Thanksgiving Trip to Baja Verapaz - Cubulco

We headed out on Thursday morning for Cubulco, Baja Verapaz about 4 hours north of Guatemala City in the mountains.  This is where AMG operates a hospital and we have friends that are missionaries with FRMI, Ken and Jen VanMinnen.  We were excited to celebrate Thanksgiving in a very new and different way! We brought along a turkey and enjoyed the amazing views on the trip up.  The road through the mountains was amazing...sometimes with sheer dropoffs and no guardrails...a bit hairy! 

We arrived and I introduced Mary to Julio and Veronica, the directors of our hospital.  We stayed in the hospital guest house and our boys stayed at the VanMinnens.  Friday morning the plan was to head deep into the mountains and hike across a suspended bridge over a river then visit a remote village where Ken ministers to the Mayan people.  We arrived at the bridge only to find many Mayans there...Ken was very surprised telling us that normally noone was around! We soon learned that the President of Guatemala, Alvaro Colom was going to soon make a historic visit to this small village in order to pledge his support of the people and a new bridge for them... we were about to witness something no President had ever done!!!

We crossed the bridge, at 300 meter long and 70' high (above the river) this was quite the frightening experience.  Many other Mayans were attempting to cross along with us and at one point the bridge twisted to one side and gave us quite a shock! We made it across and then turned around to head back... about halfway across a helicopter came right down beside us and landed in a field.  We basically ran across and arrived just in time to see the President.  We listened to him a moment and then went down through the woods and visited with his security team.  We warmed up to them and they allowed us to cross the security line and get right up close so that we could meet the President when he returned to his helicopter.  The kids talked with the soldiers protecting him and one even gave Jordan a bullet from his automatic rifle.  We got to greet the President on the way out and thought the whole experience was just incredibly cool.  Afterwards we returned to Kens pickup truck only to find it full of Mayan people wanting a ride to town.  We obliged and had a nice ride back through the mountains.

We are incredibly thankful this year for our family, friends our ministry here in Guate and Gods goodness.  Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

New Playgrounds

We were all so excited to see a beautiful new playground installed today at our Verbena school.  We are trying to improve the quality of our playground equipment and have been soliciting donations to do so.  If you would like to help us purchase another one like this for one of our other 28 schools please click on the DONATE tab above and indicate that you would like to have your gift go towards the purchase of a playground.  There is also information, after clicking, on how to call or mail in a donation to AMG.

We are all so excited for Monday, when our daycare children arrive (our regular students are on vacation)  they will be so excited with this!!!!  They are not used to playing on something so nice (a fact many of us would take for granted!) and it will be a very exciting morning for them.  Thank you to those who helped to purchase this!!

Visit to Cubulco Projects

We travelled last week to Cubulco, Guatemala (North of Guatemala City) a large rural city of mostly indigenous mayans where we have our hospital, dental clinic, radio program and agicultural center.  Our visit was part of an ongoing objective we have had to expose each of our different ministries to each other in order to interchange ideas and understand how all the work AMG is doing in Guatemala relates.  Our group consisted all of our area supervisors, our Director of Education, Coordinator of Child Sponsorship and our camp directors. It is simply amazing to me how much fruit we are enjoying from this vital group of ministries in Cubulco. 

We are the only hospital within hours of this area and we treat more than 15,000 patients each year.  The hospital offers complete services with emergency room, labor & delivery, operating rooms, dental clinic, ultra-sound, xray and our own laboratory.  Our radio program reaches much of the population and is used as a vehicle to evangelize and teach on a variety of important health topics. 

Thank you so much Julio and Veronica (Cubulco Directors) for your excellent management, your creative ideas and your love for this community!  What a blessing!