Update and Info about Coming home!!!!!

We are back to in Guatemala City and are backing up tonight in order to be on the bus and headed to the airport early tomorrow morning.  I know we have struggled to keep the blog updated the past week, and for that I am sorry.  When we are in San Lucas Toliman we have a lot of long days and hard work, and by the time we are wrapping up the day, everyone is too tired to think clearly enough to write anything on here that makes much sense.  Now that we have had a chance to rest, I want to fill you in on what we have been doing and how things are going.  First and for most, I am so blessed to have spent these past two weeks with this group of people.  It has been such a joy to watch them work together and love the people of Guatemala.  Pretty much every day around Lake Atitlan was structured the same.  Early breakfast followed by an adventurous bus ride up to Tzan Corral...which was the village we were working exclusively in.  In Tzan Corral we were building homes for three different families.  This has been the third trip in a row that we have had the opportunity to serve the people of Tzan Corral, and I personally found myself falling in love with this little spot on our planet.  Its this little village that only has one road, that is essentially a stretch of cobble stones that go past the 75-100 one room homes, a tiny Catholic church, a cute little community center, and a 2 room school house where the little kids go to school.  The community is surrounded by some of the most beautiful country in the world.  As you look around the village there are steep hills covered in corn, coffee, and bean fields all perfected lined by row after row of what keeps these people alive throughout the year.  But what I love the most about this tiny village is the faces of the little children. You see, coming back to this community for the third time, I found myself getting of the bus and instead of seeing the faces of unknown children, I looked around and saw kids that I have watched grow up for the past 4 years.  I saw Jose Manuel, this little kid we built a house for 4 years ago, who 2 years ago sat in the window of his Grandma's house as he watched up build a house of his neighbors, and who was sitting on the same wall what he was running next to as our bus pulled away 2 years ago.  I got to talk (the best I could in lack of Spanish skills) with Kevin's Mom, and talk to her about how he was doing.  And then there was Danny and Silvia, a brother and sister that we again built a home for 4 years ago.  I have pictures of the two of them helping our team carry cinder blocks that we used to build their home, and back then they were hardly tall enough to hold the block off the ground.  This year I brought with me a stack of old pictures from previous trips that I had to opportunity to show some of these familiar faces what they and their family and friends looked like 2 and 4 years ago.  When I got to sharing those pictures with Danny and Silvia, it was a little bitter sweet.  You see, they are now being raised by their grandparents because not to long ago their mom decided to leave.  I can tell you, in all my trips to Guatemala, I have never felt the shared bond of love as I felt looking into their young eyes as I gave them a picture of the two of them with their mom.  Between the excitement of seeing her face and the welling up of tears in their eyes, we shared something that can only be described as a moment divinely ordained by our Lord and Savior.
       Besides building houses, leading a children's program, and sharing in relationships, one of my other favorite experiences of this past week was the soccer tournament that we hosted between ourselves and three of the little villages.  Though we are only bringing home the 4th place trophy (ignore the math of how many teams were in the tournament), it was an amazing experience of laughing with and sharing life with the Guatemalan people.  Some of the players on one of the teams that we played were had been working with us all week to oversee our building projects (someone has to show us how to build those homes).  It was so much fun cheering for and playing against our new friends.  Plus, this was the first time in all our trips that we actually scored a goal during any game, and we actually only lost our first game 3 to 4. 
      All in All, it has been a really good week.  We did have a few of the kids get sick for a couple of days, and had quite a few upset stomachs as well, but everyone recovered and is doing great now.  However, we are all really tired from such a long week of work and activities, and I can confidently say that we are all really ready to be home.  
     Tonight as we continued to discuss what it will be like to come home, there was a little bit of mixed emotions because we are all ready to get back and see our family and friends, and are looking forward to so many things, but we also are all really aware that it's going to be difficult as well.  God has been working in each of these peoples lives, and part of what He has been doing is changing our perspectives on the world around us.  At the beginning of the trip we asked all of you to be praying that God would break us, so that he could be remade and refilled by Jesus...and God has been faithful in answering those prayers.  What that means is that for many of us, we are going back with a very different view of our lives, our world, and our God than we had when we left.  Beyond going through a profound spiritual experience, we also face the reality that as we come from a place like Guatemala back home we will experience what is called Reverse Culture shock.  Because of what we have seen and experience here in Guatemala, some of our American culture will seems sadly empty or void in comparison to what we have been living these past two weeks.  One example that many of the high school students noticed this morning when we encountered a couple at the hotel we stayed at, had to do with cell phones.  These high school students who just 2 weeks ago were dreading leaving their phones behind found themselves frustrated as they watched this couple sit together at breakfast and never stop staring at their cells long enough to enjoy one another's company.  There are so many of those little things that will just throw us off a little in the days and weeks ahead that in some ways it is intimidating.
    It's not as if we are going to come home and refuse to integrate back into our normal lives.  Trust me there are so many things that we have profoundly missed (like flushing TP down the toilets, drinking water from the tap, being able to wash our clothes when they are dirty and being able to put on clothes that are dry.  We are still looking forward to familiar foods, familiar faces, and ICE water (luke warm just doesn't cut it).  However, there will be some things that even though they are the same, we may look at them very differently (and that is a good thing).
    As we come home there are a few things that you all can do to help our team transition back into our North American Culture:

1.   Give us time to rest -  You can only begin to imagine how emotionally, spiritually, and physically draining an experience like this can be.  We have seen, done, experienced a lot over these two weeks, and taking in all of it can be exhausting.  
2.  Listen to our stories and encourage us to share them - One of the realities that we have talked about is the fact that sometimes our stories will not do justice to our experiences.  In some ways it will feel to us that "you had to have been there".  Explaining what "we did" will sometimes feel inadequate in portraying our experience of this place and how God was working in our lives.  When we tell stories about what we have done down here, understand that we might be feeling like we really can't do them justice.  Listen intently and try to see the emotion and feelings that we have connected to those stories.  If some of us aren't really telling you much about our time here, ask us questions about what we did and saw.
3. Encourage our asking of hard questions - We have seen a lot and what we have seen might make us question some of what we have taken for granted in the past.  Distribution of wealth, the purpose of money, right and wrong, our understanding of God and faith have all been confronted by our being in Guatemala, and some of us might be asking hard questions of those around us.  (I.E. It is hard to hear middle class white Americans talk about not having enough money for this or that after seeing Guatemala children who live in a one room house with 6 others hoeing in the field after school so that they might have enough money to have a healthy meal).  If we ask those question in the wrong places or at the wrong times, understand its not out of disrespect or anger, it just that we might be struggling to make sense of it all, and are just trying to figure out how to proceed.
4. Don't lavish us with Gifts - If you bought your child, spouse, etc. something special because you found yourself missing them, hold onto it for a little while.  As we are trying to make sense of all that we have seen and done, the last thing we need is to be pulled back into the world of material possessions driving our lives.  One of the great lessons that I can say we all experience here in Guatemala is seeing those with so little find profound Joy in simply being together.   If you want to show us how much you missed us, do what you can to spend time with us and allow us to share our experiences with you.  A perfect example of this came up today with my daughter (Korinne).  Instead of wanting to spend the afternoon shopping for "Guatemala Souvenirs she wanted to go to the Chocolate Museum and learn about how Cocoa has been shaped by the Guatemalan culture and how it has shaped the Guatemalan people.  At the end of our chocolate making lesson, she decided that instead of buying things for everyone on her list, she wanted to get the stuff to make hot chocolate from scratch (like taking the cocoa nibs, roasting them, peeling them, crushing them, and then mixing the cocoa past with the right ingredients to make Hot Chocolate.  It was so cool for me as her dad to hear that the gift she wanted to give was to share her experiences with those she loved.  Help us keep that perspective by allowing the team members to deepen their relationships with each of you.
5. Realize that exhaustion, mixed with completely new experiences may be messing with our emotions.... Love us through the emotions....I promise if we are being short, disrespectful, or emotional we are not doing it on purpose, we are just in a process of making sense of it all, and sometimes it can be confusing or frustration.  
6. Encourage us to get together and talk with one another - I know that we have all been together for the past 2 weeks, and should be to the point of breaking...However, we are also the only ones that really can understand all that we have experienced.  We want to and will do our best to share with you all as much as we can, but at the same time we have shared so many things that we can help each other understand everything we are feeling or experiencing, because we have those shared memories.  Please don't take it personally if we want to spend time with one another to laugh, talk, or even cry together...It's not that we don't want to spend time with you, its just that we need someone that can better understand what we have been through.  
7. And finally...Keep praying for us -  God has been doing a lot in our hearts and lives, and we are doing our best to integrate what we have learned down here into our lives up there...AND... God is not done with us yet.  He has bigger and better plans for our futures, and we need Him to lead and guide us into the men and women of God that he wants each of us to be.  Please continue to pray that God will keep making us. 

See you all soon.  (We should be pulling into CPPC around 1:00am Thursday.  I'll let people use my phone to call and let parents, spouses, and others know a more accurate arrival time.

Excited to see you all,

Doug