Our Weekend

Our weekend started out a little different than our usual. We were asked to be part of a food distribution project with someone who is partnered with Southwestern Baptist Seminary and our Guatemala Baptist Seminary.  They had heard about the drought we were having this year and wanted to help out in our area.  We welcomed the opportunity to partner together and did the distribution on Friday afternoon. I'll share a separate post about that tomorrow. The group was not able to travel up the mountain in their truck so that meant there was no room for the boys and I to travel to the village with them. I was a little bummed about that. Okay, I'll admit, I was a lot bummed about that. I wanted to go, badly. But, sometimes it doesn't work out so we hung out at home while they traveled up the mountain.

Instead the boys and I played, watched movies, colored, and did a fall craft. I drew them each a pumpkin on a piece of paper and then cut up pieces of crepe paper for them to glue onto it.

That kept them quiet and sitting in one place for a while.  

That evening we joined the team for supper at the hotel in Jocotan.  They stayed the night and returned to the Capital on Saturday morning.  

Billy and David

Billy is our IMB colleague who lives and works in Guatemala City.  He is a professor at the Baptist Seminary there.  We really enjoyed getting to work with him on this project.

Cruz was so excited to get to the hotel and see his friend from school.  His family runs the hotel in Jocotan. They played together so well while we ate and visited.

After breakfast on Saturday morning I peeked into the boys room to see what they were up to.  It was quiet so I knew it was something.  I found them in a dark room sitting on Ben's bottom bunk bed.  They had hung a flashlight/ lantern on the top bunk and were using it to give them light to read books.  Cruz had a small New Testament and told me he was reading Bible stories to Ben.  How precious!

If only they would be this sweet and play together all day! 

We had planned to make a visit to the village of Churischan on Saturday morning but after a hard nights rain we decided not to go.  The road itself would have been a mess but the trail to the house would have been a nightmare with our boys.  There are only a few more weeks left of rainy season and then things will start to dry out again.   That should help our road and trail conditions greatly.

The group from Guatemala City wanted to distribute food to 50 families.  We chose the village of Tunuco Arriba because it is small and is an area we are trying hard to get in to.  The village leaders told David there were 60 families there so the group ended up bringing enough for 70 families.  We bought the extra food to give out to other villages.  On Saturday morning we let the boys help us divide it up.  They thought it was a fun game.

helping us sort the extra food

"Put one in each pile".  You would think those instructions would be easy to follow...

Some of the left over food we now have to give away to other families.  We also have large sacks of corn to go with it.  We took several of those bags to the village of Nearar on Monday morning and gave out to our Bible study families there.  We'll do the same for our group in Lagunetas this coming Saturday.

We spent Saturday afternoon watching a little football.  Can you believe those Mississippi teams????  We are super proud for our State right now.  Since the group was here on Friday we changed our "eat out" night to Saturday and drove into town that evening for supper.  Cruz chose McDonald's.  We ate and watched them play.  It was fun, but VERY crowded.

I found this bag of "New Orleans Favorite" pinto beans last week at our grocery store and decided to give them a try.  I've never cooked dry pinto beans before but I'll say they turned out pretty good.  Since trying crock pot black beans I'm now venturing out to all the other types of dry beans you can buy here.  Why have I not been doing this for years???

Yum!

David taught Bible study in Nearar on Sunday morning.  That was about the extent of our day.  I worked with Cruz some on his letters and numbers.  I think he is doing great writing both.  Here is a sheet of letters he wrote-

Not too bad, huh.  His new hobby is walking around with a notebook and some type of writing utensil and "doing school". 

I'll leave you with this video of my dancing boys.  This gives you a good idea of their energy that I experience all.day.long.

It's a cooler than normal overcast day around here today.  We are enjoying it.  I'm off to drink my afternoon coffee and put my feet up a minute.  The boys will be up from their naps soon and life will get a little crazy again.