I'm realllllly close to finishing my first year of graduate school (!) so I expect to have a blog post about that coming up but today I'm just going to write a short one about something else.
This afternoon we had our "halfway there" meeting about Guatemala and I have gotten a lot of new information that I'd like to share with you.
First is about Guatemala itself. Why are we going there?
- In the second half of the 20th century, Guatemala suffered from a 36 year civil war resulting in about a quarter million deaths and a million refugees.
- Guatemala is the most populous country in Central America
- But their GDP per capita is less than half of the average for Latin America
- 50% of the population is under the age of 20
- 55% of the population is under the poverty line
- 40% of children under the age of 5 are chronically malnourished
Where will we be there?
- Membrillal, a small village about 20 km from Guatemala City
- Zapote, a small community about 45 minutes from Guatemala City
- This is the poorest region in Guatemala:
- over 75% are unemployed
- mostly orphans and widows
- Also apparently it's pretty close to an active volcano? Cool!
Who am I going with?
- The church I attend here, Capital Church
- 26 people
- A leader who has been there twice
- About a dozen high school students
- Roughly a third have been there before
- Only myself and one other girl speak Spanish
- Samantha! We are so excited to be able to serve God together!
- An organization called Hungry For Life
- An international organization committed to spreading the love of Jesus through service
- Established relationships with communities in 8 different countries
- They deal with all the logistics for travel, lodging, food, and emergencies
- 3 leaders from HFL will be with our team
What will I be doing there?
- Well, we won't know for sure until we get there, but HFL currently has 4 projects going in this community that we will likely help with (and Capital has worked on all four of these projects in the past)
- Repairing and rebuilding homes
- Building stoves
- Currently families cook their meals over open flames inside their homes, leading to lots of respiratory problems
- School construction
- The school isn't big enough to hold all of the children in the sponsorship programs
- Church construction
- We will also be visiting the families of the children that Capital sponsors in this region
- Through Angel Tree funds, Capital sponsors four children here
- We will be bringing them gifts and letters from the church and of course spending time with them and showing them we love them!
- The youth are also working on putting together a youth conference to host while we are there, since there are so many kids
And that's about as much as we know so far!
Finally, I'm humbly coming to you with a request for your support in a few ways.
As I mentioned in my last blog post, God was faithful in easing my initial financial doubts about this project in supplying me with an amazing nannying job at the end of last semester. However, in March, the family I was working for decided that they needed someone to be there in a more full-time capacity. I was really struggling to hold everything together with my school work while nannying only two afternoons a week and so we had to part ways. This left me a few hundred dollars short of what I need to raise for the trip, which was $1900 in total.
At our meeting today we were informed that the CDC has announced that for the region that we are going to during the time we're going, we should get vaccinated against Typhoid. This vaccination will be another $200.
To be completely honest, I was really hoping to be able to make enough money to pay for this trip on my own, and I am struggling with having to ask for financial support. I am trusting God that this request will not be a burden to you, my friends and family, but rather that some of you will feel that this is an opportunity for you to be a part of this story of God's grace in Guatemala and His stretching of my faith through this trip. I am trusting Him that the rest of you will see this as an opportunity to pray for me and my continued reliance on His sovereign plan.
If you would like to give a tax deductible donation to my trip, you can follow this link (Member-Barriuso)
The next way you can support me is to continue to pray for me in a few ways:
- For faith that God will provide the funds
- For opportunities to practice Spanish
- To get to know my teammates better, and maybe make a friend
- For diligence in preparing my heart
- For motivation to prepare my body
And finally, it is also apparently kind of common (?) to get pretty sick from the Typhoid vaccine, and this is something I am really nervous about. I would appreciate prayers that my body handles the vaccine well.
Thank you for reading all of this (it wasn't so short after all) and thank you for your prayerful consideration of support. I love you all so much and wish I could give you a big squeeze!
xoxo,
Taylor Anne
