My wife, Krista, and I started Lent this year in the Central American country of Guatemala. We spent a week in and around the capital, Guatemala City, serving as part of a Medical Team with the Christian relief organization Speroway. While there, we were able to provide basic medical and dental care to nearly 5,000 people while leaving behind medication, food and a few comforts such as clothes and toiletries.
Here at home, we’ve been encouraged to reflect during Lent on 40 blessings that we experience in our daily lives. For us, security was the blessing that we were most reminded of during this trip.
We've all heard stories coming out of Mexico and other countries about the violence that often occurs with drug-related gang wars or with tourists making bad choices in local nightclubs. However, the general impression of life in these countries is that if you don’t go looking for trouble, it won’t come looking for you. This has been our experience during our previous medical mission trips as the stories we’ve heard from people at the clinics are of muggings when someone missed their bus and needed to hitchhike at night or when someone ended up in the ‘wrong’ neighbourhood at the wrong time. In general, the trouble spots are well known by the locals and people simply do their best to avoid them and carry on with their lives, hard as they may be. This year, however, we found ourselves driving into a few of those ‘wrong’ neighbourhoods to provide care.
Over the last year, Speroway has been in contact with an organization that works in the urban slums of Guatemala City. Once the safety of our team was guaranteed, planning started on running three of our five daily clinics in some of the roughest parts of this city of 2.3 million people. These are places where gangs are in charge and the authorities have little influence. The families that find themselves living in these areas would obviously prefer to move elsewhere but their circumstances have left them living in constant fear that their lives could be forever changed on a whim by someone who has no fear of being caught let alone punished.
Pastor Jorgé is one of the leaders of this organization and is so committed to helping the people living in these areas that he relocated his family into one of the communities we visited. This is a man who knows the dangers but chooses to show God’s love by living in relationship with these families, day in and day out. It was a pleasure to serve these families with him and his team.
Once we returned to ‘normal’ life in Oshawa, it became crystal clear that our day-to-day security is a blessing that we need to be more thankful for. We are not in a position to question why some of us are born into a stable society like Canada instead of a challenging situation like Guatemala. We can simply respond with gratitude for the blessings we have received and a willingness to use these gifts from God as we are led.
We don’t know all the blessings that God has given the people that we cared for in the urban slums of Guatemala City but we left each day trusting that the care we provided during our clinics was a at least a small blessing that God would use for His purpose.
For more info about our trip, feel free to contact us or visit www.speroway.com/blog.
- Chris Ritskes
Here at home, we’ve been encouraged to reflect during Lent on 40 blessings that we experience in our daily lives. For us, security was the blessing that we were most reminded of during this trip.
We've all heard stories coming out of Mexico and other countries about the violence that often occurs with drug-related gang wars or with tourists making bad choices in local nightclubs. However, the general impression of life in these countries is that if you don’t go looking for trouble, it won’t come looking for you. This has been our experience during our previous medical mission trips as the stories we’ve heard from people at the clinics are of muggings when someone missed their bus and needed to hitchhike at night or when someone ended up in the ‘wrong’ neighbourhood at the wrong time. In general, the trouble spots are well known by the locals and people simply do their best to avoid them and carry on with their lives, hard as they may be. This year, however, we found ourselves driving into a few of those ‘wrong’ neighbourhoods to provide care.
Over the last year, Speroway has been in contact with an organization that works in the urban slums of Guatemala City. Once the safety of our team was guaranteed, planning started on running three of our five daily clinics in some of the roughest parts of this city of 2.3 million people. These are places where gangs are in charge and the authorities have little influence. The families that find themselves living in these areas would obviously prefer to move elsewhere but their circumstances have left them living in constant fear that their lives could be forever changed on a whim by someone who has no fear of being caught let alone punished.
Pastor Jorgé is one of the leaders of this organization and is so committed to helping the people living in these areas that he relocated his family into one of the communities we visited. This is a man who knows the dangers but chooses to show God’s love by living in relationship with these families, day in and day out. It was a pleasure to serve these families with him and his team.
Once we returned to ‘normal’ life in Oshawa, it became crystal clear that our day-to-day security is a blessing that we need to be more thankful for. We are not in a position to question why some of us are born into a stable society like Canada instead of a challenging situation like Guatemala. We can simply respond with gratitude for the blessings we have received and a willingness to use these gifts from God as we are led.
We don’t know all the blessings that God has given the people that we cared for in the urban slums of Guatemala City but we left each day trusting that the care we provided during our clinics was a at least a small blessing that God would use for His purpose.
For more info about our trip, feel free to contact us or visit www.speroway.com/blog.
- Chris Ritskes
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