We enjoyed having Alex stay with us last month that we brought him back with us this past weekend to stay with us. Here’s a picture of him playing with our nephew Jorge Pablo on Saturday.

We would appreciate you praying for Alex as he gets sick very frequently.  He’s gone through a bunch of tests to make sure that he’s ok, and so far they haven’t found anything wrong with him.  They’re also concerned because he hasn’t grown at all in the past year. It’s a little harder to know because he has no parental history.

Alex is such a joy to have in our house with us, and it’s a blessing to get to minister to kids like him!

After our trip to the Mexican border and two trips to the DMV, we were finally able to receive our Guatemalan license plates on Friday!

These last two days I had to return to Guatemala’s border with Mexico in order to visit the customs office to submit the paperwork to import our car.  There always seems to be weird complications here whenever we have to apply for things like this, and I sometimes get confused with the Spanish technical terms that I don’t understand.  So I was a little nervous about the whole trip.  But fortunately we were able to finish everything and the application was accepted.  Now we just have to visit an office in Guatemala City to pick up the new license plates next week.

Benjamin joined me for the trip, and we had a great time talking all along the 5 hour drive to the border.  He’s been spending more and more time with us lately, and this was another chance to have some great conversations with him. We talked about past memories and adventures, the faithfulness of God through everything, and our hopes for the future. He’s quickly becoming one of my best friends (although I’ve already known him for 7 years) and I look forward to each chance that we get to spend together.

My first introduction to being a missionary in Guatemala was working with Tom and Elizabeth Allan at their ministry called Hearts for the Children.  I learned so much as I lived with them and worked beside them.  I think that the most important thing that I learned from them was a truly God-given love for the people of Guatemala and a desire to help the Guatemalans in whatever way necessary in order to share the love of Christ with them.  This summer will be 10 years since I first came here and started working with the Allans, and it was great to be at their new church dedication on Sunday.  Ever since I started working with them they’ve had their church services under a tent, but they’ve been praying for many years for a permanent church building.  So it was a great blessing to praise God for the building and asking Him to bless their ministry through it.

About a month has pasted since our last visit to see Celia, Ana Lidia and Marcelino, and so we returned to see how they were doing.  We spent Saturday talking to the family, looking at all that they’re learning in school, eating a lunch that Yuli had prepared for everyone, and giving them some clothes.  Yuli’s family gathered together a bunch of old shirts and dresses that her niece use to wear but has outgrown.  The girls, including their older sister Estela, were very excited to get them!

We’re praying a lot that God guide us about how to best help them. We enjoy spending time with the kids a lot, and time always flies by when we’re with them.  They live in a remote area, and so their school is very small.  Each teacher teaches two grades, and so Celia in fourth is in the same room as her brother Marcelino who’s in first grade.  Celia loves math, and she’s frustrated that all that she’s learned this year is how to write the ordinal numbers (first, second, third…).  So we’re going to look for a good math book to give her so she can continue to learn on her own. The other difficulty is that the standard of living was much nicer at Casa Shalom than it is there with her family.  The block house behind us in the pictures is a two-room house that her family is building, and they currently live in a bamboo house.  It’s hard for kids to get use to using outhouses again!  We’re praying about what’s best for the whole family and how we can help.

Ana Lidia’s excited about her new shirt

Celia & Ana looking at a dress

Hanging out with Brent

Hanging out with Yuli

Today is Mother’s Day here in Guatemala, (it’s always on May 10th) and they celebrate it in a very different way than we’re use to in the USA. At about 4 in the morning people started setting off fireworks, and the fireworks continued all throughout the early morning until about 8. There was all sorts of noise from the streets.  Kinda crazy if you ask me; I would have thought that most mothers would enjoy sleeping in! We spent the day with Yuliza’s family and had a great time cooking for them tonight to celebrate.

Father’s day is just around the corner, and it should be just as loud…

Edwin turns 25 today, and so we had him over to stay with us this weekend to celebrate his birthday. He’s currently studying business administration at college in the evenings and working during the day for a cell phone company.  He also moved out of Casa Shalom last year and is living with a friend in Guatemala City.  It was great to spend time with him and catch up with everything that’s going on in his busy life.

My favorite part of his birthday was that Yuli’s family helped out with the celebration.  Yuli’s mom cooked her incredible fried chicken and the rest of the family joined in to sing happy birthday to him. Edwin also stayed with all of us for Christmas this past year, and it is such a blessing for him to feel like part of the family.  Edwin and his siblings went to live at an orphanage when he was about 5 years old.  He’s never known his father, and he sees his mother very rarely because she moved to Mexico many years ago.  So he’s loved being part of our family.

Alex in 2004

Alex came to Casa Shalom when he was about 1 year old in 2004.  Here’s a picture of him shortly after arriving at the home. His name is actually Julio Cesar Agusto, but we didn’t receive any information about him when he first came.  So he was given the name Alex, and it’s stuck ever since. He’s always been such a special kid, and I’ve always looked forward to seeing him when I would come to visit in the past.

In 2009 there was a really good chance that Alex was going to be adopted by an American, but Guatemala was going through a time of restructuring their department that handles adoptions to try to eliminate the corruption that existed.  So they stopped all adoptions for a while.  Unfortunately because of these changes (and I’m not exactly sure what happened), Alex was never adopted.

He’s grown up in at Casa Shalom ever since, and he’s now 7 and in the second grade. Alex got pretty sick back in January, and so Yuli and I visited him to pray with him and we told him that when he was better, he was going to come stay with us for a weekend.  Well, he’s now better, and we had a wonderful weekend with him!  We had so much fun together, and we were impressed with how helpful he wanted to be and help us cook and clean up after eating.  We had such a great time with him that our first thought was: when can he come stay with us again???

Here’s a few pictures from our weekend together:

Together at Casa Shalom

Alex helping make pancakes on Saturday morning

Eating lunch with Yuli’s nephew

Celia & Anna

About a month ago I posted about trying to visit Celia, Anna & Marcelino, but they were away with their family picking coffee in a plantation for the past month.  Well they returned home on Wednesday, and so we were able to visit them on Friday.  It was so good to see them and know that they were doing alright!

We were happy to hear that they were able to start attending classes at the school near their house the day after they returned home, even though it’s already a month into the school year. We brought them bookbags and a few school supplies to make sure that they’re all ready.  And we hope to visit them again in the coming weeks and see how the school year is progressing.

They are the youngest three from a family of 9 kids, and we had a great time meeting and talking to two of the older kids and their mother.  The only school in the area stops after the sixth grade. Their older brother Daniel, who we met, graduated from the sixth grade last year and won’t be studying further.

Please pray for Celia, Anna & Marcelino.  It’s good to see them back with their family, and it’s obvious that the family is happy to be together.  But they are very poor, and they have a lot of needs.  Please pray that God would bless our visits with the family, and that He would direct us how to best help them.

Celia, Anna, Daniel, Maricio, Mom & Estella

Yuli with the kids

Today is my sister-in-law Veronica’s birthday.  She also worked at Casa Shalom with us, so some of the kids, her family, and us decided to throw her a surprise birthday party yesterday. We had four guys from Casa Shalom come and two girls from an AIDS hospice that Veronica had taught in school. Her coworker Elizabeth also helped throw the party. We had a great time, and it was cool to do something special for her after all the love and time that she’s given to the kids.

The Birthday Gang

Jaquelin, Jaquelin & Heidi

Yuli, Elizabeth, Veronica, Heidi & the Jaquelines

The cake didn’t turn out too well… oops!

Yuli and Elizabeth hanging out