Bye bye Antigua, holidays here we come!

We're almost our of our house!
The sleepy morning dogs lying in groups along the sidewalks, the men doubling on bicycle, and kids tripling on the way to school, and the women walking with bright bowls on their heads, greeting people with a friendly "Buenas días", all helped me enjoy one of our last mornings here.
The last couple of weeks have been a great time of serving and fellowship together with the staff here. Many of them are relatively new here: pray for them in their roles as they have already started hosting the many summer teams. We've experienced God's grace and kindness in amazing ways here.
The earthquake that woke most of the family Friday night was centred in the Carribean near our planned journey. Pray for the few people who lost loved ones and more who lost homes. Things have settled, and appear to be as safe as usual for travel. We appreciate your prayers as always!

Good News

Thank God our car is running fine (although there is that one noise...). Our missionary friends Tommy and Marilyn from Texas are going to buy it!



Doña Dorotea has seen a general surgeon about eventually getting treatment for her skin cancer. On the same day we discovered two other ladies with skin cancer at Casa Maria! I excised one, and the other one (on the lady's nose) will be managed by a plastic surgeon which will be handled through the wonderful private Catholic charity hospital here in Antigua, Hermano Pedro.

Julia, the elderly lady who needs the hip revision, will hopefully see a visiting American orthopedic surgeon in the next few weeks.



Also, thank God the little premie twins, Antonio and Ariceli, are thriving under the wonderful care of their loving extended family. And thanks also for the donated formula which was a timely gift that arrived with the Canadian team. This family was so kind in having a few of us SI staff over for a wonderful lunch of the most delicious pepian I have tasted yet! (Pepian is a kind of sauce or stew, a--or should I say the--Guatemalan specialty, especially in Magdalena. It has dozens of ingredients and takes an immense amount of work to make. This was one of those humbling "missionary moments" where you just really feel blessed.)

Justin has finished his time with me. It's been fun to be a friend and mentor over the past few weeks. I've enjoyed that part of my role here quite a bit.

This being our last week here, we have enough going on to "keep us busy"... but I'll save my ramblings on that for another time! I'm pretty sure I will be able to get Tori to do the next blog entry, which will be refreshing for us all. We are having a great time getting together with our new friends here.

We're doing fine without our turtles, but miss our cat Louie and our dog Charlie back home! It sounds like they are being cared for so well they may not want to come home! But we miss all our friends more.

Thank you all so much for your prayers. God is listening!

Follow Up

We could have called this blog “treading water”, which is what we’re doing in the new photo (finally!) at the top of our blog. It could also be representative of what it sometimes feels like we’re doing here—hanging in there for the remainder of our time here.

We had a great time at Semuc Champey, where beautiful natural pools of clear water are perpetuated by limestone deposition. Our accommodation was fun, but despite Tori’s strategy, the bed bugs did bite.

It was a challenging drive in and out, and the car made it fine. However, now it’s back in the shop again. Nothing serious... we’re praying that it will be reliable for our trip, and that we’ll be able to sell it before we leave in June.

This morning I finally got to go mountain biking in Guatemala! It was raining, so it made me feel quite at home. Rainy season is certainly here, bringing showers—and often lightning and thunder—nearly every afternoon or evening. Fortunately most mornings are still clear (today being an exception of course!).

Getting our visas extended was another fiasco. The requirements were not set out clearly, particularly for kids... You couldn’t really know exactly what they want until trying to submit the application. However, there wasn’t anything a nearby lawyer in a shady office couldn’t fix... this time just the office was shady, not the lawyer.

Tori, Aaron, Hannah, and Matthew delivered some of the gifts for the kids at Colegio Monroy last week. The children there are thrilled with their new skipping ropes, balls, books and especially games that they can now play with at school. Our kids will be bringing similar things to the El Gorrión school next week, thanks to the generosity of all the Bridge Kids!

It was great to spend time with Phil and Judy Bergen’s Love Guatemala team here. (There’s a link to their blog on this page.) We partnered with Casa Shalom Orphanage, serving quite a few people at a clinic we held there. Terri got to share with the nurses at Casa Maria (home for the elderly). On the same day, I was finally able to do a biopsy on the large wound Doña Dorotea has had for a long time. (See the picture which was taken early in our time here. Or don’t!) It confirmed my suspicions of skin cancer. Please pray for her as we try to find a workable treatment for her—there are no plastic surgeons to do skin grafting at the national hospital.

This is a typical frustration here. For example, Maria, the elderly lady with the fractured hip I mentioned before, was never offered any treatment for a variety of reasons, and was eventually taken home by her son. A precious 63 year old woman with endometrial cancer presented to the Magdalena clinic with pain and bleeding from her endometrial cancer. The national cancer service is able to diagnose, but the treatments are just too expensive for her caring family, who will have to look after her at home as well. Julia is a beautiful old lady who has been unable to walk because of pain in her leg since she her hip repair over a year ago. This week we brought her to the national hospital for some X-rays, which showed that the prosthetic was loose. The chances of her getting a revision surgery on this joint are pretty slim. Justin, a Trinity Western student, and I visited some premature twins and their family in their home in Magdalena. The babies were born at around 32 weeks, and were discharged after little more than two weeks in hospital. Thank God they’re doing well, and pray for their health as they are still very vulnerable.

Other follow-up: Rosa’s little grand-niece Marixa is doing well, now drinking donated formula. Rosa herself is also improved and will hopefully be able to avoid surgery, taking medicine we were able to buy with donated funds. Her brother Carlos (Marixa’s grandfather) who had been bed-ridden after an accident, was back to work at least part-time, last time I saw him. Brablio, the fellow with the strange attacks, has only had very minor episodes compared to prior. Thank God, because I don’t think he’s being compliant with his medicine, but we did pray for him!

Our turtles are no more. Sam escaped a few days after Ella’s traumatic death.

Once again, thank you all for your love and support. Pray that God continues to accomplish what He wants to during our last two weeks here before we leave on our road trip!

Post-vacation

Our car broke down yesterday. Again. We thought it was all fixed up, but I guess not. We had been shopping with the money the kids had saved up before coming to Guatemala, and the money that Bridge Kids from our church had donated, to buy things for the two schools they’ve helped at.

So there we were, stuck on the busy highway between Guatemala City and San Lucas on our way back to Antigua, as the rain and darkness set in. Thank God the engine died just in time so that we were somehow (!) able to pull a few feet over on a driveway instead of being stuck on the “shoulder”. (There’s only two feet of pavement between the edge of the lane and the sharp drop into the trench at the side of the road.)

We made a few phone calls for help. Yeah Yuri!! After towing the car to the safety of their home, he drove us and our baggage to our home. Of course he wouldn’t take anything for it: “That’s what brothers do”, he said.

I love that. For the same reason, Joyce, Julia, and Zach said “sure, we’ll varnish the new shelf at the clinic instead of hanging out in Antigua.” And Bonnie and the kids put the second coat on the next day. And Phil & Judy are down here with the Love Guatemala team to help wherever they can. And Fernando, and Seth, went to the city with a poor Gringo like me to help get some business done. And Nic, Ramon, and Marcos went to visit Oscar in the hospital when he wasn’t feeling well. And so many of you are praying for us. And, and, and...

Last week I had an Abba moment. (No, I wasn’t the Dancing Queen. I mean Abba Father, Daddy.) I was reading a book Bonnie passed on to me.* I realized, again, that God LOVES me. I realized that discovering this truth in some amazing palpable way has been the most significant, life changing thing in my entire walk with Jesus.

I got up to go outside, and appreciate it over again. We were on vacation at Lake Atitlan. It’s beautiful. I sat on a rock overlooking the volcano and lake, and His love obliterated everything for a few minutes. I discovered (He revealed to me) that the desires of my heart, that I had expressed to Him just a few days earlier, could be realized by a life flooded in this TRUTH.

...Then I noticed the bananas growing, and the old man walking down the road in his white striped knee-length pants and cowboy hat, and the rest of my surroundings returning. That's how it is. Our Father’s love is there every morning, but it only arrests us occasionally. Like being in a new culture, some things are incredible, until you've been around them for a while.

I think sometimes our spiritual lives are impoverished by a god whose love is routine. God's is NOT. When our hearts are awakened by his indiscriminate acceptance of us, his warm affectionate embrace, his bizarre and complete approval of us, his own orphan-adopted children... our everyday lives become transformed, marked by such a generous, reckless love that could only have its origins in something (Someone) completely Divine. Father, mark my life with your generous Love! (*I’d like to recommend this quick little book that I found very profound: The Furious Longing of God, by Brennan Manning.)

Thank God for ongoing safety and guidance. Pray for our car, as it’s needed for some things we are hoping to do with the Love Guatemala team, amongst other things. And you could pray that we’ll hang in there for our last month here. We’re all still doing pretty well. We’re getting out to help at sites, or to get together with other people around here. Hannah gets to Skype with some friends and generally likes it here. Aaron & Matt like to play gamecube/DS but sometimes need more to do (or maybe just need separate rooms?). Bonnie needs less to do—laundry & cooking take up most of the day without all the modern amenities—but is an amazing support for all of us. Tori’s beginning to wonder who she is. Pray for the staff here, and the Love Guatemala team that’s here this week: for God’s love and joy and health to be with them all. Although there are no officially confirmed cases in Guatemala, the swine flu is throwing a bug into some things here.
(Oh yeah, and pray for those Canucks too!)

PS our pics (especially of Lake Atitlan)are at: http://picasaweb.google.com/jkornelsen