We spent the morning at Margarita Tejada School, the only learning institution of its kind in Guatemala. The school is for people of all ages with Down Syndrome, from infants through adolescents through adults through the elderly. The school was set up by a family wanting to support some sort…
After breakfast and centering prayer this morning, we had an hour and a half of relaxed time, so students rested, caught up on their journals, or chatted with each other. At 10:30 Rachel Beveridge, who runs an NGO in Central America and is married to Israel Ortiz, spoke about human…
We just returned this evening from our weekend away. After a 4 3/4 hour trip from Chichicastenango, we arrived back at SEMILLA (“I can’t wait to get back home to the seminary,” some students were saying), had dinner, enjoyed worship together led by a student group, and then celebrated Simon’s…
Departing from SEMILLA at 6 a.m., on this first day of our weekend field trip, we headed for Iximche, a pre-Columbian Mesoamerican archaeological site in the western highlands of Guatemala. We had breakfast at nearby Way’bi Foundation, which functions as a hotel for tourists, whose stay helps fund a hospice…
OK, now we believe it’s the rainy season in Guatemala. The seasonal rains arrived just in time for our afternoon field trip, all of which was scheduled to be outside at several different sites. But the rain came in buckets, a true deluge, and it’s still raining now, some five…
Thus far our days have been a bit different than originally planned, with several components shifting because of a protest or newly scheduled activities or different availability of guest speakers, but the rescheduled activities and timing always seem serendipitously right. This afternoon, at the request of the local Ronald McDonald…
Today turned out a bit differently than originally planned, partly because a major march was happening in the downtown area today, finishing with a protest in the National Plaza — the precise area where we planned to go for an afternoon field trip. We revised the afternoon schedule and instead…
After breakfast and centering prayer led by Gwen, we started off the first structured day of our Guatemalan SSTT with an intense and moving 2017 film, “Finding Oscar” (see trailer here), which chronicled the Guatemalan civil war through a particular 1982 massacre by the Guatemalan Army. Only a few…
Today was a full day, beginning with breakfast and orientation led by Carla Gonzalez and Leonor and Jerry Kennel, who work with CASAS — an educational program that usually serves college students — on the SEMILLA campus. Leonor expressed gratitude for our program since money we pay for housing and…
After leaving Goshen at 4 a.m. this morning, we arrived safely at SEMILLA in Guatemala City around 9 p.m. Guatemala time (two hours behind Indiana time), so our total travel time was about 19 hours, door to door. It was a relief to pull in at the seminary campus and…
