Hey guys, it’s Katie! I’m the oldest kid in the Trent Tribe. Mom asked me to write about our mission trip to Guatemala, so here I am. The group that I went with included my younger sisters (Gracie and Emrie), my dad, a family from our church (Rodney, Cindy, and Alexis), and Amanda Simmons (a teacher in Abu Dhabi who was/is part of our church).
Sunday, August 10, 2014 the preacher (my dad) said, “Amen” and the group piled into our 8 passenger Yukon (talk about loving each other) and drove 9 hours to Fort Lauderdale, FL. The next morning our plane took off at 11:30 am and we landed in Guatemala City, Guatemala at 12:30pm (gotta love the time change).
After collecting all our luggage, etc… we hopped in a bus that would take us to Huehuetenango, Guatemala which is where the orphanage we go to is located. Our driver isn’t exactly a Guatemalan, his name is Rhyan and he’s American. He actually pastor’s a church in Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala (I’ll share more details in a later post). Anyway, it is a 5 hour bus ride without traffic (in Guatemala you better just forget schedules and times). We got to Huehue at 8 something-ish and unloaded all our stuff, unpacked, and went to sleep. We were tired.
That morning (8/12) we got up, ate some breakfast, and headed to the “School of Hope”. It’s a bilingual school for grades preK-6th (pictured above). They are currently working on building a 2nd story to create more rooms in the school. Next year they plan to open the school for children outside the orphanage. This will allow the kids to not only learn English but receive a better education. Now I understand why they named it the “School of Hope”.
The purpose of us going to the school was to
1. Deliver tons and tons of school supplies
2. Paint
3. Have VBS in the evenings with the children
I’ve never seen so much orange in my life. In the pic above you can see me painting the trim of one room. The walls aren’t smooth. They are concrete and let me tell you concrete is hard to paint! We ended up painting 2 offices, 3 bathrooms, a closet, and a book shelf in 2 days. Before you start thinking we are like professional painters, we really had a professional painter help us. lol He came in handy!
To be continued…