First Full Day

Today we had our first full day of work here in Guatemala. Breakfast came early at 6:30, but it was a great meal of beans and tortillas. Afterwards we spent several hours organizing our tools as well as preparing some of our materials for later use. Then, little by little our teams made their way to their work sites. I’m on the water team so I’ll give you our story. We were the first to arrive at the new bridge site and we made our way through the village across the river and arrived at our project home. We made some more measurements and explained what we wanted to do to Diego. He is the father of the family who lives in the home. He was very excited about what we wanted to do and he quickly moved to cut away some of the plants and trees that were in our way. Also, to create space for the water tank that will hold the rainwater, we needed to move around 50 or 60 cinder blocks. It was a remarkable moment when we joined together with Diego and his sons to move the cinder blocks. Everyone was working together despite being separated by language and we were able to unite towards a common goal. A remarkable thing happened as well. One of the other villagers named Jesus was very interested in getting a water filter for himself. So now we will (hopefully) build two water filters and maybe even a second water collection system. God is certainly providing work for us and I’m sure we’ll be capable instruments for his work. Later in the day we had a devo with the villagers and David gave a lesson in Spanish to at least 50 of the villagers who had come to hear. It was very moving experience. We worked on our projects for the rest of the afternoon until rain began to threaten. When we made it back to the clinic it wasn’t but 5 minutes before it began pouring. It rained really hard for almost an hour and a half. I was completely soaked from head to the inside of my boots! Today was really great though. I’m sure that tomorrow will be just as good as we continue to work. I hope everybody back home is doing well and we’ll be writing more later!
- Alex Briski