Being Epic: building houses, feeding children in Guatemala

Palm Coast Observer
Neighbors

Monday morning last week, I woke up in Guatemala with my team of 16 other people from Epic Church in Palm Coast, and we built a house in the town of Pastores for a single mother and her two children.

Tuesday morning, we woke up and built a second house. This time, the home was for a single mother with six children and required a hike up a mountain with several boxes of tools.

These houses were not what most people in the United States think of as a home, but to these families, it meant the world. The concrete slab floor, steel walls with two windows and a lockable door and steel roof replaced dirt floors and unsecure metal sheeting.

After lunch Tuesday afternoon, I stood wedged in between the housing structure and the dirt-covered mountain side, which would give out and crumble every 10 minutes or so. I gripped a Sawzall power tool with all my strength and cut a window into the steel, moving the blade up and down to flow with the shape of the sheeting. After completing the second house, the reality of what our team was doing for these families hit me, when Anna, the homeowner, expressed how grateful she was to have a place for her sons to sleep. Up until then, they were sleeping outside. If there was a dry eye there, I didn’t see it.

Wednesday started a different side of our mission’s trip, which were we completing through a partner church in Antigua, Iglesia del Camino. The rest of the week focused on children in great need. We traveled to the town of Santa María de Jesús, an indigenous Cakchiquel community dating back to the 1600s, located at the base of Volcano Agua. It is among the poorest and most malnourished communities in all of Guatemala, where the average daily wage from working in the local cornfields is Q30 a day, which is just under $4 in the United States.

Water is also a problem for this community. There are, at present, two natural water springs providing water for about 20% of the community. The remaining water is pumped from wells lower on the volcano.

These pumps are turned on every other day for one hour a day. And even then, it is not drinkable.

In Santa María we connected with Campos de Sueños, the community feeding center, where we helped serve lunch to 258 children before hosting a Bible program in the afternoon. Presently, Campos de Sueños provides one meal, twice a week. A new feeding center is in the process of being built, which will accommodate as many as 500 children at one time for the nutritional feeding program, with the hope of operating at full capacity three to four times a week. In addition to feeding, the center will also provide a short-term water solution for the entire community. Under this complex will be storage tanks for 180,000 liters of water. Over the complex will be a roof that takes advantage of the six months of rain each year, collecting that rain into the storage tanks.

But the day that my emotions really got the best of me was Friday afternoon, when we visited Rosa de Amor, an orphanage for girls in San Lucas.

I pushed the little girls on the swings. They asked me all kinds of questions, and then they wanted me to help them across the monkey bars. When I said goodbye to them, three or four of the little girls hugged my legs and tackled me and said, “No say bye!” repeatedly. I didn’t want leave, either. The home was well run, and the girls were so full of joy, even though we knew they were there because they had been abused or found on the streets.

Having only been back in the States for a couple days, it’s hard for me to put into words everything that my team experienced during our week in Guatemala, which felt so much longer. But my pastor, Trent Schake, who was on the trip with us, said it best. The bottom line, he said, always comes back to what Jesus said, “It is better to give than receive.”

“It always amazes me what God does when we serve others,” Schake said. “Too often we are focused on what we are giving up (time, money, energy) and we overlook what we are getting. When we serve others, God does inside us what only He can do. He helps us become a little more like Jesus.

“Jesus said He didn’t come to be served, but rather to serve. After serving, we can be physically tired and yet spiritually full. We can feel depleted and yet be overflowing with love.

“God is at work around the world and it is a pleasure to play a small part in what He is doing. We don’t have to go to places like Guatemala to serve. We can do that every day at work, at school and at home. I pray that more and more people will discover that it truly is better to give than receive.”