Guatemala

**Guatemala Outreach '97**
This was the one area that I was not prepared to see. Thousands of people live off of the garbage at the city dump. They rummage through as it is dumped from the trucks, taking what they can salvage as food or usable items. It was a shocking site to see children scampering about such a place. We spoke with one little girl and asked her if she went to school, she said she has a school but she does not go. It appears to us that the parents would rather have their children help them in the dump, looking for something to sell, recycle, or just for themselves. Their living is based solely on what they find in the dump. The YWAM ministry in Guatemala has a regular program for helping the children get educated and to learn about God as well as donating clothing and other items. Teams from YWAM visit the dump weekly and are working with a group of about 30 children. It may not seem like much, but it is a start.	This is the community of Tierra Nueva, located in the Northern part of Guatemala City. This is a poverty level community, we worked with the children in this community, teaching Bible stories, crafts, coloring, singing and playing games. YWAM Guatemala visits this group of kids once a week, we were able to tag along with their ministry. A local church opened their doors and allowed us to use their facilities to have a sheltered place to hold our meetings. They also make home visits during the week to families with new born babies to weigh the babies to make sure they are not malnourished. The people in this community are very receptive to the help they are receiving and they are very open to the word of God.
This is a picture of the open air evangelism we did in Parke Colon, Parke Colon is about eight blocks away from the Central Park in downtown Guatemala City. In Parke Colon, there is a round sidewalk that goes around the park, and people stand around this circle and sell things, talk politics, ramble on and even preach the gospel. As we gathered to pray their were over 150 people waiting to see what we were going to do. Our presentation consisted of Sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ through puppets, skits, dances, praise and worship, mime drama, and preaching the word of God from the Holy Bible.	This is us on a street corner in the heart of Puerto San Jose, Guatemala. We spent two days here from eight to five while the Mercy Ship Cataract screening was going on. We were just outside the gate to the screening area where people were being checked for cataracts, there was about 600 people in the line each day. In the picture above is a truck, to the right of the truck (just out of the picture) there was a fish market, they originally told us that we could not set up on the corner because it blocked the delivery entrance to the market, we came to an agreement that allowed us to set up and we would move when they needed us to. Not only were they kind enough to let us set up on their corner, partially blocking their entrance, but after the first day the wife of the owner gave her life to Christ, the following day the owner gave his life to Christ. We really made an impact on the lives of the people in this community. Mercy Ships offers these operations to remove cataracts, for FREE
Guatemala is definitely a beautiful country. The picture of the volcano is the view on the road from Puerto San Jose (Puerto Quetzal) to Guatemala City. The other picture is of a ravine that slices right through the middle of Guatemala City. The view is from The north side of town (Tierra Nueva) looking to the east into the ravine.	One of the tools we used to share Christ was mime drama. Some of the drama's did not have any words and some one would usually preach after the drama. Two of our biggest drama's were narrated in Spanish, these were very powerful drama's . We did them together, the first one "This Blood" tells the story of the crucifixion, and the second one "El Vive!" He Lives) focuses more on the resurrection and sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ. By learning the drama we were able to effectively share the gospel in an area where we could barely speak the language. Many of us did pick up some Spanish and we did have a translator with us and we did preach after the dramas to explain what they had just seen and how it applied to them.
The port authority allowed us to use a duplex type building to use for the optical and dental clinics. The boxes you see in the above picture contain thousands of used eye glasses, the purpose of the optical clinic is to give eye exams and to give out the used eye glasses according to the prescription needed. The clinic made over fourteen hundred appointments to give out glasses while we were there. The dental clinic works much the same way, appointments are made to have cavities filled, teeth removed and whatever else might be needed. Mercy Ships provides all of the services for no charge and shares the gospel of Jesus Christ while doing so. All workers including the doctors are volunteers.	We did a lot of local projects to help out the local churches in any way that we could. Sometimes they would ask us to help with church services, praise and worship, guest preaching, teaching youth or children's church, but sometimes it also included manual labor like raking up leaves or even clearing an overgrown church yard. (pictured above). It was amazing to see how excited our team members got when they were doing work for God, even pulling weeds!