Spanglish

Hola! After our fourth day in Guatemala and our second day serving at the malnutrition center we have all become experts at speaking "spanglish"! But, today it was a huge blessing because we had three wonderful girls from Guatemala that joined us at the center and were excellent translators for our entire team. This morning we passed out gifts to the workers that serve full time at the center and it was exciting to see their faces brighten up when they found out that the gifts were for them! They were so thankful for these small gifts and they took them away and opened them together when they thought we weren't looking!

This morning we began several projects at the center! Many of the women assembled mobiles to help stimulate the minds of the infants and attached them to their cribs. These mobiles added so much life to the plain white peeling walls of the room by adding color, motion and soft music. We were also able to play with the infants and feed them and love on them. Some infants even seemed to be much more responsive to the love that we showed today and they all had a much more positive disposition. The physical needs of these infants are so visible as they are severely malnourished, losing hair, and suffering from chicken pox that it is hard to leave them in the afternoon.

Others on our team worked on painting the whole facility again today! Huge progress was made, but, we all will have to pitch in to help over the next couple days to be sure that we leave the center fully coated in canarie yellow paint and beautiful! Several men also worked on replacing soffit around the facility which was quite hard work!

And, once again the older children were ecstatic to see us! It seems like almost every child at the center has been able to form a positive attachment to one of the members on our team! Some children wouldn't even let our team members leave them :) Today, our team was able to take the children outside, teach them Bible stories, read to the children, and do arts and crafts with them. It is amazing to see everyone's servants' hearts as they unceasingly give of themselves to serve these children with great needs. We became even more aware of the needs of these children today as some of our team members worked with Bennito, a 7 year old boy who was so severely malnourished when he came to the center 2 weeks ago that he was at the last stages of life. We were also able to love Francisco, a little boy who was found in a dumpster 2 weeks ago.

Our whole team has been blessed with so many opportunities this week to love the unloved. It is incredible to gather together at night and share with each other all of the Wow! moments that we have experienced individually each day! Please be praying for these children as we spend our last few days helping however we can!