That’s a lot of tamales!

They made HOW many tamales? 600! The ladies at the ministry had been cooking for days and well into the night. Soaking corn, washing and cooking banana leaves, cooking the chicken, going down the street to have the re-hydrated corn ground into the thick play dough-like substance, wrapping the leaf around each portion of corn meal…it was quite a process. And there were so many!! Each year at Christmas, the ministry brings a very special meal to the people in La Libertád (meaning “free land,” the squatter’s area around the dump). This was going to be a feast!

We loaded up Rodrigo with 3 huge plastic bins full of tamales and 6 bags of pan (pronounced “pahn”, meaning bread), several containers full of juice bags which the ladies had filled and tied, and enough Styrofoam plates and plastic forks to feed an army. Most of us walked down to our usual site where we serve The Provision at the edge of the squatters’ area, as only Hugo1 fit in the back end of the overloaded pickup. Some of the ministry staff had taken invitations around to the shanties inviting people for this special meal, so when we rounded the corner at the end of the shanties, we were met with an already huge crowd! It took some doing, but Hugo1 led the task of separating the hundreds into lines of children and adults. We always like to be sure the kids get their meals first. Numbers were handed out and the children and adults waited in line to wash their hands before receiving their special Christmas meal.

There were lots of familiar faces that we see every day. We saw quite a few of our ministry kids with their little brothers and sisters. But there were hundreds of new faces that we were able to greet and give a Christmas smile. It took about two hours to hand out every last tamale and a few people who had waited all that time only received some bread and a juice bag.

Standing there watching this huge crowd of hungry people made me wonder what Jesus would have been thinking as He was constantly surrounded by hungry, sick crowds. He could have fed every one of them, but knew that feeding them physically wasn’t as important as feeding their souls with the Living Bread and Water. There will always be more hungry people than tamales, but we press on with the prayer that God would use these moments when maybe a smile or a hand on the shoulder or a hug might be a seed of love planted that will grow into faith one day.

Escuela Biblia de Vacaciones

That's Vacation Bible School in espanol! And what a couple of weeks of VBS we had in Guatemala in November! Remember that the kids here are out of school in November and December. Our first week was in Amatitlan where we had over 400 children come for a week of singing, playing, Bible stories and crafts. The children come pouring in off the streets and out of the shanty neighborhood for five days. We're able to use one of the public schools of Amatitlan (oddly enough named John F Kennedy Elementary School), which by our definition would be considered filthy, ugly and about the last place you'd want your child to spend their school day. But it was the only place we could meet that would accommodate that many kids. They allow us to use the facilities in exchange for a few school supplies like pencils and crayons. Andy said that last year they told us that they were so under-funded that they had to break pencils in pieces to give to the kids!

There are piles of desks thrown into a corner of each room and dozens and dozens of children are squished in to do their craft or hear God's Word. The awesome thing is that our VBS is conducted by just eight of our high school youth with the guidance of Oscar and Reyna. I stood and watched as over 400 children ran in and lined up according to age. Our teens had such quiet control over this massive group of niños with no raised voices. The various age groups moved from station to station, like we do in the States, ending their day with a little snack and bag of juice on their way out the door. Pretty incredible!

Well, after the week in Amatitlán, the teens braced themselves for another week of VBS, but this time with almost 250 kids in Guatemala City. Every afternoon for five days the kids in our neighborhood came to hear about their Jesus who loves the daylights out of them. You can just imagine what it would take to make crafts for almost 700 kids. We don’t have any handy resources from publishing companies with all the ideas and lessons prepared. Everyone who sat down at the ministry for the past month was handed a scissors and something to cut out! What a great two weeks! The teens did a collective sigh of relief last Friday when the final Christmas gift and hygiene kit was passed out to the last child. If you were in a church or on a mission team that sent or brought Christmas gifts last year, just about every single one of them was used for these almost 700 children. Oscar worked for days with Gerber and Julian to put the bags together. Since we had fewer teams come down this past year, we really scrounged and divided and emptied out Ziplocs of other things to have enough bags for the gifts. But we made it! And we gave out hundreds of hygiene kits as well. So thank you, friends of our ministry...friends of the Guatemalan children...for your gifts of love!!

It was a pretty crazy couple of weeks, but man, what an outreach. Hundreds of children taking the message home to their families!!We pray that the Holy Spirit will bless the Words that were taught so that these children might come to saving faith and that the seeds that were planted in their little hearts would grow.