A Piece of Home in Guatemala
Yesterday we met up with John who is a missionary here in Guatemala. He took us around to some of the areas he is working in, including the ghetto of Zone 18. There was a girl from Seattle who was with us that was trying to find an organization to work with so John was showing her Global Soccer Ministries. The girl looked a lot like and sounded like my ex-girlfriend from several years ago when I lived in Guatemala. Yikes.
For lunch, John took us to his house which is actually Nathan and Claudia's house who I've worked with in Guatemala before. When we sat down with his wife Amy and one of his kids, I noticed that something about the table we were sitting at looked very familiar.
The table was rectangular with rounded corners. There was a gold-foil-covered rubber molding around the bottom of the table-top. The gold foil was pealing off. On each end of the table were two legs that came straight down and ran into a horizontal cylindrical base. Each end of the base was covered with a hard clear plastic tube that was cracked.
Whoa! I've eaten at this table before! In fact, I did my homework on this table when I was in middle school. The table of my childhood made its way down to Guatemala and now I was eating at it again. Quite an interesting reunion.
I was scrambling in my brain to see if I could figure out how it got down to Guatemala, and then I remembered. About two years ago there was a shipping container going down to Guatemala from Atlanta. I had a bunch of computers sitting at my house that people donated for Guatemala so I got a big U-Haul trailer, attached it to my truck and packed in all the computers so that I could take them to Atlanta before the shipping container left for Guatemala.
There was plenty of space left in the trailer after all the computers were loaded and my dad said, "Well, why don't you just stick this table in there too. It's just been sitting here in the garage." The last-minute casual donation has made an impact on a Guatemalan family.
Afterwards we checked out Paraiso ("Paradise" in English) which is one of the roughest and poorest areas within the ghetto. John was showing us the Global Soccer Ministries soccer field when out of the corner of my eye I noticed something painted on a wall that looked familiar. It was a logo I designed for GSM when I was here several years ago.
I don't think I'll ever know the impact I have had here in Guatemala. There is something truly special about seeing the impact of your efforts years later. I know how much the people here have impacted me. Had it not be for the people I met in Guatemala, I'd be hunched over a computer in Lexington, KY under a fluorescent light. But instead, I'm hunched over a computer while traveling around the world. I'll take the second one.