Pastors y Medicos

Our days have been incredibly packed for the last week and more. The Barrera's and I packed light and headed up to the mountains above Salama on the way to Cobán Thursday last week. Our church, Desert Springs, was hosting a pastors conference at the Posada del Quetzal and we were arriving early to see that all was ready and prepared; and it was. It was an incredibly lush setting, green, ferns of many types, huge tree ferns, tall trees with mossy bark; a jungle paradise. That afternoon a van arrived delivering the first contingent from Desert Springs; Bart Faris, one of our team leaders who grew up in Latin America and is totally bilingual; Tim Ragsdale, one of our elders; Greg Schneeberger, our former youth pastor that will be leaving for a position in California and is also bilingual; and my three young adults, Sophia Edwards, Brian Whippo, and Rachel Breidenbach. It was really great seeing everybody and I think it was Sophie that just about immediately pinned me with my new Guatemalan name, Abuelito Loco. Also arriving in the van was Tania, a charming young Christian lady from Mexico that was going to be our interpreter, when necessary, for the young adult team for the next five weeks.

The following day, the Rabinal Achi pastors began to arrive and after lunch and time to get reacquainted with old friends and new friends, we started the conference. The Desert Springs contingent of three taught, and on Saturday we continued with testimonies and a session taught by Francisco Benefield of Guatemala City. The testimonies were powerful. A wife (names withheld for security) gave her testimony about their time in Morocco, ministering for twenty years until her husband was kicked out and forbidden to return. She is from El Salvador and her husband is a water engineer from Guatemala. They are now back in Guatemala, but their heart remains in the Middle East and they are now awaiting word as to whether they can go to live in Tunisia. Our own Sophia gave her testimony about how cancer has impacted her family and how they have come to see God more real in their lives. She also explained that the reason her hair was cut off was that there was a little girl that was bald due to chemotherapy and she donated all her hair for a wig for the little girl. Also often during the retreat, Brian would get up at the end of breaks and be joined by the other young adults, both North American and Achi and lead everyone in song, Achi and Spanish songs. After a few sessions, the pastors named the group Las Piedras Vivas (The Living Rocks, see Luke 19:40 and 1 Peter 2:5). This was the second pastors retreat I have been able to go to and once again I was blessed.

After the retreat ended Saturday afternoon so the pastors could be back in their churches on Sunday, we returned to San Miguel Chicaj and met up with the medical team that just arrived the day prior from New Mexico. With the addition of the medical team, we were now a team of about 20 gringos plus our Achi and locals made us a team of over thirty. I know we were over thirty, because one evening our regular bus broke down (not an unusual event in Guatemala) and they sent a bus that designed for twenty passengers and we crammed in 32 of us plus the medical supplies because it was raining and we could not put the supplies on the roof rack (no one brought a tarp).

Sunday morning we were bussed as close as we could get to the church we were attending. In order to get to the church, we hiked by fields and over a cable bridge and reached our church, a simple cinder block building with a dirt floor and plastic lawn chairs. This was a church that Pastor David Ixcopal planted and he did introductions and then Stevie gave a very well received testimony about her great-grandmother who was the first believer on the Jemez pueblo. Stevie was also wearing traditional pueblo clothes. And after Stevie, Brian once again led music and then Bart preached. Then on Monday through Friday we did four medical missions at three different locations; Tempisque, Buena Vista and Chichalom. We saw over 300 people and witnessed many blessings and some tragedies. We saw a lady with untreated and very advanced cancer on her jaw and all Dr. Jacobo could do was prescribe morphine for what terminal. And in another community we were made aware of a nearby family with two very, very ill young boys. Bart made a quick home visit and recognized that the two young boys about one year old and four years old were near death and rushed them back to the clinic. We found out they both had infantile diabetes and the family had no way to refrigerate the necessary insulin. Plus the grandfather did not want the boys stuck with needles any longer and believed that the money that had been spent on their health would have been better spent on property. So, despite our doctors insistence that these boys would die if they did not get to a hospital immediately, the mother absolutely would not allow them to go to the hospital. And she was smiling while she disagreed with the pleading advice. That was a tough one for all of us. That night at dinner, Dr. Jacobo's wife, with tears in her eyes was distraught with this situation because she knew that if we had stepped in, we would have been arrested by the police. But she also knew that in the USA this mother would have been arrested instead and she was distraught with the impotence of authorities in Guatemala.

On a brighter note, we have been doing both water/sanitation and medical missions in the village of Chichalom and there have been been a lot of improvements over the past few years in volume, purification, and distribution. And when we did the medical mission this year and saw nearly 150 patients, for the first time there were no cases of diarrhea or intestinal parasites, praise the Lord.

It has been a blessing to watch our team, many of them first timers, come alongside our Achi team and bless the villages. Some real friendships have developed and it has been wonderful and marvelous to see the prayer for the patients from everyone on the team, simultaneous prayers in Spanish, Achi and English. At this time, the medical team is now on their way back to the USA and I remain here with my young adults.