general news, musings and dreams

For those of you who are wondering, I'm feeling fine now. Thanks for your prayers. In other news, it's still dry season and we still don't have the promised well. The drilling rig was supposed to come this week but they called and said the truck was broken. The people who paid for the well are supposed to visit in June I think, so we're hoping we get the well before then.

You can continue to pray for the Mota family, as they are raising funds for Willy's heart surgery and trusting God for Willy's health. They were able to get a reduction in cost through social services but the surgery is still much more than they can afford by their own means. Willy is back in school now. He is healing well from the hernia surgery and has a lot of faith that the Lord will take care of him through the next surgery.

Mike and Latonya are still traveling in the States, sharing the news about what the Lord has been doing here and the vision for the ministry. Pray for their safety and effective communication with those who support this ministry in the States.

This month I started teaching an English class to some of the teachers once a week. We've met a couple times so far. I really enjoy working with the teachers. They're a lot of fun and eager to learn English. It's funny, when I was in college I thought that some day I would like to teach other teachers, but I always thought I would have to wait until I was older and got a doctorate or something. I'm also going to have an opportunity to do a workshop with teachers at a school in Zona Reina when I go there with some of the people from our young adult group in July. It's funny how the Lord puts a desire in your heart to do something, and sometimes that desire gets fulfilled in an unexpected way.

I really love the work I'm doing here, and hoping that I will be able to come back next year and possibly stay long term. I have a lot of ideas of how we can develop the English program and encourage literacy in the community. One of the major problems in Guatemala is that about half the population is illiterate. For example, the kids I work with are in a private school, and many of them come from families who are doing well economically and whose parents are educated. Even so, many of them don't read books. It's unusual for people here to have books in their homes. The curriculum doesn't have students reading whole books, it's just excerpts in a workbook format. There aren't public libraries around here, that I know of, and reading for pleasure is not common. It's hard to get books around here. I'm hoping that we can work on setting up a bilingual library here. We have a fair amount of English books that we're using to implement an afterschool English reading program. That is good but it would be a dream come true if we could get quality Spanish books for these kids to read.