Wednesday, February 20, 2008

At the Other End of a Dirt Road

Yesterday Domingo and José, two of the Kekchi missionaries, took us to one of the villages they found with no church. It is 2 hours off the main road on this dirt road. The name of the village is Secacau (say-caw-cawoo). Please pray for this village. There are no Christians in it yet.

First I have to say that Domingo and José truly love these people. While so many people on this earth are consumed with physical gain, these two men have chosen to forsake the little bit that they have for the eternity of complete strangers. It is one thing to be a missionary from the States full of Christians and churches who faithfully support and pray for you, it is a completely different world to be a missionary from Guatemala.

These men spend their life on dirt roads locating villages like these. There are plenty of them, but they are hidden in the jungle. Sometimes they just drive for hours on back roads looking for villages. The Kekchi have started a Christian radio station out of Sayaxché and sometimes people will call in and ask for someone to come to their village. Once they find them, they make contact and spend months just building a relationship so that they can then be given permission to start a work in their village.
This is where we held the medical clinic.
We got there and they weren’t too sure about us at first.
We passed out numbers.
Dr. Andy set up under a tree. The Kekchi missionaries had found a Christian nurse that was willing to come with us and translate from Kekchi to Spanish for Dr. Andy.
Jimmy & I were just there basically for crowd control... which is a little tough when we don’t speak Kekchi and they don’t speak Spanish.
The kids had fun playing frisbee with Jimmy!
Gabriel was in charge of the pharmacy. He is from Gaute. He and his future wife, Sheila, have surrendered to move to Petén as missionaries after they get married in June. We are very excited about that!
Sebastian is a friend of Andy’s who is trained to pull teeth. He and his wife were able to help a lot of people yesterday. We heard of one person who had 5 teeth pulled! These people are very brave. Afterwards they are always holding their bleeding gums and trying to say thank you.
How would you like to go to the dentist with an audience?!
It started raining, so Dr. Andy had to move indoors. It got pretty dark since there was no electricity. The kids were sitting on top of the walls watching.
This lady has twins. I had a really good picture of her balancing one in a sheet wrapped around her head and hanging down her back while she nursed the other one... it was very impressive but the photo was removed by my editor!
The little black tarp down this path was the outhouse that most of us had the pleasure of visiting... the hardest part was balancing in the mud!
This was one of the poorest places we have seen. Most of the men and boys have boots to work in the fields, but most of the ladies and girls did not have any shoes.
This is Jimmy talking to some of the men in the village, some of them spoke Spanish a little. Afterwards they all came to thank everyone for coming. The ladies prepared fish for us before we left.
It was the whole fish! I had to take a picture of it to see it because we were eating in the dark. It had a delicious flavor!
These are the ladies that prepared it for us!
{Making corn tortillas}
The 2 missionaries, Domingo and José are in the blue shirts. They are a lot of fun!
They were watching us eat to make sure we liked it!
Domingo is in the center with some of the people from the village. Jimmy, Gabriel, Dr. Andy, & his son are standing in the back. This last picture is with Sebastian and his wife.
Dr. Andy was able to see everyone from the village in one day which worked out good since he is very busy while he is here. Unfortunately we had nowhere to show the movie because of the rain and we had a long trip back anyway, so it was probably much safer since we left at that time. Jimmy and I are going to go back soon with Domingo and José to show it.

Please pray for this village and the 50 other villages just like it that these Kekchi men have found. There are countless more that still have not been reached.
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...