Monday, July 16, Day Two

Today is mom's birthday... I wonder what she has planned.

This day has felt really long. We made our first trip to Hope for Guatemala today. It's really cool! For the entire two weeks, we're going to be serving the Zone 18 kids breakfast and lunch, and a few of the guys are going to work on building a second story expansion on the Hope building.

Zone 18 is pretty rough. I mean, many of the houses are made of concrete walls and floors, tin roofs, and have no running water. Hope has water, but a limited supply for every day. They make every drop count!!

My goodness, the kids are adorable!! The majority of them were friendly and they tried to teach us a little Spanish...

Good luck with that one.

We worked all day until 4:30, then loaded the bus. Which is where I am right now. Something's wrong with the bus and it won't start. It's starting to get a little hot... But we're all trying to keep up a good attitude. Morgan, Henry, Ian, and Anna are talking about movies they've seen recently. I was considering joining in, but decided not to. By the time I watch 'new' movies, they're already out on DVD.

We're supposed to eat dinner at 6:30... I'm starving.

Sunday, July 15, Day One...

Today has been very long.

We spent the whole day traveling. It's been crazy, but crazy in a good way.

We woke up at 4 am and left to church. At 6, we made a quick goodbye video for the Students service, and loaded a Young bus, pulling out of the church parking lot at 6:30.

We arrived at the airport and spent a couple hours checking everyone in and going through security. Then, we made a mad dash to a Wendy's inside the airport to grab food to tide us over until we could have a decent meal.

We then all got on the plane, and flew down to the Dallas airport and had an hour or so to eat an early dinner. Clay, Adam, Alex, Levi and I went to T.G. I. Friday. The food was really good, and we all had a blast talking and laughing.

After dinner, we met up with the group and boarded the plane for Guatemala. It was about three and a half hours long, but it was a nice flight. At the end, when we started to descend, we broke through the layer of clouds and were overlooking an amazing, beautiful view of Guatemala City. The lights were like stars in the dark night. Breathtaking...

We got off the plane and went through customs, which was a quick process. By then, we were all exhausted and ready to go to bed. Luckily, the team that flew through Miami joined us before too long, and we were able to board a big yellow school bus to ride to the seminary. It was a pretty quiet drive, thank goodness, because most of the chatterboxes were too tired to talk.

Looking out the windows on the way to the seminary, it didn't look like Guatemala needed much service. In fact, it looked a lot like downtown back at home. Big buildings and nice houses. After a few minutes, though, I figured out that we were in Zone 1, one of the nicer zones.

Wonder what Zone 18 has in store. Can't wait to start serving!!

Uncut writing

It's taken a lot of writing, erasing, re-writing, re-erasing, and re-writing again to get this post written.

I don't know why. I suppose it takes a bit to get the stuff in my head out on paper (Er... Screen)... But maybe that's a good thing. Anyway, enough of my dodging.

34 days ago (July 15), I set out to Guatemala with my lovely church for a mission trip. If you've been reading my recent posts at all, you've heard me talk about it a little bit...

Backing up:

Last September, I filled out a form along with 56 other teenagers. It requested my personal information amongst other things. Then, I had an interview with two staff members of my church. I waited in anticipation for a few days and finally, an intern from the church called to say I made the team.

Since then, I've spent nine months serving, training, and preparing to go to Guatemala. And man, was it ever worth it. Even though I had to raise quite a bit of money, and it didn't seem like we would pull through -- which, by the way, I didn't pull through... God did -- and we faced quite a few obstacles in those long nine months, I found myself sitting in my church's student room on July 15th, about to get on a bus to leave for the airport.

I've decided to spend the next couple of weeks posting my journal entries. (Idea credit to my good friend Anna... Follow her at http://standingfirm4him.wordpress.com/)

What?... You can't expect me to come up with all the good ideas. Besides, just think of it as the uncut version of my writing. No editing, no 'cleaning up'. Just pure me (a.k.a pure awesomeness).

My apologies for not writing to you sooner.