During the past week here in Canillá we have had the chance to connect with friends - both old and new and to spend lots of time together as a family. Anybody who has young kids knows that good old fashioned family togetherness can both warm your heart and make you pull your hair out. There are a lot of young families amongst the missionary community down here, so the kids have had some great playmates. Only in Guatemala do your kids pretend to make concrete when playing with their friends.
As we consider the last year's events here in Canillá, it is obvious that something incredibly unlikely is happening- we clearly see the Lord's hand at work, weaving together people and resources to bring healing and hope to the people of this rural Guatemalan valley and beyond. A local mayor recently promised that if we built the hospital he would repair the now ruined bridge on the road that connects our town to the 1.5 million inhabitants of his community who are also without adequate care....thank you Mr. Mayor.
We recently met one of the newest additions to the hospital team - Dr. Luis and his wife Naomi. He is a Guatemalan family physician and Naomi is a nurse. They are fantastic people and the hospital literally couldn't function without them. Having moved to Canillá after completing his family medicine residency in Spain, their young family is getting used to life here as well.
Dr. Kyle Sheets and his wife and friends were also here this week. We're incredibly blessed to be able to partner with their non-profit organization (PAPA). They have become dear friends and I hope to become a little more like them by osmosis when they are around!
As we consider the last year's events here in Canillá, it is obvious that something incredibly unlikely is happening- we clearly see the Lord's hand at work, weaving together people and resources to bring healing and hope to the people of this rural Guatemalan valley and beyond. A local mayor recently promised that if we built the hospital he would repair the now ruined bridge on the road that connects our town to the 1.5 million inhabitants of his community who are also without adequate care....thank you Mr. Mayor.
We recently met one of the newest additions to the hospital team - Dr. Luis and his wife Naomi. He is a Guatemalan family physician and Naomi is a nurse. They are fantastic people and the hospital literally couldn't function without them. Having moved to Canillá after completing his family medicine residency in Spain, their young family is getting used to life here as well.
Dr. Kyle Sheets and his wife and friends were also here this week. We're incredibly blessed to be able to partner with their non-profit organization (PAPA). They have become dear friends and I hope to become a little more like them by osmosis when they are around!
I'm not a construction guy, so I have only a layman's understanding of the physical hospital build so far. As I looked at the hospital build site, only the bottom few inches of each concrete wall now rises from the earth. Little more than a very large set of three dimensional blueprints at this point, an incredible amount of resources sit unassumingly under the ground. However, without having invested much resources including hundreds, if not thousands of man hours and on what lies beneath, the entire structure (and ministry) would be at risk. Upon seeing this the word integrity jumped into my head. Surely rising to the daily task of walking with the Lord, rooting ourselves in the word, and choosing to obey Him when nobody else is looking are analogous to the costly, painstaking, and excellent work that have been done here. I always knew that we are to build our "house" on the solid rock of Jesus Christ. I guess I never thought about the struggle, blood, sweat, tears and just plain hard work that must go into building our firm foundation that nobody will really ever see, an indispensable support lying just under the surface. I am thankful for the fresh perspective.
The sheer work that goes into making one load of concrete here is mind numbing. The guys in Canillá have literally scooped hundreds of loads of sand and rock out of a local riverbed, sorted the rocks from the sand, washed the sand, crushed the rock in a rock crusher, and re-sorted the rock in order to make from scratch concrete components and a small but adequate concrete plant. It's really cool to see advanced construction techniques (i.e. use of concrete forms as seen in the pic below) in the construction of this building, where block, concrete, and construction principles are usually inefficient and substandard. The locals working with the Adonai missionaries here will walk away from this job with a very advanced skill set compared to their peers. We hope to pour the same degree of excellence into medical and nursing education in the future.
Adonai missionaries and construction crew pouring concrete into concrete forms in order to make foundation walls.
The sheer work that goes into making one load of concrete here is mind numbing. The guys in Canillá have literally scooped hundreds of loads of sand and rock out of a local riverbed, sorted the rocks from the sand, washed the sand, crushed the rock in a rock crusher, and re-sorted the rock in order to make from scratch concrete components and a small but adequate concrete plant. It's really cool to see advanced construction techniques (i.e. use of concrete forms as seen in the pic below) in the construction of this building, where block, concrete, and construction principles are usually inefficient and substandard. The locals working with the Adonai missionaries here will walk away from this job with a very advanced skill set compared to their peers. We hope to pour the same degree of excellence into medical and nursing education in the future.
Adonai missionaries and construction crew pouring concrete into concrete forms in order to make foundation walls.
On a walk with the family (Pete is strapped on April's back)
The final corner of the hospital foundation dug out and ready to be poured. over 300 dump truck loads of dirt were brought in to level this land out. Those ditches were deeper than several Henrys stacked on top of each other.
Henry hanging out in the heavy equipment
Front fence for the hospital, complete with (temporary) sign
