5:15 on a Monday morning is not my favorite way to start a
week. But breakfast is a great incentive to get me moving, so I rolled out of
bed at 5am to make it to breakfast on time. Our team members muttered morning
greetings to each other over cereal and orange juice, loaded our gear, and hit
the road at 6am. I got to ride with Jaime again – lucky me! We stopped for ice
and gas, then left the urban area for rural roads. We had to pick up pipes for
the drill rig from people Jaime knew at one of his last sites, so we stopped
and got to meet a family who invited us to see their chicken coop and hold
their chicks.
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| Photo by Lisa McCutcheon |
Their son showed us his treasure under one of the hens.
We got back on the road and arrived at Iglesia Bethania in
Caballo Blanco less than 10 minutes later. The pastor and a work crew (formed with
church and community members) greeted us with a formal hello. One of our
leaders, Sonja, returned the greetings and then the pastor and church prayed
for us.
Rabbit trail: I’m used to the kind of corporate prayer that
my church practices. We politely pray one at a time, listening to each other’s
words and nodding or “amen-ing” or “mmm-hmm-ing” in agreement. Not everyone has
to pray if they don’t want to, and we do it “popcorn” style with those who want
to pray jumping in when someone else finishes. At Iglesia Bethania, those
“polite” prayers go out the window in favor of bold, loud, all-at-once prayers.
Everyone from the church prayed at the
same time and the messiness was so perfect. It didn’t matter that our team
couldn’t make out any words in the jumble of voices. What mattered is these
prayers were spoken to our poly-lingual, multi-cultural, everlasting Father who
is omnipresent enough to decipher each word that each voice spoke, even at the
same time. Later, our team discussed why we don’t pray like that back home.
Isn’t God big enough to hear simultaneous prayers? Or do we pray “politely” one
at a time because we’re more interested in the other people around us hearing
our prayers than God Himself?
After the “amen” was said (it’s the same in English and
Spanish, ya know!), each team member received a hug from every man on the work
crew. And then, we jumped in with both feet.
Pipe was unloaded. Craft supplies were carried to our Sunday
school classroom. The drill rig was backed up to the pre-dug trench. Chairs
were moved from the church to the courtyard. We found the bathrooms, got the
lay of the land, introduced ourselves to some of the adults and kids, and got
to see the church’s current water well in the courtyard. It’s 30-feet-deep,
carved by hand, and not exactly clean.
Our team of 12 had previously split up into hygiene and
drilling teams (Remember the “fight” Sonja and Blanca had previous night?), so
the drilling team donned their hard hats and started working. The hygiene team
met our local escorts for a community walk. Alder and Marvin are two teenaged
boys who walked us door to door to meet neighbors and invite them to the church
later in the day to hear lessons on clean water and prevention. (We were taught
to say “prevention” instead of “hygiene” lessons, because hygiene makes it
sound like the locals need lessons on how to be clean – which could offend some
of them. Disease prevention is information everyone needs, no matter where they
live or who they are.)
Our first stop was at the house directly across from the
church courtyard. We met a mother and her kids, and got to see the family’s
water source: a hand-dug well with a few mushrooms and algae growing on the
sides.
We met other neighbors like this carpenter who runs a
door-making business. He showed us his work and said it takes him and his crew
a week to make one door. The finished products show great craftsmanship.
As we wandered around town, we definitely drew a few
glances. Why wouldn’t we? I’m sure groups of gringos don’t often walk the
streets of Caballo Blanco.
At one house, we got to sit on the front porch with a
seamstress who makes uniforms for a living. Tami decided to take a turn
inviting the family to our prevention classes, and Blanca translated for her.
At our next stop, Shauna did the inviting and then we talked
with the family and they told us about their daughter, Grace Amaryllis, who’s
been ill since age three. The mother said it was something to do with
bronchitis that developed into a deeper illness and affected Grace’s motor
functions and development. She brought Grace out to meet us, then we offered to
pray for Grace and ask God for healing. It was a special moment.
We continued to travel through the town, meet people, and
invite them to the church. I was so curious about people’s houses and their way
of life and tried to restrain myself from gawking and asking dumb questions.
(It’s so so hard to restrain myself from those dumb questions!) The good news
is I wasn’t the only one who was curious. The locals were just as intrigued by
us and our differences. At one of the houses, one woman commented on my white
skin and told our translator to make sure I wear sunscreen so I don’t get a
sunburn souvenir from Guatemala!
When we arrived back at the Iglesia Bethania, kids had
already arrived for our morning class and drilling had begun. I soon found out
that drilling involves a special mixture of bentonite clay that is pumped
through the drill bit. It coats the inside of the drill and also provides
lubrication while flushing out rocks and dirt. It makes for a pretty muddy
mess, especially if it sprays out at you when you’re adding extra pipes to the
drill rig.
While our team drilled, the work crew (make up of church and
community members) were assigned the job of sifting the bentonite clay/water
mixture as it flushed back out of the drilling hole. Since the mixture was
recycled back into the drill pipes, their job was important to keep too much
gravel and dirt from recirculating back into the mix.
Before our morning prevention class started, some of our
team got to help the church ladies make tortillas for lunch. Mary cracked me up
as I watched her pat her corn meal into circles, tenderly lay them into the hot
pan, and try not to get burned. The ladies giggled at her attempts to make
perfect circles because the circles turned out not-so-circle-y. We joked and
called her Tortilla Maria.
Katie jumped in and tried her hand at making tortillas, too.
It was time to start our classes. We had so many kids show
up for the day’s three lessons. We started with a lesson on clean water and why
it’s so important, then moved into a lesson on germs and hand washing
demonstrations.
Our third lesson (which Katie taught in the morning and I
taught in the afternoon) was about how germs are transmitted by our hands and
animals (like flies) and other ways (bathroom habits). Pretty gross but it
involved a great skit where Tami pretended to be Josefina, who pooped out
Play-doh that a fly (it was a toy one) landed in before landing on people’s
clothes, food, and skin. Her play-acting poop skills brought laughter from
everyone.
Everyone took a break to eat lunch at a long table in the
church courtyard. We were treated like royalty, with a fabric tablecloth and
the first servings of all the food. Monday’s lunch was unusual but tasty: an
entire fish, with its head still attached. Of course, lunch also included rice
and tortillas. Mary was proud of her lumpy labor of love!
A few of our gringos aren’t fish eaters, especially when the
fish’s fried eyeball is staring up at you. I think Connie tried only one nibble
before passing her plate to Jaime to eat. The church ladies were stirred up by
this, asking Blanca in Spanish what was wrong with Connie. Is she sick? Does
she not like the food? Could they make her something else? It was an offense to
the ladies if we didn’t eat the food they worked hard to offer us. Connie
realized her mistake and felt terrible about it, and promised not to pass her
food off so early in the meal again. We all realized offending the church
ladies could be minimized if we timed food rejection a little differently and
waited until much later in the meal.
We split back into our work crews after lunch, with the
drilling continuing in the courtyard and the lessons continuing in the
classroom. The afternoon lessons were the same as the morning lessons, with a
new audience: all the mommas! Blanca had warned us that adults tend to be very
late for events in Guatemala, while children are on time if they aren’t early.
This proved true, as the mothers slowly trickled in to class. We treated them
to manicures while we waited for the crowd to grow, and they giggled over the
fun color selections each other made. We also pulled out adult coloring books
and colored together to pass the time.
The lessons started, the ladies giggled a lot, I took a lot
more photos, held a baby (who looked so hot in her sweatpants and sweatshirt!)…
When we got too hot in the classroom, we’d step out on the
narrow balcony to get a little breeze and sit down for a moment. That’s where I
found Connie, looking slightly pale and hot. She perked up when a little girl
came out to chat.
The next time I saw Connie was about 45 minutes after that
photo, when she was puking outside the church. Mary was helping Connie, and
asked me to alert Blanca to Connie’s situation. I did, and then talked to
Connie and Mary to find out how I could help. Pretty quickly, I realized Mary
was declining too. While she wasn’t puking (yet), Mary felt very weak and
nauseated and hot. Eventually, I pieced some clues together and figured out
Connie was ill because of dehydration, and Mary was ill because of a migraine
that was brought on with all the fire pit smells, generator smoke, and the incessant
noise of the drill rig in operation.
It made for a rough end to the day, and we finally packed up
and left sometime after 5:00. I got to ride in the truck with Jaime one last
time while everyone else piled into the van. I didn’t realize until we got to
the hotel that the van turned into a mess on the way back: Connie and Mary had
gotten sick in the van. I found this out when we parked at the hotel, and I
went to the van to help unload. All of a sudden, the van door slid open and
everyone (except Connie, Mary, and Greg – who was helping Mary) fled the van.
Dan told me Connie had been sick, so I dropped my things and jumped in to help
her. Slowly, I got Connie out of the van and carried her things – including her
bag of barf – so she could creep her way upstairs to her hotel room. She had to
pause for a while on the stairs because they were too strenuous to climb.
Once I got Connie to her room and into bed, I found a trash
can (with a liner) to put by her bed, along with a fresh water bottle. At this
point, the rest of the team had finished cleaning the barf out of the van. We
took time to shower and eat dinner, then met for a little devotional time on
the balcony to discuss what we learned today.
Pretty soon, we said our good nights and headed to bed.
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