Dear friends,
These past two weeks since I wrote last have been good ones as well. I am enjoying myself as cimcumstances have been fairly exciting here.
I helped host a group of American and Guatemalan volunteers from Intervarsity for two days. They were a great group—really fun to talk with, and very helpful in the ministry of our team here. They helped with meetings with some of the community members, doing skits about nutrition and a team-building game. I had to translate a presentation done by Axel (the Asociacion Vida director) for them. This took about 30 minutes, and was a good challenge for me. It was hard, but people said I did pretty good! This was my first time doing a formal translation.
This past week I actually started a regular work routine: I'm doing a rotation: 2 days in the clinic/lab/farmacy, one day and a half split between Louisa and Maritza doing Sex ed. or nutritional education, a half day with Mardoqueo meeting with a community group, and 1 day for myself to do school work. I spent a lot of time praying about this, and I hope that it works out well.
This has been a lot of “news,” but to reflect a bit and discuss my thoughts, these past two weeks have been really marked by my simply trying to survive the displacement that I feel. I was confronted with this just last night when my friend and co-worker Carlos was advising me to think about what I really want to get out of this experience (i.e. set goals) and then to work hard to achieve that. I know that I am in this “conflict stage” of culture shock and that I need to embrace the culture and work through adjustment in order to make this my home. But instead of embracing, I have been simply focusing on “getting by.”
So to set some positive goals . . . I want to grow infinitely closer to Christ through this experience; I want to build loving relationships with the people; through this I want to learn more about poverty, global Christianity, my home culture, development, and all the things we talk about in the HNGR department at school. These goals are also linear, I think: as I grow closer to Christ, I will have a natural desire to grow closer to the people and love them, and as I do this I will learn more about their lives and culture. Please pray that I will actually surrender my comfort to God and that He will enable me to do this.
Besides this prayer request, praise God that things are going well here. Continue to pray for my work here and for the work of A.V. in general. Pray that the Church here will accept God's call to help the poor holisitically, not only spiritually. Pray that God will guide my independent study.
Here is a biblical prayer that encouraged me this week: “And now I commend you to God and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified” (Acts 20:32, as Paul says goodbye to the Ephesians).
Thanks, and God bless you all,
Ryan | 
