My team, 180, and team Hot Mess stayed in Antigua this month and have been incredible blessed by our wonderful contacts. Forrest and Carol from Servants 4 Him Ministry have been a great team to work with. We have also been blessed with the opportunity to work with Vera from Casa Jackson, a house for malnourished children and Levi from Sharing His Plan.
 
With Forrest and Carol we will be working sifting sand and mixing concrete for the water filters. I am excited for the opportunity we will have later in the month to actually visit the villages and install the filter. They have also graciously invited us into there home several times for dessert and pizza and have showered us with knowledge on how to conduct children's hygiene ministries and how to build bio-sand water filters and efficient wood burning stoves.
 
Forrest and Carol followed God's calling 5 years ago and moved from there comfortable farm in America to Guatemala to start making bio-sand water filters. Their strategic plan was to use the filters as a form of "good deeds evangelism", or in other words they use the metaphor created with the water filter to tell the people about the gospel. It meets a physical need, which saves lives, as well as allows for the people to hear the good news. In 2002, about 2.2 million children died of dehydration cause by diarrhea, 80% of them in the first two years of their life. Parents in Guatemala, like many third world countries, do not know of the importance of ,and do not have access to, purified water. The answer is simple, provide them with the Bio-sand water filter ($55) and educate them! The bio-sand water filters use local concrete, sand from the rivers (cleaned of course), lasts a lifetime, and do not need to be cleaned or replaced. Servants 4 Him do not have to follow up with the people but choose to continuously check in with them to see how they are doing and truly build relationships. This makes all the difference in the world!
 
 
Forrest and Carol have also since expanded their ministry to include building efficient wood burning stoves to minister to the Mayan villages. The Mayan woman currently cook over an open flame in the middle of their houses causing the house to be filled with smoke. This has caused many respiratory and eye issues among the villagers and because it requires a lot of wood it has also caused many deforestation and mudslide issues.  When Servants 4 Him goes in and installs a clean efficient wood burning stove they are able to use a simple analogy to present the gospel. They talk to the woman about how their house is dirty from the smoke. No matter how hard they try to clean the house it just gets dirty from the smoke the next day. This is like our life with out Jesus, but once we install this stove, or let Jesus into our life he forgives are sin and washes us clean so we no longer have to live in the filth of our past. The analogy makes so much sense to the Mayans that every single family but one that had a stove installed last year came to know Jesus Christ! Praise God!
 

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We were also able to help Levi from Sharing his plan to dig ditches on his new ministry site. Levi makes prefabricated ferro concrete panels so when teams comes from America they can build a house in less than a day. The houses cost $700 or $7 a square foot to build and can withstand the earthquakes that are common to the area. He is currently in the process of building up his work site with a workshop to build the panels, storage for them and housing for mission teams so they have a place to stay on the property. We were in charge of digging the ditches to run electrical wires to the future buildings. It was very tough work but I know it will bless Levi and his future ministry site.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Our third and final missionary contact for the month is Vera from Casa Jackson. Casa Jackson is a clinic for malnourished children. When a parent brings a child to the hospital because they are sick or dieing from malnurishment Casa Jackson takes them in for 9-10 weeks to get them back to health. The house is run almost entirely by volunteers. We go in there in groups of 3 to feed the children. We run 8 hour shifts waking up the children every two hours to feed them. They can't afford bottles so all the kids are fed formula by a spoon or syringe. It is very difficult to get them to take the formula and is heart breaking work as the children are in such bad shape.