Iowa First Presbyterian Church Mission Team

It is 5:30 in the morning, and the Iowa Mission Team of 66 people just left a little while ago. I tried to fall back asleep but was not able to! It has certainly been quite a week, and as most mission trips go, went by very quickly.

They team came last Saturday and were already separated into 3 groups. Each group rotated two to three times during the week between Hope Haven (assembling wheelchairs and a distribution), ImagininGuate (constructing a house), and smallchangeforbigchange. With Lisa, they were installing stoves and with me we had a VBS of up to 100 children. The majority of the team was youth from the youth group and had never been out of the country before. It was certainly an eye opening experience for everyone to not only leave the US, but to see the way people live who are living in poverty. Most of them had the opportunity to go inside at least one family’s home and saw the seriousness of the way families are living here in Guatemala.

The team who built the house worked with an organization called ImagininGuate that I mentioned above. It is a team of 4 guys from the very same community want to make a difference and whose passion is house building. They start from essentially nothing, the ground, and construct a home in one week. This was also a wonderful chance for the group to start a project so big and see it finished at the end of their time here. Each day the groups were separated in yet more groups for lunches in the homes of our most special families. This gives the women a chance to not only work and cook traditional food for visitors but also relationships to be built and for the groups to have a chance to talk with them and hear their stories.

Lives were touched, both for the Guatemalan people here but also with the huge team from Iowa. Many tears were shed as it was time to say goodbye yesterday and promises were made to come back. God was at work this week; keeping everyone safe and moving in our hearts.