Escuela Integrada

The Escuela Integrada is a K-9th public school located in Antigua. However, unlike other public schools in Guatemala, Integrada covers 90 percent of the cost of going to school for each of its students. It is free to attend public school in Guatemala, but students must purchase their own uniforms, textbooks, school supplies, food, etc., so while it's technically "free," only the rich kids go. Integrada was started by two missionaries - Andrew and Rebecca - who moved to Guatemala nine years ago. Andrew said he and his wife came to Guatemala because there is a severe shortage of biblically-educated pastors. Once down here they realized basic education was one of the best ways to influence the trend of uneducated religious leaders. They started Integrada, which is a state-run public school. However, they and their supporters in the U.S. pay for almost everything so the children's families do not.




Integrada calls itself a school for "niños trabajadores," which means worker children. This title actually serves as a repellent for rich families because they feel above the "worker" class, and do not want to send their kids to such a school. And so the vast majority, if not all the kids at Integrada come from families well below the poverty line, yet they receive as good an education as they would get at any other public school.




Mission Discovery works with Integrada to find poor families who need their homes repaired. We also send a small group three days of the week out into rural communities to deliver food and care packages to Integrada families who have next to nothing.

Volcan Pacaya

On the group's day off, we took them to Volcan Pacaya, the most active volcano in Guatemala. A very steep two-hour hike found us at the foot of the crater, where the lava pours down the side and creates a lava field. There was no river of lava flowing through the field while we were there, but there were several areas where you could stand on very hot rock and look through openings to see the magma below. Some of the campers stuck their walking sticks in and lit them on fire.





One of the Mission Discovery staff here in Antigua, Jimmy Rivera, got a little too close and singed his arm hairs.



An eruption a while back that destroyed the original paths to the very top and a recent incident involving a hiker who broke his thigh bone have caused the guides to stop taking groups to the crater area, but we did see an eruption from where we were.





Nearby there was a geothermal power plant.



From Pacaya you can see Volcan Agua to the north, which is the same massive volcano you can see in the south when you're in Antigua. Far beyond Agua and a little to the left, Volcan Fuego is also visible when cloud cover is very light. In the first of these pictures, you can see the side of Fuego in the middle of all the clouds.




On the hike up there were hundreds of these fuzzy caterpillars everywhere, especially on mossy tree trunks. Our guide said at night they glow in the dark.

The Jeremiah Project

The Jeremiah Project is a free lunch and education program for Guatemalan street children who work in Antigua to help support their families. Kids can come by the "Refugio Jeremiah" at noon for a free lunch. If they stay(and they do) they get two hours of basic education - math, reading and writing - that they wouldn't otherwise receive. The project is run by Larenda Haden, who was an intern in Reynosa, Mexico with me two years ago.

This week we held our VBS at the Jeremiah Project, combining the dozen or so kids who regularly show up at the project with about thirty of the kids the Escuela Integrada across the street. The Jeremiah kids are fairly rough around the edges, but it was amazing to see how the influence of their better-behaved peers changed them over just a week. Larenda said it was an intense experience for her kids, and many of them got very jealous of the attention she was giving the VBS kids from the Escuela. This coming week we'll have VBS at the Escuela and give Larenda's kids a chance to catch their breaths. These are some pictures from before VBS, during the kids afternoon lessons.

Tuk-Tuks and Chicken Buses

Tuk-Tuks are three-wheeled taxis that will take you anywhere in Antigua for 15 quetzales(app. $2). They fit two Americans, or six Guatemalans. The experience is quite amazing. Tuk-Tuk drivers like to drive fast, and they like to dodge and weave through traffic.



Another form of transportation in Antigua and Guatemala is the "Chicken Bus," named because livestock is not an uncommon sight. These buses are how huge numbers of Guatemalans get around between cities. Here's the inside of one, before it got really packed.


Chicken buses are also very colorful. Each bus is decorated very differently, so that Guatemalans who can't read can still tell which bus they want.

Agua y Fuego

Vista Hermosa

This week we are replacing the roofs of two families' homes in Vista Hermosa—a small community of extremely poor Guatemalans on the side of a mountain just outside Antigua. Vista Hermosa is a good ways up the mountain, and it's a substantial hike to get there. Once you're there, the view is amazing, though somewhat ironic: Vista Hermosa overlooks one of the richest areas of Antigua, including a few tennis courts and a soccer stadium.







In this last photo you can see Volcano Fuego just beyond the first mountain range. Volcano Agua takes up an even larger portion of the sky to the south.

Bienvenidos a Antigua

Antigua is probably the most beautiful city I have ever seen. It is 7 streets wide from east to west, and 9 streets long from north to south. Its streets are all cobblestone and its buildings are all extremely old. To the south is the volcano Agua (water), and to the west is the volcano fuego (fire). Fuego is active and you can routinely see plumes of smoke coming out the top of it. On a clear night from a good vantage point, you're supposed to be able to see a river of lava flowing down Fuego's side. There's another volcano nearby which we might be able to climb before we leave in two weeks. I've been told when you climb this third volcano, you can walk right next to the lava at the top. I have many posts to make in the next few days, including photos from the poor communities outside Antigua where we'll be doing roof repair, La Escuela Integrada(a free school run by Christians for Guatemalan children), The Jeremiah Project(an afterschool-style refuge for Guatemalan children who have to work to support their family and cannot regularly attend school), the volcanos and several more. For now, here are some more streets from downtown Antigua and the surrounding countryside.

The Staff House

This week a church group who had originally planned on building three houses wound only being able to build two. The extra house was assigned to the intern team to build during the week.

Some interesting things happen when the interns get to build a house. All summer long the interns are working at everything but building houses so that the groups who come down can build houses. All summer long they are working harder than the groups, but at what feels like quite a distance from the actual "work."

The groups get to come down, connect and fellowship with a family who they build a house for. The interns get to watch this happen from the sidelines, where they are executing the tedious gruntwork.

So when the interns get a house, they go crazy. Think back to when you were just beginning to have romantic interests. Think back to how you couldn't take your mind off of that other person. No matter what else was going on around you, no matter what you were supposed to be getting done at the moment, everything you did was either directly or indirectly done with the goal of getting closer to that person. It's a desperate, longing desire that fills you with joy when it's satisfied just as quickly as it fills you with despair when you have to face even a few moments separated from it.

This is what the interns are like when they get a staff house. It's really quite amazing. Because of video problems, which I'll explain in a moment, and because I was letting someone else take over my normal responsibilities so they would be ready to take over when I left, I had a week essentially free of specific responsibilities. I spent the entire week basically serving as an intern, trying to do whatever I could so the interns could build for and be with the family they so desperately desired to connect with. Sometimes I got annoyed when the interns' focus on their family was so intense that normal duties or routines were neglected or ignored. But sometimes I was able to let the normal routines fall to the side and enjoy seeing a group of people so passionate about taking advantage of the opportunity given to them to share some love that they couldn't really be bothered with anything less important.

I don't think it would hurt if we were more in love with the people around us and the God who ties us all together. I think it would be awesome if we were so enamored with the idea of living love that our normal everyday behaviors, that we have convinced ourselves are necessary, fall to the side and get forgotten.

On to the video. As I've mentioned before, Michael and I were originally planning on shooting several documentary/promo videos for Mission Discovery this year as we traveled around. But as the summer started we could tell we had been given too many other things to do at the same time and we had not come prepared. So the video fell to the side until this week. Unfortunately on Monday we discovered a nice set of malfunctions with our video equipment that made it essentially impossible to film.

A church group from Austin, Texas, discovered our plight on Wednesday. On Friday they casually handed us their camera, the exact same model as ours, and told us not to scrap our video projects. So during my week "off" I will be story-boarding some ideas and scheduling when I want to shoot what in Guatemala, and Michael will be doing the same. If it all works out, we will have a grade-a video showing Mission Discovery's work in Guatemala by the end of the summer.

The others in the colonia

Humans are not the colonias' only inhabitants.