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Teen Revival
Completely Transformed
By Kalista King

Greetings, friends! It has been a while since I have had the privilege of writing to you myself. As you heard from my mother last week, I just recently got back from Guatemala. Me and 13 others had the wonderful opportunity to embark on a life-altering experience to this third world country through Greenville's EUM mission team, "Destination Known." This week, I would like to share a little bit about my trip with you and how it had an impact on me. To begin, I will share about my thoughts and feelings about the trip prior to leaving.

Technically, Guatemala is the fifth mission trip I have ever been on. Every year since my freshman year of high school, I have gone on Youth for Christ's Detroit mission trip where we fix up houses and work throughout the community to try and reach out to those who are in need of our help. I have also been to the Bronx, New York with Youth for Christ, where we did many relational activities to reach out to the residents in the Bronx. (Cheyanne Mills shared more about this trip in a previous article.) However, Guatemala was the first mission trip I have ever gone on out of the country. I have always said that I'm not much of a "missions person," I just did mission work, because I knew it's what Jesus calls us to do in the Bible. I did enjoy these kinds of trips, but I never could see myself going into the mission field as a career, because honestly, I was not very fond of all the work that I had to put into the mission work. I chose to go to Guatemala because of course those who have been there before say it's an incredible experience, and I wanted to have that experience too. I prayed a few times that the Lord would prepare my heart for it but never really expecting the results I got. To me, Guatemala was just going to be an experience, one that gave me good memories but not much else. Little did I know, I had a reality check coming whether I was prepared for it or not.

Now before I begin going into detail about my trip, I want you to hear what God did behind the scenes weeks before we even left for Guatemala. Our missions leader, Cliff Rapier, had gotten us all tickets to fly out of Dayton Airport on December 26th in order to catch our next flight in Atlanta which would take us to Guatemala. However for reasons I don't clearly remember, Cliff ended up finding out a week or so prior to us leaving that all of the flights booked through Dayton Airport were cancelled, which obviously was a bit of an issue considering that flight was the one taking us to Atlanta! Thankfully, Cliff found a way to get us to Atlanta Airport from Columbus so our flight was able to be transferred from Dayton to Columbus. My point in telling you this is so that you can see that Satan was trying to stop this trip from happening even before we left. But in the end, God always wins and we got to Guatemala safe and sound without any other problems.

To save time, I won't share every little detail about the trip, just the highlights. When we got to The Ville, where we were staying for the week, I was shocked by how beautiful the scenery was. Since we were told that we would be experiencing poverty all week, I expected to stay in something much less nice than this. What I found out later was that we were very fortunate to stay in The Ville because working in the dump community was enough of a shock to us, let alone staying there. Now that I mentioned the dump community, I am going to focus more on that because this is where most of the highlights take place. Our mission for the week was to build a house for a family in one of the 16 communities in the Guatemala City Dump. Yes, one of the "16" communities. The Guatemala City dump is not just an ordinary little dump, it is a city in which all of Guatemala's garbage is stored. And yes, this garbage is what feeds the massive number of people who live in the dump communities. Just to put things into perspective for you, the amount of people who live in the dump community is almost equal to the entire city of Greenville. So if you were to walk throughout the dump, you wouldn't just see a few people here and there, you would see many people doing things like people digging through the garbage, carrying bags of trash back home, homeless people laying on the streets, etc. Coming from America, I'm sure you can imagine how this would seem like a whole other world.

The organization we were working through is called the "Potter's House Association," and their staff is devoted to showing the light of Christ there in any way they can. They provide many resourceful programs for the residents of the dump community such as schooling, tutoring, mentoring, health care, dental care, parenting classes, etc. Something I love about the Potter's House staff is that that they always stress the importance of realizing that what most Guatemalans call "the scavengers," of the dump community are completely equal to any other human being. Therefore, instead of calling them "scavengers," they call them "treasures." The theme for their entire association is that God cares about the poor, so let's join our hearts to His. From day one, I realized if God cares about the poor, then I should too.

I could probably write a book about everything we experienced there, but for your sake, I will just skip to the big highlights. When we first met the family that we were building the house for, their community gave us a special welcome by setting off firecrackers for us to let everyone know we had arrived. The names of the family members in which we were serving were, Juan Carlos, Juana, (father and mother,) Catherine, Tiffany, and Allison (daughters in order from oldest to youngest). Juan began welcoming us through a translator and thanking us for what we were choosing to do for their family. When he was finished speaking, Catherine spoke up and said something that spoke to all of our hearts. She said, "I have been praying for a new house for a long time, and now God has finally answered my prayers." Once this was said, it was clear to all of us that God had specifically chosen us to be there for this family. Thus, we were determined to do whatever it took to give this family the house that they deserved.

Long story short, we ended up finishing the house in five days. Now, of course, this house is most likely nothing like your house or mine. Quite frankly, it is about half the size of my garage. However, Juan's family did not care about the size or even really the look of the house; he said he was just so happy that he can now give his family a safe place to live. Between working and a few other activities, we also had the chance to play with the children in the community we were working in. Let me tell you, each and every one of those kids just stole my heart. I was truly amazed by how happy they can be with how little they have. The affection they showed for us when we were able to love on them was just overwhelming. Cliff had told us a few times throughout the week that if we were only focused on building the house and nothing else, then we were missing the point of this trip. Yes, we were there to build a house, but there was so much more to it than that. We were also there to share the love of Christ with the kids, people, and families we encountered. And in doing so, what we discovered was that even though we thought we were coming to bless them, in reality, they blessed us even more.

At the end of the week, we had a farewell ceremony with the family, where we presented them the keys to their new house. During this time, something happened that I will never forget. After we were done sharing about what a privilege it was to serve their family in this way, the translators asked if the kids wanted to say anything. This is when little Allison, who had barely spoken a word all week, lifted her head that was buried in her mother's chest and said, "Thank you for my new house because I finally have my own room." Right then, I broke. All the emotion that had been built up inside of me through the week came out in a rush of tears. Nothing can top the feeling that I had at that moment, absolutely nothing.

It is safe to say this trip has changed my life. I have been so incredibly humbled by this experience that I will never see life the same. I do wish to go back to Guatemala, because I left a piece of me there. I will never forget that those people are still out there, living in extreme poverty while I am living in what they see as paradise. I want to go on more mission trips and share Christ's love in every way that I can! It has been extremely hard for me to adapt to life here after experiencing what I did there. But nonetheless, I have been completely transformed, and I intend on allowing God to continue transforming me like He did last week. He did tell me something that I feel as though I need to share, and I will end with this. "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." -Matthew 25:40

Dios te bendiga. God bless you.


 
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