After a lovely and relaxing rest week in Monterrico, we headed off refreshed to our new project.

We arrived in Guatemala City on the Sunday and got settled into the church building that’ll be our home for the next two months. We enjoyed exploring the building, as there are so many random rooms – great hide and seek potential! The family that looks after the church live on the top floor, so we were introduced to them. We’re so thankful to have this space and we hope we’ll get on well with the family (particularly considering that noise travels extremely easily here!).

The charity/project we’re working with is called Puerta de Esperanza (Door of Hope) and they provide support to a community in an area in the centre of the city called La Terminal. Most of it is made up of a huge market where people both live and work, sometimes living above, or even in, their stalls. Many families live in blocks of flats where the rooms can be as small as 2×2 meters. We visited a family in one of these rooms and there were nine of them all living in the one room. Some of these buildings also make individuals pay every time they use the bathroom or shower, or to wash up their kitchen items. There’s also a rubbish dump in La Terminal which people live and work on. For a lot of us, seeing that area was very impactful.

Puerta de Esperanza recognises that children are often not being encouraged in their education, for example, parents don’t have the time to help them with their homework. Also, when children in La Terminal are not at school, they would normally either work alongside their parents, or stay at home alone. This means that children are at risk of participating in gang culture or taking drugs. Puerta tries to positively impact these kids’ lives and prevent risks by running homework clubs at their centre (located just outside La Terminal) throughout the day. As the kids here only go to school for half the day, the little ones are at the centre in the morning while the older ones are at school, and then vice versa. At the centre the children receive teaching, and also some food (breakfast and lunch for the morning group, and lunch and a snack for the afternoon group).

The project also recognises that some children cannot attend the centre so we need to go to them, to their homes. They can’t attend for various reasons such as: many of them don’t go to school as they are working; they have to stay at home to look after their siblings; or they are addicted to drugs. So there’s a dedicated “street team” who go out and help children with their homework, and check up on the children at risk. A few of us this week joined the street team (or “caminar juntos” (“walking together”) as the team calls it) on Friday, where we spent the day visiting families that Puerta is connected with. We would give each child a wet wipe and encourage them to wipe their face and hands, then we’d cut their nails and clean their ears. We gave them each a drink and a tostada with bean paste on it with a bit of parmesan. In total that day, we probably visited around 40-50 children. Even though what we did was small, we felt like the charity was meeting a need, and we enjoyed getting to know some of the kids that we met.

On Tuesday we visited another project that the charity has which is just outside the city, about an hour away from La Terminal. A few years ago, due to the drugs and gangs in La Terminal, many families moved away. These families set up homes illegally in an empty piece of land (they call it “invasion”) and people there are living in homes made of metal sheets with no running water or plumbing of any kind. They have illegally connected themselves to the national grid to get some electricity. As there’s no drainage of any kind, it floods when it rains, with sewage water even getting into some of the houses. The charity has another centre there where children or adults going back to education can come and do homework, receive a snack, and play games. We spent all of Tuesday and Thursday there.

On Friday, those of us not on the caminar juntos team played sports with both the morning and the afternoon kids. It was fun to join in playing football and other games, but very hot!

As a precaution we are not allowed to go out by ourselves, so the team at Puerta have been kind enough to organise having a member of their team to accompany us on our rest day on Saturdays so we can go out. We went to a big shopping mall and visited a launderette to clean our clothes. Once we got back we’d planned to go to the park, but it rained so we stayed and played card games and practiced our Spanish with our friend Jacob.

On Sunday we had our first church service, and it was a bit different this week because it was Mother’s Day. We attended the men’s and women’s Bible study groups that start before church. The service had a few songs in Spanish that we recognised, and after the sermon some of the kids performed short dramas about Mother’s Day. Each mother was celebrated and given a rose. After church some of the women prepared something similar to tamales for everyone, served with a deep red drink that we found out was made with hibiscus and beetroot. After church one of the leadership team, Deborah, brought us a feast of spaghetti bolognese, salad and cheesy bread that we all ate together. It was probably the most homely meal we’d had since leaving the UK, and definitely our first proper salad!

We have been warmly welcomed by the congregation here and feel very grateful to be staying in the church. We are excited to get to know people here and in our project as well.

Answers to prayer/things we’ve been grateful for:

• The opportunity to join in with something bigger.
• There’s been more opportunities to learn Spanish, so we’ve been learning rapidly.
• The kindness of the church congregation – they even got us a new fridge since ours was broken!
• Having the church building to live in, and the kindness of the family who live here.

Prayer requests:

• Safety, particularly for the street team as they visit the community surrounding the project.
• Health.
• Energy, as it is much hotter here and the work is very full-on.
• For the mental wellbeing of everyone – that our spirits would remain high and that we continue to enjoy being together, despite the long days.
• That Charlie F’s foot will heal quickly, as while on holiday, he cut it on something in the sea at Monterrico. He’s had to be on crutches, meaning he can’t get as involved in the project as he’d want to.

Thank you for everyone’s prayers and support!

• Emily, Theo, Carrie, Hannah, Ben, Ella H, Ella S, Charlie F, Charlie P, Charlotte

(Written by Ella H and Emily)

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