Guatemala, Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Today was another wonderful day at the Malnutrition Center in Guatemala!!  We were blessed to have 3 guests join us to help out at the Malnutrition Center.  Denny, Hallie, and their son Matthew are from the Gainesville area and were down here on another mission trip and joined with us today! What a blessing it was to have 6 extra helping hands!!

The Canaries got a new little baby yesterday!  LYDIA is a 1 month old that weighs 4 pounds! She’s beautiful and had a good first day at the center.  We still haven’t seen a smile from Jeremiah but he is improving!! He prefers to be held because it’s a little painful for him to sit on his own. He’s just still too weak to really sit for long without pain.  Today he drank a whole cup of his milk. He started to cry when he finished so we gave him another cup and he drank all of it… YES!! That’s progress!  One of our canaries, JOSE, was moved up to the bunnies. He just came to the center last Friday and was able to move to the bunnies today.  We did manage to get our first smile from Jose today!!

   

Parker is one of our teenage guys on the trip and he had his first experience with changing a diaper! He learned to keep little boys covered at ALL times while changing their diaper!! 

  

The Bunnies and Chicks had Chocolate cake today!  Yum!   They are also still potty training, which is NOT a small task!! There are about 17-20 young toddlers all potty training!!

The Ducks and Squirrels had a fun, messy time making play dough.

 

After our lunch, some of us took a quick outside tour of the malnutrition center.  We saw the chicken coop that has 220 chickens.  They produce about 160 eggs a day which is enough for every child at the center to have an egg for breakfast.  Next month 200 meat chickens will be donated to the center.   We also learned about the Moringa tree.  100 seeds were creatively donated to the center. They were planted eight weeks ago and have already started sprouting.  It’s a tree that has leaves with very high nutritious value.  The leaves can be cooked like a spinach or chopped and used in other foods.  All of the outside gardens, chickens, bees, etc. is all tended to by a really great staff employee named Basilio.  When the Moringa seeds were donated, Basilio knew exactly what they were because he had learned about them in a class he took.  GOD IS AWESOME!!

The father/son construction crew continued to sand and paint several benches.  These benches will be used in the front lobby of the center for the parents to sit on when they come to visit their children.