As I am experiencing this incredible adventure I am constantly amazed by the people that I encounter along the way. Our group spent this weekend in the capital, Guatemala City. In the lobby of the hotel where we were staying we met a man who created a medical record system for third world countries. The system is in the process of being applied to all of Tanzania. Since Tanzania holds such a special place in my heart I could not pass up the opportunity to talk with him the next morning at breakfast. He created the system to overcome many of the issues that third world medical recording faces. The system also collaborates the information from all different countries in all different languages to better track outbreaks and disease rates. Earlier in the week we toured an organization called God’s Child Project. This organization has projects dedicated to the education of poverty stricken women and children, health clinics and sanitation education, meals for the poverty stricken, counseling for those affected by the war, legal defense for domestic violence cases and homeless shelters. He we met a girl from the U.S. who after graduating college moved to Guatemala to do long term volunteer work with this organization. I also met a girl at La Union (the Spanish Language school) who is Canadian but has taught in several different countries including China and Hong Kong and after she leaves Guatemala will be moving to London. For our first few weeks here we had a housemate who was part of a group that was here studying Spanish before they left to work in a Honduran orphanage for the next 2 years. My roommate here spent time in Mozambique working with the influential missionary Heidi Baker who was featured in the documentary “Finger of God.” I am also on this trip with a guy who spent this summer biking from Maine to Oregon and received lodging in the homes of perfect strangers along the way. Another girl in our group was born in Honduras, lived in China and spent a year in Zambia. While in Zambia she encountered a baby boy who was so malnourished that his only chance to live if he was fed every 20 minutes for several months. She got permission to leave her mission post and dedicated her time to caring for this baby boy and ended up saving his life. These are just bits and pieces of the stories of some of the people that surround me. From Marta, our house-mom, who cares for us like we are her own children to the guy we met in the hotel lobby (who I am quite certain I will see on the news someday), I am blown away by the massive amounts of good I have seen in the people I meet here. In the past few weeks I have learned that Guatemala just ended its 36 year long civil war in 1996. I have heard stories of the thousands of people who disappeared during this genocide, the children forced to become soldiers, the women raped, the ethnic divisions that still exist and the role my own country had to play in all of this. Every day I see guards with machine guns patrolling the streets, parks, restaurants and stores. It is almost ironic that in the midst of all this darkness there is light that shines so bright. These people are not sitting around waiting for life to happen to them. Instead they have decided to live their lives for something greater than themselves. Whether they know it or not these people have challenged me to choose a life less ordinary.
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