We are blessed and joyful to have a big pile of brightly colored shirts to bring with us!
Monday, January 20, 2014
Soccer Jerseys!
Making connections and building relationships is our goal. And what better way to reach out to kids than to just run around and play? The kids on our team are going to be part of a soccer camp our Guatemalan partners are working to start as a way to get local kids to come out and feel encouragement in their life. We are thankful and happy to have a generous donation of soccer jerseys to get the program started, and give the kids something fun. Thanks to the Eden Prairie Soccer Association for a donation of 250 youth jerseys! It just happens that the design they have is no longer offered by the clothing vendor and several years of odds and ends of bright colored jerseys are just sitting around with the association wondering what to do with them. So they gave them all to us!
We are blessed and joyful to have a big pile of brightly colored shirts to bring with us!
We are blessed and joyful to have a big pile of brightly colored shirts to bring with us!
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Across Cultures
We're going on a trip. Not just to help people, but to build relationships and support those who live and work there. We need food and shelter to physically survive, but relationships make us live. I think this is the biggest hurdle for a mission trip, especially when the mission is working with people.
We bring supplies to people who don't have them, but if that is the extent of the help, after we leave and the supplies run out the impact is minimal as life goes back to what it was. Or, what we consider "help" may not actually address their needs. Knowing the people you are serving is critical to effectively helping them. The needs of someone living in a place with cold temperature, snow, wealth and comfort are significantly different than someone in a town with few roads, perpetual warmth (Guatemala is called "land of eternal spring") and an unstable government.
Each week the Bridge Builders team meets in order to prepare us each for effective work. This weekend we are teaching each other about the culture we are visiting. Each person is tasked with reading a book relating to working in a foreign culture to get us thinking about life beyond our Minnesota winter. We share our thoughts and experiences with each other so that when we interact with people in rural Guatemala we can be seen as someone who actually tries to understand the people where we are. Some people on the team are travelling to Guatemala for the first time, some have been on this trip several times, one family is from Guatemala. Each person has a unique perspective we can learn from.
We encourage you to look around you and pay attention to the vast diversity of people. By looking beyond ourselves we are being obedient to God who has made us more than just a physical being but blessed with the richness of relationships. Following this belief may be work, but we gain a reward far greater than we can imagine!
We bring supplies to people who don't have them, but if that is the extent of the help, after we leave and the supplies run out the impact is minimal as life goes back to what it was. Or, what we consider "help" may not actually address their needs. Knowing the people you are serving is critical to effectively helping them. The needs of someone living in a place with cold temperature, snow, wealth and comfort are significantly different than someone in a town with few roads, perpetual warmth (Guatemala is called "land of eternal spring") and an unstable government.
Each week the Bridge Builders team meets in order to prepare us each for effective work. This weekend we are teaching each other about the culture we are visiting. Each person is tasked with reading a book relating to working in a foreign culture to get us thinking about life beyond our Minnesota winter. We share our thoughts and experiences with each other so that when we interact with people in rural Guatemala we can be seen as someone who actually tries to understand the people where we are. Some people on the team are travelling to Guatemala for the first time, some have been on this trip several times, one family is from Guatemala. Each person has a unique perspective we can learn from.
We encourage you to look around you and pay attention to the vast diversity of people. By looking beyond ourselves we are being obedient to God who has made us more than just a physical being but blessed with the richness of relationships. Following this belief may be work, but we gain a reward far greater than we can imagine!
Friday, January 10, 2014
Packing Day!
On Sunday we are having "packing day". It sounds like it might be stressful to pack when the trip is a month out, but the packing isn't for our personal items, it's for supplies we bring down. As part of working with churches in a poor area we try and "share the wealth" with what we can offer. Many of the villages we have relationships with do not have regular access to medical help or even basic hygiene supplies.
One thing the churches do to serve their communities is more than preaching at them, it's simply helping them with life. Poorer countries like Guatemala often have health issues simply because people don't know any different. Cleanliness is not understood to directly affect health and the ability to even have the chance to work, feed, and care for their families. While we are there, we help the churches provide a medical clinic. This gets people to actually come into their building and talk with them. We provide some basic education about water cleanliness, personal hygiene, and care for some basic health issues. When people are "cured" they often come back to the church because some trust has been built that someone actually cares about them. This opens the door for the church to actually build a relationship with someone and help them in a more meaningful way.
Another part of our trip is water filtration systems at some schools. Germ and parasite-infested water is an issue for towns without central water treatment. Kids can miss school from being sick, or having to stay home to care for someone else who is sick, or even go work themselves because the adults in the family are sick. In schools where our filters are installed have seen a significant increase in healthier children. This gets noticed. And trust and relationships are built to learn how and why this happens, and why people care enough to help them.
So we bring supplies with us as to not burden the churches we work with, and because we have the wealth and access to supplies that are simple and readily available to us. Ibuprofen, vitamins, and band-aids are some of the items we bring for the medical team. Shoes, pens, backpacks and notebooks are things we bring as gifts to the schools.
Because we are travelling to a different country, and are bringing items of value, various customs and import regulations need to be followed. This involves inventorying every item we bring: each bottle of medicine, each tube of toothpaste, etc. With most of the supplies being samples (ex: sample toothpaste tubes like what you get from the dentist) this creates a large list of itemized things to explicitly track. Each bag must be inventoried and marked. Government papers must be prepared and submitted both to the U.S. and Guatemala. And processing takes a few weeks. Packing day gives us the chance to all work together as a team, even before beginning the physical travel. It gives us a tangible view that our trip is about practically helping people as much as it is about sharing the gospel. If you are blind to basic needs, then you are blind to the love we are actually called to show each other. If we grasp this as a chance to help not only a person, but to support the churches and missionaries we work with by helping them build relationships in their communities, then we can better understand that our work can be much bigger than ourselves.
So packing day is here, and we celebrate this chance to live how we are called!
One thing the churches do to serve their communities is more than preaching at them, it's simply helping them with life. Poorer countries like Guatemala often have health issues simply because people don't know any different. Cleanliness is not understood to directly affect health and the ability to even have the chance to work, feed, and care for their families. While we are there, we help the churches provide a medical clinic. This gets people to actually come into their building and talk with them. We provide some basic education about water cleanliness, personal hygiene, and care for some basic health issues. When people are "cured" they often come back to the church because some trust has been built that someone actually cares about them. This opens the door for the church to actually build a relationship with someone and help them in a more meaningful way.
Another part of our trip is water filtration systems at some schools. Germ and parasite-infested water is an issue for towns without central water treatment. Kids can miss school from being sick, or having to stay home to care for someone else who is sick, or even go work themselves because the adults in the family are sick. In schools where our filters are installed have seen a significant increase in healthier children. This gets noticed. And trust and relationships are built to learn how and why this happens, and why people care enough to help them.
So we bring supplies with us as to not burden the churches we work with, and because we have the wealth and access to supplies that are simple and readily available to us. Ibuprofen, vitamins, and band-aids are some of the items we bring for the medical team. Shoes, pens, backpacks and notebooks are things we bring as gifts to the schools.
Because we are travelling to a different country, and are bringing items of value, various customs and import regulations need to be followed. This involves inventorying every item we bring: each bottle of medicine, each tube of toothpaste, etc. With most of the supplies being samples (ex: sample toothpaste tubes like what you get from the dentist) this creates a large list of itemized things to explicitly track. Each bag must be inventoried and marked. Government papers must be prepared and submitted both to the U.S. and Guatemala. And processing takes a few weeks. Packing day gives us the chance to all work together as a team, even before beginning the physical travel. It gives us a tangible view that our trip is about practically helping people as much as it is about sharing the gospel. If you are blind to basic needs, then you are blind to the love we are actually called to show each other. If we grasp this as a chance to help not only a person, but to support the churches and missionaries we work with by helping them build relationships in their communities, then we can better understand that our work can be much bigger than ourselves.
So packing day is here, and we celebrate this chance to live how we are called!
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