Back at Home

Well I arrived back home on Tuesday night. It was wonderful to come home to my mother's cooking and sleep in my own bed. :) I've also been enjoying having hot running water always available, and not thinking about cockroaches in my room at night. We live in such luxury in the US. I have never appreciated hot showers and a clean house as much as I do now. You really can't appreciate what you have until you go without it for a while.
I hope that while I was there, I was able to bless the school and the kids in different ways, but I know that my time in Guatemala, more than anything, was a learning experience for me. It was really good to get some experience teaching kids so I know what I'm getting into studying elementary ed. After the first week of teaching kindergarten I had decided I could never ever be a teacher, and was almost sure I would be changing my major as soon as possible. But once I started teaching a little older kids--third and fourth and fifth graders--I really loved it and now I'm much more confident going into elementary ed.
I also learned a lot from my time in Guatemala by seeing Marta and her dedication to her work. I envision myself in the future working in a very similar ministry to Marta's, if not in Guatemala, somewhere else in Latin America. So seeing the way she ran this school helped me understand some of the challenges and the fruits of working with kids from hard families and backgrounds. For one thing, kids from these kinds of families tend to be very undisciplined which makes teaching them very difficult. But when they don't get a lot of love at home, they are so excited to get hugs and attention from their teachers. That was my favorite part of spending time at Preciosos Momentos--just loving the kids. The joy of Marta's ministry is seeing kids get all the way through sixth grade who otherwise would not have gone to school at all.
I don't think I ever mentioned this, but while I was there, Marta made a huge step in expanding her school to go through 9th grade. She got the permission and certification from the department of education to teach "basicos", which is kind of the equivalent of middle/high school. Now she needs teachers for the older kids, who she hopes to start in February for next school year. They will go to school in the afternoon, after the younger kids leave. Getting the certification was a huge step which everyone said was impossible with the school's lack of...everything, but God worked things out. Now we need to pray for good teachers to come.
Overall, I'm really thankful for my time in Guatemala and everything that I learned. God is working there and its exciting to see what he is doing. I can't wait to return to Guatemala. But for right now, I get to start getting ready for college :)

Poverty

In the neighborhood where I live, there are two areas where all the people are extremely poor...La Isla and Los Eucaliptos. Many of the kids at the school come from these neighborhoods. So on Monday, we walked down to Los Eucaliptos, and yesterday we walked to La Isla to visit some of the kids at their houses and to get to know how they live. It is amazing to see how they live. Last year during our vision trip, we visited La Limonada, which seemed very poor--but those houses were really in good shape compared to some of the places we visited in the last couple days. They are just tin shacks on the side of the ravine. They cook over fires, and of course they don't have bathrooms. In order to get to their houses some have to climb down the steep side of the ravine, which can be very dangerous in the rainy season. You would never guess, from seeing the kids at school, that they came from those kinds of homes.

As you go lower down into the ravine, it gets harder and harder to walk down the trail, and the houses get worse and worse. But it is also more dangerous the lower you go, because there is more gang violence lower down. From a distance, though, the ravine is beautiful because it is so green.

After going down there, I was talking to Martha about poverty. One of the biggest reasons these people can't get out of this poverty is because the kids don't get an education. The parents would rather have the kids working at home, so they don't send them to school. Without school, they never get a better job, and the cycle just repeats itself. But according to Martha, another big reason things don't improve is because of missionaries and churches who hand out free food and gifts. Every day, there is at least one free meal for the kids of La Isla. If people get free food every day, the parents stop sending their kids to school. If food is free, why study to try to make a better living?

It was several years ago that a new feeding program got started in La Isla. As soon as the program started, Martha lost a lot of the students at the school. It surprises me that it would make that big of a difference, but this is what Martha tells me.

Another interesting thing is that at the school, there are 27 kids in first grade, but only 6 in sixth grade. Every class gets smaller and smaller as they get older. There's a whole lot of kids in this neighborhood who don't go to school. And their parents don't care. Even if people are given the chance to get out of their poverty, so many just don't try. They don't want to put in the effort, and if they aren't willing to work at improving their situation, there's nothing someone else can do for them.

It definitely isn't the case with everyone. Yener is a sixth grader who started out in the same situation. He lives in one of the tin shacks in the ravine. Martha found him selling candy in the streets when he was about seven, and she got him to start coming to school. He's gotten all the way to sixth grade, and he's very smart. I was teaching English to the sixth graders the other day and he knew all the answers and was very excited to participate in everything we were doing. I think that he has a lot of potential. Its easy to get discouraged about the situation with so many of these kids, but there's some cases like Yener who make the work worth it.