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This is what I wrote to my family while I was on my mission trip in Guatemala:


Hi everybody! This mission trip has been AMAZING. I’ve been working with the children and they have been so sweet and easy to work with. Even with the language barrier, they don’t care. I can speak some Spanish, but they haven't really been annoyed with my lack of knowledge. All of them were willing to do the activities we had planned and they hung all over us. I also learned one thing; it is good to know animals in Spanish for face-painting because if I hadn't, they would have been disappointed. The helpers who were native Guatemalans, fluent in Spanish, were a great help. They were such good teachers and helped the kids to understand and retain what we wanted them to learn.

The first day, we only had about 30-40 children to work with and we taught them the story of Jonah and the Whale and made a craft-game that had the Jonah theme. When we exhausted our activities for the day, we just played games, pretty much any game we could think of to keep them occupied while they were waiting for their parents or just to show them that we still cared about them. These kids want to be loved and want to love other people. It's so great.

So, anyway, the next day, which is Wednesday, we had some little children not in school in the morning. Then, a teacher from the school who noticed the children were playing with us during recess asked about what we were doing and the principal of the school allowed us to use a big space, like huge bleachers, to teach Vacation Bible School. All of the children in the school were told, so that afternoon, after we were finished preparing all of our crafts and activities that we had planned for today and tomorrow, there were around 500+ that turned up. That is more kids than I've seen at one time ever. We had to divide it into about 5-6 groups to be able to do the activities. They ate everything we had to offer up, pretty much. They were so willing and we were so willing so I think we all made a great team. I really think they understood our purpose as well. The translators did an awesome job at teaching them the Gospel, especially Makko, he preached twice, once at the beginning and again at the end. (This is where I was kicked off the computer for writing too much... Boo.) Bye!