Surprises, Successes, and Swimming in Water

Here I (DeeDee) am sitting in the airport, waiting to catch a flight home for the week to surprise my mom for her birthday. My dad and brother are in on it, and I just hope she hasn't figured it out yet! I am very thankful for this opportunity to show appreciation and love for the mother who raised and took care of me for so many years of my life, and who continues to encourage and support me here in Guatemala. (Day later update... SUCCESS! It was a complete surprise!)

Let me begin by sharing that there are lots of exciting things going on in the Valley! Since my last post, a group of professional engineers from Knoxville called ProCorp came to visit us, we (including the Colvetts) have all moved back to the Valley full-time, and Kris's brother Jason just came for a week-long visit. We are so thankful for these blessings that God has been showering upon us!

Now, I guess I'll head right into our Project Ulpan updates (forgive us for the length, but we can't help but brag about what God is doing!):

-Thanks to help from Ginger and one our Guatemalan partners Roberto, this coming week we will finish our first month of dental health curriculum in the 15 or so schools of the Valley. Both the teachers and students have been very receptive to our visits, and they are very excited about next month when we will bring them all toothbrushes so that they can begin brushing daily at school.

-Our partner Christian has suggested that we should train the students who have just started in the secondary schools (the "high schools" that we helped to start this year) to present the dental curriculum in the schools and help relieve us of some of our scheduling issues and long hikes, and we are very interested in exploring this option as a way for them to repay their scholarships through service to their communities. Below is a picture of these teens and their parents on the day that they signed the papers to receive their scholarship from us for the cost of their classes and materials. I hope you can see the excitement in their faces as they choose to continue their education and as doors of opportunity begin to open up before them.

-We are also excited to share that our very own Julio Caal who has been working with us for about a year now has decided to join one of the literacy programs in the Valley, in hopes to finish his years of primary education. He will continue to work with us as our water technician, while studying in the afternoons and on the weekends. We are so proud of him!

-This week we should receive plans from the Lipscomb Engineering Depatment for a foot bridge that is to be built in the community of Saquiquib to help enhance the safety of these people as they travel to and from the weekly market. The bridge is scheduled to be built by a group of Lipscomb engineering students and professors in early May.

-This past Saturday we hosted our very first health promoter training for the Valley, with 34 people present! These promoters will serve to assist our doctor Misael with diagnosing illnesses and distributing medicines to the far reaches of the Valley.

- Also, a medical team comprised if Lipscomb students and medical professionals will be visiting us in mid-March. They will set up dental clinics in several centralized communities and help Misael with the development of a medical baseline study for the Valley. We are excited to dream about the differences that these clinics will make in the health of the people of Valley.
- We are praying that our new houses and kitchen will be finished by the time that the medical team arrives, so that we can adequately host 40 extra guests! We continue to be thankful for the rapid and skillful work of our foreman Manuel.

- We are still searching for a women's promoter (sadly, the last one didn't work out) and a project coordinator for the Valley. Please keep this in your prayers... We are finding it to be increasingly difficult to find applicants who have the education, experience, language capabilities, and heart for serving the people of the Valley.

- We continue in our search for Spanish and Q'eqchi' books for our community libraries, and we have several promising leads.

- Finally, as suggested in the title of our post, we are swimming (and thankfully not drowning... yet) in water projects. We have hired two head constructors for a very large (12m x 8m x 3m) concrete holding tank in Sesalche I, and they are making significant progress daily.

-Jason was able to help Kris and Kevin put the finishing touches on the Sesalche II water project by piping water to the community pharmacy.

-The ProCorp group from Knoxville made lots of progress in their study of the Sequixpur water system, realizing that there are several feasible options for repair of a very large system that was intended to serve four communities (but is only currently functioning in one) and possibly could be extended to serve most any community in the Valley. We are currently in conversation with the original engineers of the system, and we have high hopes that growing knowledge of the system will assist us in developing a plan for a system that could deliver agua pura (or "chabil ha" as the Q'eqchi' say) to the whole Valley! Needless to say, we are extremely thankful for the willingness of the Knox ProCorp team to dream big with us and to commit to working with us for many months to come.

So, as you can see, God is moving in big ways in the Ulpan Valley, and we are just holding on for the ride! When we asked Jason for his three words that would sum up his experience in the Valley, we thought he would say "hot" (it is finally warming up here!), "tired" (we took him on a 11-hour hike on "non-flat" terrain on Thursday), and "full" (I think perhaps we fed him too well while he was with us!). Instead, he described it as "enlightening, genuine, and fun." We find his description to be very fitting, for joining in God's work here continues to daily be enlightening as He reveals Himself to us in new ways, a genuine experience of humility and love, and tons of fun!

Nuestros Ahijados and Security in the Valley

Well... due to continued security issues in the Valley, we decided as a team that it would be best for Ginger and the kids and I (DeeDee) to stay in Antigua for some time, where we could work on language school (and home school for the boys), invite Ginger's parents to come and hang out for a while, get out and walk around the beautiful city as often as we'd like, and perhaps do some volunteering.

I was very fortunate to make a connection two weeks ago with an organization in Jocotenango right outside of Antigua named Nuestros Ahijados, translated as "The God's Child Project": http://www.godschild.org/. Ginger and the boys came with me to receive a tour of their home base facilities, called the "Dream Center." At the Dream Center (which truly seems to be making dreams come true for many impoverished families around Antigua) is located a primary school, all administrative offices, a medical and dental clinic, a domestic abuse shelter, and space for the gathering of a Mother's Group that also benefits from a weekly food distribution. The organization also includes at different locations around Antigua a technical school, a malnutrition center/hospital for infants, a homeless shelter, and an institute to fight against human trafficking. AND the organization offers individuals and groups from the States opportunities to be involved through being Godparents to children in the program or through funding and building of simple houses for families in the program. To say the least, I was very impressed with this organization from the very beginning!

So, to make the best of my time in Antigua, and to get some extra practice with my Spanish, I decided to volunteer in the mornings at Nuestros Ahijados primary school, helping in both a third and first grade classroom. As a side note, I loved the fact that the school didn't end at noon (as the majority of schools in Guatemala do), but lasted until 3 PM, offering students a free and nutritious lunch, more hours of learning, and an alternative to selling candy on the streets in the afternoons. I was asked to teach the first graders their colors in English, and I had a ball teaching them a song that I had learned in my first Spanish class in high school. During my time there, I was blessed by countless hugs and kisses, by games of tag during recess that wore me out, and by a vision of what kids who really enjoy learning (and do not take their education for granted) look like. I believe that God used this experience to remind me of my love of teaching and to energize me for my presentation of our dental curriculum in the schools of the Valley.

On another note, thankfully, much progress has been made in the Valley over the past couple of weeks, and it seems as if the communities are actually beginning to work together to address issues of security. Just this past week, the leaders of the community came together to decide to expel from their villages two different families that were involved with the robberies and other negative activities in the Valley. Kris and Kevin have continued to make short trips into the Valley to work on water projects during the past two weeks, and it looks as if I (DeeDee) will be able to return with them next week and finally make a good start on our dental curriculum in the schools. Thanks for all of your prayers over the past month... God continues to amaze us by the ways he is working, and He continues remind us to live one day at a time, always trusting him for guidance and protection.