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Teen
Revival
Completely Transformed
By Kalista King
Greetings, friends! It has been a while since I have had the privilege
of writing to you myself. As you heard from my mother last week, I just
recently got back from Guatemala. Me and 13 others had the wonderful
opportunity to embark on a life-altering experience to this third world
country through Greenville's EUM mission team, "Destination Known."
This week, I would like to share a little bit about my trip with you
and how it had an impact on me. To begin, I will share about my
thoughts and feelings about the trip prior to leaving.
Technically, Guatemala is the fifth mission trip I have ever been on.
Every year since my freshman year of high school, I have gone on Youth
for Christ's Detroit mission trip where we fix up houses and work
throughout the community to try and reach out to those who are in need
of our help. I have also been to the Bronx, New York with Youth for
Christ, where we did many relational activities to reach out to the
residents in the Bronx. (Cheyanne Mills shared more about this trip in
a previous article.) However, Guatemala was the first mission trip I
have ever gone on out of the country. I have always said that I'm not
much of a "missions person," I just did mission work, because I knew
it's what Jesus calls us to do in the Bible. I did enjoy these kinds of
trips, but I never could see myself going into the mission field as a
career, because honestly, I was not very fond of all the work that I
had to put into the mission work. I chose to go to Guatemala because of
course those who have been there before say it's an incredible
experience, and I wanted to have that experience too. I prayed a few
times that the Lord would prepare my heart for it but never really
expecting the results I got. To me, Guatemala was just going to be an
experience, one that gave me good memories but not much else. Little
did I know, I had a reality check coming whether I was prepared for it
or not.
Now before I begin going into detail about my trip, I want you to hear
what God did behind the scenes weeks before we even left for Guatemala.
Our missions leader, Cliff Rapier, had gotten us all tickets to fly out
of Dayton Airport on December 26th in order to catch our next flight in
Atlanta which would take us to Guatemala. However for reasons I don't
clearly remember, Cliff ended up finding out a week or so prior to us
leaving that all of the flights booked through Dayton Airport were
cancelled, which obviously was a bit of an issue considering that
flight was the one taking us to Atlanta! Thankfully, Cliff found a way
to get us to Atlanta Airport from Columbus so our flight was able to be
transferred from Dayton to Columbus. My point in telling you this is so
that you can see that Satan was trying to stop this trip from happening
even before we left. But in the end, God always wins and we got to
Guatemala safe and sound without any other problems.
To save time, I won't share every little detail about the trip, just
the highlights. When we got to The Ville, where we were staying for the
week, I was shocked by how beautiful the scenery was. Since we were
told that we would be experiencing poverty all week, I expected to stay
in something much less nice than this. What I found out later was that
we were very fortunate to stay in The Ville because working in the dump
community was enough of a shock to us, let alone staying there. Now
that I mentioned the dump community, I am going to focus more on that
because this is where most of the highlights take place. Our mission
for the week was to build a house for a family in one of the 16
communities in the Guatemala City Dump. Yes, one of the "16"
communities. The Guatemala City dump is not just an ordinary little
dump, it is a city in which all of Guatemala's garbage is stored. And
yes, this garbage is what feeds the massive number of people who live
in the dump communities. Just to put things into perspective for you,
the amount of people who live in the dump community is almost equal to
the entire city of Greenville. So if you were to walk throughout the
dump, you wouldn't just see a few people here and there, you would see
many people doing things like people digging through the garbage,
carrying bags of trash back home, homeless people laying on the
streets, etc. Coming from America, I'm sure you can imagine how this
would seem like a whole other world.
The organization we were working through is called the "Potter's House
Association," and their staff is devoted to showing the light of Christ
there in any way they can. They provide many resourceful programs for
the residents of the dump community such as schooling, tutoring,
mentoring, health care, dental care, parenting classes, etc. Something
I love about the Potter's House staff is that that they always stress
the importance of realizing that what most Guatemalans call "the
scavengers," of the dump community are completely equal to any other
human being. Therefore, instead of calling them "scavengers," they call
them "treasures." The theme for their entire association is that God
cares about the poor, so let's join our hearts to His. From day one, I
realized if God cares about the poor, then I should too.
I could probably write a book about everything we experienced there,
but for your sake, I will just skip to the big highlights. When we
first met the family that we were building the house for, their
community gave us a special welcome by setting off firecrackers for us
to let everyone know we had arrived. The names of the family members in
which we were serving were, Juan Carlos, Juana, (father and mother,)
Catherine, Tiffany, and Allison (daughters in order from oldest to
youngest). Juan began welcoming us through a translator and thanking us
for what we were choosing to do for their family. When he was finished
speaking, Catherine spoke up and said something that spoke to all of
our hearts. She said, "I have been praying for a new house for a long
time, and now God has finally answered my prayers." Once this was said,
it was clear to all of us that God had specifically chosen us to be
there for this family. Thus, we were determined to do whatever it took
to give this family the house that they deserved.
Long story short, we ended up finishing the house in five days. Now, of
course, this house is most likely nothing like your house or mine.
Quite frankly, it is about half the size of my garage. However, Juan's
family did not care about the size or even really the look of the
house; he said he was just so happy that he can now give his family a
safe place to live. Between working and a few other activities, we also
had the chance to play with the children in the community we were
working in. Let me tell you, each and every one of those kids just
stole my heart. I was truly amazed by how happy they can be with how
little they have. The affection they showed for us when we were able to
love on them was just overwhelming. Cliff had told us a few times
throughout the week that if we were only focused on building the house
and nothing else, then we were missing the point of this trip. Yes, we
were there to build a house, but there was so much more to it than
that. We were also there to share the love of Christ with the kids,
people, and families we encountered. And in doing so, what we
discovered was that even though we thought we were coming to bless
them, in reality, they blessed us even more.
At the end of the week, we had a farewell ceremony with the family,
where we presented them the keys to their new house. During this time,
something happened that I will never forget. After we were done sharing
about what a privilege it was to serve their family in this way, the
translators asked if the kids wanted to say anything. This is when
little Allison, who had barely spoken a word all week, lifted her head
that was buried in her mother's chest and said, "Thank you for my new
house because I finally have my own room." Right then, I broke. All the
emotion that had been built up inside of me through the week came out
in a rush of tears. Nothing can top the feeling that I had at that
moment, absolutely nothing.
It is safe to say this trip has changed my life. I have been so
incredibly humbled by this experience that I will never see life the
same. I do wish to go back to Guatemala, because I left a piece of me
there. I will never forget that those people are still out there,
living in extreme poverty while I am living in what they see as
paradise. I want to go on more mission trips and share Christ's love in
every way that I can! It has been extremely hard for me to adapt to
life here after experiencing what I did there. But nonetheless, I have
been completely transformed, and I intend on allowing God to continue
transforming me like He did last week. He did tell me something that I
feel as though I need to share, and I will end with this. "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one
of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me."
-Matthew 25:40
Dios te bendiga. God bless you.
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