Mission Trip to Guatemala - St. Paul & St. John's Lutheran Churches

Yesterday was packed full from the 5:45 morning alarm to falling into bed around 10:30pm.    It was our last day of clinic, which presented new challenges - It had the potential to be very busy with people wanting to get in while they still had the chance, we were running low on a variety of glasses, and we knew we would need to pack for the trip home at the end of the day.   We started the morning as we usually do, with 6:30am breakfast at Claudia’s, a delightful little cafe-type space that she opens every morning just to cook us breakfast.    There we have morning devotions, breakfast, and prayer.    Then we were picked up by Gregario, our driver for the week.    He’s amazing, getting our bus into and out of traffic, fitting into the smallest, most unlikely places, and keeping us safe. We left for the church at 7:30am, even though clinic doesn’t start until 9am, because we wanted time to get organized for a long day and hopefully some ...

Wow!    There’s so much to share and it’s overwhelming to try to write about it concisely.    Today was our last day of clinic for the trip.    We had our busiest day yet with 130 people fitted for glasses.    The final numbers haven’t been tallied yet, but that brings us somewhere near 450+ people served with more than 700 pairs of glasses and another 450+ pairs of sunglasses as well. The attached video walks you through what our clinic looked like.    You enter into the courtyard and begin with the registration table.    Registrants then waited in the seating area of the courtyard where a short session on caring for your eye health was held and then the witness for Christ by either Pastor Rudy or Pastor David.    From there, registrants went to the nursing station where they discussed their eye health history and learned about the use of eye drops and received an eye dropper and a recipe for making their own eye dro...

There is so much beautiful flora and fauna to be found here, even in the midst of a large city.  The gardener at the church itself is quite remarkable.  These are some photos of the plant life just at the church.