I am so upset right now. Geoffrey asked me on the way home if this was going to be a "blog" and I told him no, I just wrote one the other day, it would be at least another month before I wrote another one. But now, two hours later, I am so upset that I feel like the only way to get it out of me is to "share it with the world".

People can live their whole lives with their eyes closed. They aren't ignorant of what goes on in the world around them. You know about the child trafficking, the female mutilation, the starvation, the brothels, the genocides, the street children, the abusive husband down the street, the girl who cuts herself, the drug addicted, the poverty that leads to disease and death. They know. They just choose not to let it affect them. They choose to close their eyes and only open them for the "important" things in life, themselves, or maybe the "easy" things in life, things that won't cause their materialistic smile to turn into a frown.

But the Lord tells us to bear one another's burdens. Bear them. I suppose we can choose to only bear the burdens of those we have to bear, our children, our parents, our spouses. But what about those who have burdens too painful to even mention. Burdens that can't even be imagined. Burdens that would drive someone to suicide. Those are the hard ones to carry. Those are the ones easy to close your eyes to, and pretend you can't do anything about them.

Today after church we went to bear a bit of Maria's burden. You all remember her. That is Henry's mom. Henry is the 22 year old boy, I say boy because that is all he is, with cerebral palsy who lays in a bed soiled in his own urine and feces all day long, every single day. His mother was raped 22 years ago and ever since has bore the burden of 24/7 care for her son, who now is too big for her to move. She struggles to even change the t-shirts she wraps around him as diapers. They are very poor and she does the best she can as a single mother with no income. People look at her and judge her. People whisper about her and talk about her behind her back. She has had no one to help her bear her burden, no one except a faithful God. She is a devoted Christian woman who has looked into my eyes time and time again with tears falling down her cheeks telling me in broken Spanish,"No aguanta." That means, "Doesn't support." She is telling me that she just feels at times like she can not do it anymore. It is too hard. Mentally, she can not do it. Physically, she can not do it. Emotionally, she can not do it. But yet, she does it. And now, living 45 minutes from her house, we are trying our best to be there for her. To help her "aguanta". We support them monthly with food and medicine. We sit and listen to her talk and laugh and cry for hours. I hold her hands and try to understand her plight and remind her that with God, she can. She is. I am here for her. I pray for her. I love her like a sister and will do what I can to help her bear a little of her burden. She is not perfect, she makes mistakes, but who am I to judge? Who am I to withhold the good I can do?

Today, we sit there and we listen. We talked about the hard rain from yesterday and she begins to tell us about some "poor poor people" that sleep in the dirt and the rain washed all the mud over them yesterday. I am looking around her dirt floor shack and thinking, "you are telling me about people you think are poor??" I ask her where they live and she immediately gets off the bed, grabs her shoes, and says let's go. We walk about 25ft from her shack to an even smaller shack. A shack smaller than most of your bathrooms. She says some things to the people inside that I don't understand and then motions for us to come in.

This is why I am upset. Meet Catarina (I wish I had a picture to insert here). Catarina, a 23 year old little girl, I say little girl because that is all she is, stands there and greets us. At her feet sits Victoria, a 1 year old, filthy little girl. She is sitting on a piece of torn plastic in the mud. She is digging at what looks like a dirty tortilla. She starts to cry when she sees our white faces. 3 ft away sits a young man and a 4 yr old little boy, also covered in mud from head to toe. Catarina was abandoned as a baby by her mother and never knew her. She now has this husband and two young children and I am standing in the middle of their house and they have nothing. Absolutely nothing. There are no clothes, not a toy in sight, no bed, no couch, no shoes, nothing at all. There is a tiny wooden stool and a little rotten wood table, not much bigger than the stool and a shard of a blanket not even big enough to cover the one year old. That is it.

I have seen poverty. I have seen extreme poverty. I have never seen anything like this. Catarina's eyes filled with tears as I asked her questions and I did everything I could to keep my eyes dry. I can't wrap my head around that family of four and how they live. I wanted to run out of there and pretend I never saw them. I told them "nice to meet them" and said we'd be visiting them again. Turns out Maria gave them that stool and little table. Maria brings the kids over to her shack to help clean them. She shares the little food she has with them too. Maria, who's paraplegic son lies in the bed 24/7 while she tries to keep the flies off him for fear of the maggots she will find crawling through his hair, she is trying to help this little family. She sees their need. She has a better excuse than anyone I know to close her eyes and not do anything, but she doesn't. The woman who has next to nothing doesn't close her eyes to the plight of the ones who have nothing, how can we?

The Lord knows He has opened my eyes. He knows if He puts it in my path, I have no option but to act. That is, after all, why I live in Guatemala in the first place. All the suffering things He brings us, we help. How can we say no? Are we not saying no to Jesus Himself? I have been through plenty in my life and could make plenty of excuses, but when your eyes are open, there is no excuse. If you have breath in your lungs, you have no excuse. Give until it hurts. Give of yourself without holding back, without making excuses, give and give and do it all in the strength that the Lord provides, because that strength will never run dry. If you don't have anyone's burdens to bear, then it's because your eyes are shut.

We will go back to Catarina this week and we will build her a bed. Yes, we have lots of work to do here, and it will cost us money, and she lives 45 minutes away from us, and we will be dirty and uncomfortable, but the Lord has put her in our path, or shall I say put us in her path, and to close our hearts to her is to close our hearts to Jesus. To get her and her babies out of the mud, to pick them up in the middle of their suffering, to reach out to her and to love on her and show her that we care for her, well, that is exactly what the Lord did to us on the day He passed by and saw us squirming about in our own blood and He said to us "Live!". As Ezekiel 16 clearly portrays, He held nothing back from us, not one thing. He lavished us and gave us His absolute everything.

Are my tears for the weight of the burden that this family of four, and so many others like them, has carried for too long? Or do they fall because of all the suffering in the world that could be relieved or even eliminated if only people would open their selfish eyes? Together, the body of Christ can always "aguanta", always.

D.y.i.n.g. That's what I feel like doing anyway. To be with Jesus? Yes, please! But while I lay here wasting away, inwardly my hope is being renewed....

Okay, no. I will spare you all that...for now anyway. I don't have anything profound to say except that pregnancy, well, pregnancy = suffering for this girl. I am almost at 6 months, completed 5, and I have had maybe, maybe, 6 or 7 days of feeling o.k. Not good, but o.k. In 5 months! That is like 150 days or something.

I never knew it was so hard. I have so much more respect for, well, every woman who has carried a child to term and delivered, because for every person I look at, someone had to go through some kind of terror to bring them into this world.

Well it isn't news to anyone that I was blessed with hyperemesis gravidarum (the best diet known to mankind (if you're not pregnant)) for 4 months, but that goes away, I think, and a week later I get parasites, yes, a form of E. Coli. And, as if that isn't bad enough, I am diagnosed with a bacteria infection which causes me to immediately regurgitate anything solid I put in my mouth, and of course, gastritis, which means eating or not, I have acid burning mad in my esophagus, and if I am lucky, my throat too, almost all the time.

So, I've been giving our doctor really good business lately. Medicines are my new best friends. And don't worry, Mary Charis is growing just fine and has firmly rooted her butt right on top of my bladder, literally. Today during the ultrasound, she was sitting with her head upright, right at the base of my sternum, her butt straight down and her knees pulled up to her chest. Just hanging out in there with all her new little friends I suppose.

How did I get all these little playmates for my daughter you may ask? Well, someone didn't cook their feces good enough for me, and I ate them. Nice, I know. * Note to self * next time be sure to order them well-done. Noted.

Enough about me, we all know you are reading this to find out about the children's home. Well, it's still not there. We are still waiting on more funding. While we have been super blessed in the donations we have received recently, we still lack roughly $6,000 to start and $26,000 to finish. Some people, knowing we do not fund-raise, have felt led to fund-raise for us. It amazes me the things the Lord lays on the hearts of His church (the people, not the building). And last month was an incredibly special month with some of the donations we received, including the Morris Ave SGA donation. Those kids collected coins every day for two months for us and even won an award for it! That's incredible. A HUGE "thank you" to every single contributer. Way to make a pregnant woman smile!

So, what did we do all month last month, you ask? Well our guard and his wife got saved in our living room. Amazing. Our pastor came over to answer some of his questions and we chatted a while about salvation and my two humble friends decided it was time to make a profession of faith in Christ! Bam. He came to church with us to receive classes on baptism, and now we are planning their baptism for the next few weeks. Wow. Those of you who have been here know him, Julio, and others of you may have eaten his wife's food.

Our neighbor, the very very poor one, with no running water, no bathroom, no electricity, and no teeth...well her oldest son I found lying on his bed in tears with a fever of 104.6. I asked her why she hadn't taken him to the doctor and she told me, "He said he didn't want to go." End of conversation. I was like, "He is 12 years old, who cares what he wants?" So we scooped him up, carried him to the car and drove him to the emergency room. Got some tests done and found out he had parasites and a very bad bacteria infection. Yes, ironic isn't it? I know. We bought his medicine and within a week he was getting back to normal.

We started the sueing process of the bad, dirty, evil lawyer (see last blog). We will see how that goes.

We visited Henry (see many blogs ago) and he was still there, lying in his soiled bed, with long fingernails and curling toe nails. We still sponsor him monthly by buying a good bit of food and medicine, and it helps, but he needs nurses and caregivers. Still no news about the home in Antigua and whether they have a space or not.

We had my mom come down and visit for a week and stocked up on lots of little girl baby stuff and got to eat some really, really (shaking my head thinking about it) good food while she was here. Including Hard Rock Cafe, mmm. It was good to have her here and I didn't like seeing her leave. That was actually a few of the 6 days where I felt better. She has turned in to quite the tech-saavy grandma always on that Iphone 12 or whatever, snappin' photos and postin' them before you even knew she took one. 

And well other than being pregnant and trying to survive, that's about it. We are preparing for a team to come down in June and pave half the driveway. That will be a huge blessing. And in between spending a little time with the kids at the dump and waiting patiently through all the hot weather and earthquakes to get started on the next part of the home, we've been seeking the Lord's provision. We're ready and so are the kids who will one day live here, they're ready too. Thank you for remembering us in your prayers. We love you!

 

Love, Jenna

 

 

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