Friday, May 29, 2009

Guate and Kappa Collide.


The first question we get when we tell people about this trip is "How do you guys know Kappa girls from Baylor?" When Russ was a youth guy at our church, I had a small group of girls that I mentored for years. They have since grown up and one of them, Lauren, went to Baylor. Being the Chaplain of her sorority, she had the idea to take a team on a mission trip and the conversation started. They did fund raisers and raised all the support they needed.

Last Tuesday we all met and flew to Guatemala. The theme of the week was to hang lightly not tightly to our expectations. The girls loaded up their back packs with toys, stickers, side walk chalk, bubbles, etc as we headed out on Wednesday morning for an orphanage for special needs children called Los Gozosos (the joy filled ones). We were all blown away by the director's story of faith, love for these children, for this country and God's provision.

(Where special children find their family)
As she finished sharing her story, we were divided up into groups to prepare the orphanage grounds for some major construction coming up this summer. In other words: manual labor. The girls jumped right in and were nothing but happy to help. Since the kids were all in school, we worked all morning and afternoon on everything from clearing storage rooms to become more classrooms to hauling dirt and breaking up concrete to help level out the country road. We were exhausted by the end of the day.



We would have done manual labor all week for this face!

Russ and Mel's brother, Peter, hung a tarp between the house and the outdoor dining area so they could prevent getting wet in the rainy season while taking the kids to eat every day.

The teacher in me had to peek and see what school looked like for these sweet kids.


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