea of what a missions trip would be like, and then to plan out next years trip. I saw everything that I needed to see and Shiloh Community Church is going to Guatemala in July of 2009. We went with an organization called Simply Missions. If anyone is looking for a missions agency to work with, this is the one to go through. You will not feel like a cog in the machine, they connect churches to missionaries in different feilds around the world. I tried to take trips through some larger organizations, but I always felt lost and disconnected with the size of the organization. Simply Missions is a great personal organization that can tailor a trip to meet what you want to do instead of you tailoring your team to meet what the organization wants you to do.

The first day was travel. We took a 6am flight out of Detroit and arrived in Guatemala City at 1pm Michigan time (11am Guatemala Time) The trip licked our butts since we didn't sleep the night before, so the first day we got out room and met the missionary family the Banta's and took it easy.

One of our days was spent in Paradise, or Zone 18, which is a squatter village (500,000 people) built upon the Guatemala City garbage dump. The picutres here show some people we met, and some houses we got to walk through.

Many houses are washed away in garbage slides, kind of like land slides but with trash, so the church the Banta's are associated with is building retaining walls to keep houses from sliding into an abyss of trash and mud. The church is also building houses for people from their church who live there. You can see the block house in these pictures is one of the "nicest on the block" complete with windows and doors. Most people live in shacks held up with large sticks and walled in with corrigated tin. The family you see here is waiting on a house. They have 6 - 10 people living in a two room shack with an open fire for a stove and one outlet for the radio. They have three mattresses in one room that they all sleep in, but the rain is draining in and making the mattresses and blankets wet and moldy.

In the center of town there is a dirt feild for a soccer feild that the church is fixing up to make a community center for this area.