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!