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Adventures in Guatemala

Aug 24, 2016
 
I woke up very early this morning, too early to get up and do stuff, so I laid there in bed for an hour or more. My mind drifted to a very bizarre experience I had in Guatemala a few years back, that I hadn’t really thought about since it happened.

The first time I went to Guatemala was 2013 when about 150 JMT coaches took transformation to the country with John Maxwell. It was a truly sensational trip. While we were there, Paul and I really fell in love with the country and the beautiful people and so we decided we would like to do some charity work there. Over the next year or so we went back 3 or 4 times and looked at different projects that we could get involved with.

One trip, we talked to a Charity called DAR who ran school in the middle of nowhere. They offered to show us the school to see if it was the sort of project we wanted to invest in. It was either 4 hours of winding roads to get to it, or 45 minutes by helicopter. They offered to fly us there if we preferred, and so me, Paul and 2 others got into the helicopter at Guatemala City airport.

It was a very strange experience as the helicopter lifted off the ground and flew alongside the same runway that we had landed on just a few days before in a commercial jet! After about a minute the helicopter shot up into the air and then banked hard right. Up and away over the top of Guatemala City. I stared down at the tops of the all sky scrapers and in no time at all we were out of the city and heading over beautiful Guatemalan countryside, as far as the eye could see in every direction. It looked like typical Central American landscape to me, although I’d never seen it before!

We flew over rivers and streams, farmhouses, shacks and then the pilot pointed out an erupting volcano to the right! I’d never been in a helicopter before and so I found it a magical experience.

Then we circled around and landed in the garden of a fairly normal looking house! The pilot took care of the helicopter and we walked to the school.

The town was obviously very poor but when we got to the school, it was immaculate. A real oasis of promise in a desert of apparent pessimism. The faces of the children were alight with life – huge, beaming, welcoming smiles. The teachers were eager to show us around the school as it was, and then showed us their well thought out plans for what they needed.

Children had to leave the school after 4 years of education because they didn’t have a classroom for them to stay on another year. If they could build another classroom, instead of leaving at 12, the children could stay a whole extra year.

Then we went into the village and saw the huts where the families of the lucky children who went to the school lived. The cooking stoves had no chimneys venting the smoke outside the hut, so the huts were always smokey. Cancer was far, far higher than is should be amongst the families as a result. Another possible project was to install proper chimneys for the stoves for the village.

I felt very peculiar on the way home, like I had a sense of shame of living in such relative decadence.

The next morning our hotel was hit by an earthquake. Another frightening, sobering, perception altering experience – a story for another day!

When I got back home, Susan and I talked about the extent of the poverty in Guatemala and many other places in the world. We really thought about how we were going to be changed by this experience.

And in truth, there were many changes – things we decided to do, things we decided to stop doing and things we decided to be.

But one of the most important came from a quote by Mother Teresa ‘If you want to change the world, love your children.’

I love that quote because it is so simple, so powerful .. and so easy to do!

We decided that we would give more to charities, but also to give the gift of the habit of giving to charity to our children. So that it becomes automatic for them to think - not whether to give or not - but who to give to.

It is only a few years on, but I have to say, the signs are very encouraging.
 
Until next time .. 

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