165 baby kits delivered all in one marathon day!

January 30 Thoughts of the AMA   Our friend Shanna Ballard visited for a week after coming down with a humanitarian group.  She has been making and collecting baby kits in Utah and getting them down to us via a number of visiting groups.  Without her dedication to the project, we would have a whole bunch of kits in Utah and only a few here.  We were glad to be able to take her around to show our appreciation for her tireless efforts.  We went to Escuintla with her and dropped off kits.  While we were there, a member lady who had lost her right hand in a car accident asked if I could give her a blessing.  Several of her family had died in the crash.  I hope that my poor words comforted her. 

Shanna contemplating kidnapping a cute Guatemalan baby

     After the hospital we drove to Puerto San Jose on the Pacific Coast. We ate lunch and spent some time at the beach.  The next day we dropped by the Maternidad hospital in Guatemala City with Shanna, but there were only two patients there.  They said a dozen were being transferred later from another hospital, but on returning later, they still hadn't come. 
     On Sunday Shanna came to our branch at El Cerinal.  Afterward we picked up HermanaVictoria Petrie and visited the hospital in Cuilapa and dropped off some more baby kits and stuffed bears. She volunteers there two or three times a week. We finished off Sunday by going to the Break the Fast dinner at the area office, where everyone modestly displays their favorite dishes.  It's generally a decadent way to end the spiritual high of the fast. 
     Shanna also arranged for a visit to the Safe Passage School [Camino Seguro].  This school was started by a US visitor Hanley Denning who was in Guatemala to learn Spanish.  On seeing entire families combing through the garbage at the municipal dump, she returned home to Maine, sold her car, computer and most other belongings and started a school for the children of the scavenger families with the money.  She was killed in a bus-car accident some years later, but the school lives on.  One of the facilities is right next to the garbage dump.  After our tour of the school, we drove up to the cemetary and which overlooks the dump. 
   

Hanley Denning founder of the Safe Passage school

A little corner of the dump

Slightly closer shot, the dark figures are workers sifting the garbage for salvageable or recyclable items

Sopelotes, the local buzzard, at the graveyard

[Which is next to the dump.  They've been eating garbage, not dead people]

Sopelotes hanging out waiting for their shift to begin

     We went to Ipala, a small town in the south east part of Guatemala to train one of our new mission nurses Hermana Wood and her companion Hermana Zapata.  We took them to lunch, then trained them how to help the missionaries stay healthy and deal with their medical problems. We went to the hospital there to see if we could give away any baby kits, but only one baby was born and one in labor, so we left them two kits.  A big change from our usual 40 kits at a time.  It was Patsy's birthday. The hermanas gave her a piece of cake and a cute note folded up origami style into a heart.  I took her and the Kinghorns, the new mental health advisor and his wife, to dinner on Saturday.   I didn't know what to get her for a present. The last necklace I got her, hematite, gave her a bad rash.

     I answer phone calls and emails from the nurses and mission presidents in 6 missions and the MTC [CCM] in Spanish.  I would have 8 missions, but both Nicaraguan missions are currently closed because of political unrest.  Most days I get about ten communications, but the last week I've been getting about twenty every day.  Some are pretty straight forward, but some involve advising mission presidents on whether to keep a health challenged missionary in the field or send them home.  Because I am bilingual, some of the Hispanic mission presidents will ask me to talk to the parents and stake presidents of the gringo missionaries if they don't understand Spanish.  Some days I get pretty worn down, but thanks to a great companion, I soldier on.

     We went on an excursion with some of the other senior couples to the museum of archeology.  It has a number of artifacts and carvings from the Kaminaljuyu archeological site right in Guatemala City.  A stella with the date 143 BC showing a new ruler succeding a dead one correlates well with the ascencion of King Limhi to the throne which the Book of Mormon dates at "about 145 BC".  Many scholars think the land of Nephi was the Kaminaljuyu site.  

Mural in the archeology museum showing the religious history of Guatemala

     After the museum, we went to the relief map.  It is about an acre in size. 

 This shot is looking north and west from the border of Honduras on the south east part of Guatemala.  The red smudge a little left of the middle is Guatemala City.  The flat Pacific coastal plain is on the left, the central plateau in the middle. The red border on the right is Mexico.  Peten, where Tikal is located is out of the photo at a right angle to the line of sight.

     After lunch we took Sister Olson and the Kinghorns to the Patsy restaurant nearby.  When I asked for a discount on Patsy's lunch, the cashier pretended not to speak Spanish.

     We do the singing time in Primary.  They recently divided the kids into two groups by age.  Only a few of the little kids know how to read, so we are trying to think of ways to teach them the lyrics.  For the big kids it is easy, Patsy makes posters with pictures and the lyrics on them.

      On admit day at the MTC, over a hundred new missionaries came in.  Patsy helps and was there for 12.5 hours.  They have it pretty well organized, but there's a lot of paper work involved with checking them in and finding out what vaccinations they have received and which ones they need.  Every three weeks a new group of 80 - 110 comes in. 

     We went on a baby kit delivery to Chimaltenago for the first time.  It went smoothly.  A member lady who had had a difficult delivery asked me to bless her baby.  I did so and she accepted the offer of a blessing for herself.  

    Then we went to another hospital in San Felipe near Antigua.  We finished at 11:30 and had delivered 72 baby kits.  I mentioned that if we had more, we could have dropped down to Escuintla and delivered some there. So the next week we took along Sharon Smith for support, and did the Chimaltenango, San Felipe and Escuintla marathon and delivered 165 baby kits in a single day.  The road from San Felipe to Escuintla was cut by the June volcanic eruption, but is now open with a few brand  new bridges. 

I was afraid to ask this mom how old she is

This grandma just had a birthday, but I won't tell you how old she is, 

but we've been married 44.5 years.

     The primary kids in our branch are intelligent and curious, but don't have a lot of things to stimulate their intellect.  So Patsy has been trying to find an affordable way to get books in Spanish for them.  She searched online and found a used book store in the old part of town.  We got there, and it was just what she had been looking for. The proprietor was from New York, but married a Guatemalan and stayed here. Ninety dollars later we walked out with 27 books, some new, some used.  We are going to start a lending library out of the back of our car after church.  When the kids finish one book and bring it back, they can get another.  Patsy's school teacher training remains strong.  When we leave, we'll give them the books.

    We minister to a couple of families.  One couple is getting ready to go to the temple for the first time.  He wears Levis and a white shirt and tie to church every week.  I asked him his waist size and it was 32.  I have a pair of black slacks that are 32, so we took them to him so he will have something nicer than Levis to wear to the temple.  

    We love our branch, especially the primary kids and will miss them when we have to come home.  

Holidays Guatemala style

Thoughts of the AMA -  A busy couple of weeks.
     Our friend, the mental health counselor Hermana Diane George left and was replaced by Elder Kinghorn.  He and his wife have just come from a mission in Samoa.  He's been a professor at BYU Hawaii, Idaho and Provo.  He will work out of his apartment by phone and email, but we took them in to the area office and helped get them a phone, computer, car and ID cards.  The first week in the mission is pretty hectic. 
    The senior missionaries are allowed an overnight trip once a quarter.  December 21st and 22nd we went to the old Quiche capital, Quetzaltenango or Xela in the north west part of Guatemala.  I served there for a total of 5.5 months.  We went to the temple there, visited the craft market, then dropped 7200 feet down to the coast and went to a theme park Xetulul near Retalhuleu.  It has buildings in the styles of various countries that have influenced Guatemala, including a Mayan section with caged jaguars.  Unfortunately on the way back to the capital we got behind a string of three sugar cane trailers which are gigantic and are pulled along at about 15 miles an hour.  The bus couldn't pass them, so we had to follow them for about 45 minutes until they turned off.  It was fun to see the sugar cane fields that were being burned at night.
     At church the 23rd, they only had sacrament meeting.  We passed out little gifts to the primary kids, a treat plus a coloring book of Jesus' birth and crayons.  Candy canes for the mutual kids.
     A member family invited us to lunch.  It was very good.  They have 4 generations living in the house, great grandma, grandma, mom and ten year old Silas.  Patsy had some gifts for Silas and he surprised her with a beautiful beaded necklace that he'd made for her.  Mom was really touched.
     Our son Mark came to visit us over the Christmas holidays arriving the night of the 23rd. Some humanitarian groups and also Mark brought down a total of 7 duffel bags of baby kits, around 400.  We're excited to have the challenge of being able to distribute them. 
     Because my work is mostly done by phone and over the internet, I have considerable flexibility where I do it.  So on the senior trip and our travels with Mark, I took my phone and laptop.  All the hotels have WiFi, although some were a little slow.
     On Christmas eve day Mark and I climbed the slightly active volcano Pacaya.  Mark did ok, but the only stamina producing exercise I do is climb 5 flights of stairs once or twice a day.  I was pretty slow going up the hill. 

 One of the novelties of the Pacaya hike is roasting marshmallows in one of the fumaroles.  

 

Some liquid lava [the red areas] coming out of the side of the volcano.  

     Christmas eve we met at 10 pm with the other senior missionaries and played games until 11:45 when we went up on the roof of their  5 story apartment building.  At midnight the people set off fireworks, most of them commercial grade right in residential areas or off the roofs of buildings. The entire sky all around the building was lit up.

 It was pretty wild and still pictures don't do it justice. 

Christmas day we got up and exchanged a few gifts.

   Then drove to the always beautiful Lake Atitlan.  Being Christmas day, there was very little traffic going up.  By the highway there were lots of groups of people, some families, some just groups of kids.  Some were picnicing.  All waved at us as we passed, so we waved back, we haven't ever experienced anything quite like it. We stayed at the pricey, but beautiful Hotel Atitlán.  We weren't so lucky with the traffic on the way back the next day.

Pool and gardens at the hotel

 Mark and I went on a series of zip lines on the side of the hill above the lake.  The longest was a half mile long.  Unfortunately the videos I took of Mark on the zip line and a panorama of Lake Atitlan won't play on this blog.

    The next day we took a boat to some of the villages around the lake and stimulated the local enconomy.  At San Juan we went to a local textile establishment where they demonstated spinning thread out of cotton, which grows on trees that are about 25 feet tall here.  It comes in white, tan and brown.  They also dye the thread with various natural plant compounds. 

     We went to a chocolate factory where they show how chocolate is made from the cacao beans to the finished product.  Cacao pods from the Peten region of Guatemala have been found as far away as New Mexico and south eastern Utah.  

     At Santiago de la Laguna we found a couple of churches, one a little older than the other.  We met a couple of missionaries who were only able to teach those who understand Spanish.  About half the town speaks as a first language a dialect Tz’utujil that is distintive to the south shore region of the lake.  There are 23 recognized indigenous languages in Guatemala.  

     That same night we drove to Antigua, the original conquistador capital of Guatemala.  Earthquakes destroyed the cathedral and many other buildings five times in 200 years.  They finally moved to the capital to the present location of Guatemala City.    Mark, being a civil engineer who did his thesis on preventing seismic damage to buildings  spent a lot of time examining the wrecked buildings.  We drove around the town [streets nearly all bone jarring cobblestones] and up to Cerro de la Cruz, a lookout point on a hill overlooking the city and the volcano Agua on the other side of the city.  

    The next day we went to Monterrico on the Pacific Coast. Our hotel was right on the water.  The beaches on the Pacific side all have gray sand from the lava.   The water was warm.  Every year at this time a sanctuary hatches baby sea turtles.  For a small fee, we bought cute little turtles and released them into the ocean along with about 200 other conservationists..  

Lining up to release the turtles

Some of the turtles were a little confused as to which way the water was.

Crocodiles at the Tortugaria reserve where we got our turtles

     On Saturday we went to the central market and stimulated the economy some more.  Then to lunch at a local restaurant.

     Sunday the 30th we did our usual singing time in Primary with Mark's help.  Here he is with some of our primary kids. They loved him!     

After church on Sunday we visited the hospital at Cuilapa and distributed baby kits to the new mothers and stuffed bears in the pediatric wing.

This little boy had lost his fingers on his right hand

     On New Year's eve we went on a one day trip to the fabulous Mayan ruins in Tikal. We flew there early in the morning and came back in the evening.  Even though the images of the pyramids are commonly seen in photos, the scale of the ruins is breath taking.  The combination of the numerous and massive ruins, the dense jungle, the loud roaring howler monkeys, and all the other exotic animals in the park give you the feeling of being in strange lost world. Some of the scenes from Star Wars were filmed in Tikal.

                                                            A pyramid poking out of the jungle

Coati

Wild turkey that survived Thanksgiving

     After flying back from Tikal, we were going to take Mark to dinner at a restaurant near the apartment.  At 7:30 on New Year's eve, it was closed.  Instead of worrying about making a lot of money, they let the employees have the evening off with their families.

     We were beat from having to get up at 3:30 am to fly to Tikal, so we went to bed early.  In the morning we reluctantly took Mark to the airport, then came back home and went back to bed.  I had been thinking about going in to the office, but realized that being New Year's day, it was closed.  So we napped and I answered emails and calls from home.  

     Now back to work.