Saturday was a good day for your Guatemala team. We assembled around 10 a.m. at teammate Tom Dirks’s house in West Seattle under a cloudless sky and began the job of filling all two hundred of the children’s gift bags then stuffing them into the fourteen suitcases and duffle bags we had all brought.
Each school kid in La Capilla will open their bag to find notebooks, rulers, erasers, coloring books, pencils, colored markers and stickers. The bags also contain donated tennis balls, jump ropes and, an unexpected bonus, match box race cars. On the hygiene side are toothbrushes and toothpaste for everyone!
In addition to these items, we packed hundreds of pairs of donated reader glasses to give to the villagers, mostly new, but others that are gently used and even well-used. We filled the suitcases with sets of colorful hot pads, the majority of which were hand-stitched by the Hearts and Hands Ministry at Marine View Church, others by neighbors of team member Steve Drury out in the Hood Canal area. Those same neighbors also donated beautiful tops for infants, which we also packed.
We loaded up tools and tool bags for our stove assembly work, batteries, multi-tool gifts for our in-country assistants, pencil sharpeners for each classroom and pens and other supplies for the teachers. We also included 15 soccer balls, which we will distribute both to the village teams and throw out randomly to soccer-playing kids that we pass on the bus, then watch as the wide-eyed youth scramble to grab it. We are bringing two basketballs too. I was delighted because I had hauled up several boxes of items that had been stored in a classroom at Marine View for some time with no expectation that we would be able to take them all, and somehow, we did. (I’ve been getting some pressure to clear the room). What we don’t use for our trip can either be used by other Hands for Peacemaking teams or by a future Marine View team.
We worked steadily in assembly line fashion, with some team members taking a station on the assembly tables while others carefully loaded the suitcases. After loading each bag had to be carefully weighed so as not to exceed the airline maximum of 50 pounds. In addition, everyone will bring a small box of the SeedPlayer audio bibles to carry in their personal luggage due to their lithium batteries.
Once the bags were all loaded, we sat for lunch. Tom served up a great meal of pellet-fire cooked chicken and sockeye salmon, along with asparagus, and mashed potatoes, and large brownies for dessert.
Not all of the team could make it – one had a commitment in Eastern Washington. Also joining were three team member spouses, along with Jeffrey Hager, the executive director for Hands for Peacemaking, so we had plenty of help. Besides getting the work done, it was a merry day for the team to talk and begin to get to know each other. We will have plenty of time for that during our trip, but today was a momentous day to kick it all off. We will next see each other on Thursday at 3 p.m. at the airport.
