day one & day two

day one:

Boarding the plane in San Jose, Costa Rica for what would only be the second time I’ve flown out of Costa Rica destined for somewhere other the US, I was caught off-guard by an altogether unexpected sensation:  anxiety.  Of all the feelings, emotions or thoughts that I’d expected to encounter, anxiety was one I’d written off.  After all, I’ve been to Guatemala, lived there, and it had once felt like home.  I suddenly realized, about 30,000 feet above the ground, that the anxiety wasn’t about Guatemala at all.  It was something else, something human.  I realized that the fear of the unexpected had crept upon me.  I feared that the team members, who were descending upon Guatemala City in their own respective airplanes like vultures on a hot desert highway, would be difficult to deal with, coming from another world; perhaps the Northwest, or the Northeast.  I was afraid that somehow, this unknown group of people would somehow tint or change altogether the lens through which I’d always viewed my precious Guatemala.  And, honestly, deep down I feared that somehow Guatemala had changed herself. 

But, the Lord is good. He is faithful.  He has certainly pulled together a team of brilliant engineering and architecture minds from various parts of the US: Nashville, Oregon, Minnesota, Atlanta, and Washington State.  Through this team, I can already sense that the Lord has great plans for this hospital here in Chichicastenango. 

We spent the night at a hotel in Guatemala City.  We all had dinner together and we were able to share in one of the team member’s burden for his family.  God certainly ordained that dinner and the subsequent conversations to begin welding together our separate paths and bring our hearts closer together.  I wouldn’t have said it a year ago, but the arts of engineering and architecture take on a distinctively different light when viewed as an act of love and service.  There is fellowship and brotherhood in sharing the gifts the Lord has blessed us with, though they be technical. 

I went to bed that night giddy, noticing that my anxiety had melted away into the cool, reassuring breeze of promise, hope, and expectation.

day two: 

I awoke this morning well rested and went down to breakfast.  There was certainly a more expectant attitude among the team this morning as the exhaustion of travel had been slept away and the new morning was established with Guatemala City as the backdrop.  Waking up in the destination country has a way of resetting the baseline, of washing away the grit and grime of travel and setting the purpose for your arrival on level ground.  We talked at breakfast about plans and schedules and the exciting reason we’d all arrived:  to serve with our gifts.  Who knew that specifics could be so refreshing.  After months of planning and preparation, we’d finally reached the tipping point, the point where the rubber met the road. 

We all piled into the van and made out for Chichicastenango.  Expecting a 3 to 4 hour ride, we settled in for a journey into the “wilderness” of Guatemalan hillside.  We made a few stops along the way to tour an existing hospital, drop off some materials to a missionary we’d served on a previous trip, expose the volunteers to a real Guatemalan construction project, and to use the restroom.  We encountered “derrumbes” or landslides along the way; some of them containing pine trees as thick as 55-gallon barrels.  In some places, the hillside roads had been washed away from underneath.  We made it safely to Chichi in the late afternoon. 

After getting settled in, we had a quick tour of the hospital we’d come to serve and were whisked away to church.  Church was like a twisted match of dueling banjos with Spanish and Quiche (a local dialect of the old Mayan language) pitted against each other. 

We retired to our rooms after dinner and the feeling was somewhat like the hush that comes over the crowd at the first home game of the regular season after the first play for a gain of 2 yards is over.  After the hysteria and excitement of a new season is gone, there is a comfort that comes flooding in; a comfort that the first play of the game wasn’t a fumble return for a touchdown.   There was an overwhelming peace that we could take a deep breath and get settled in for the full 60 minutes; we could settle in and begin chipping away at the design one day at a time for the next 8 days.