A Week with Covenant Presbyterian Church -- Coyolate

Hello everyone!  I'm afraid I'm far behind in my updates, but the internet has been a bit sporadic.  The group from Covenant arrived Saturday, January 9th, and spent a week here in Santo Domingo and one other community working, sweating, visiting, laughing, and praying.  Everyone agreed it was a good week, not just because of the work we accomplished, but also because of the things we learned and reflected upon.

Here are some highlights of the trip starting with our trip to Coyolate:

We spent Sunday and Monday in the small, rural town of Coyolate.  As I understand it, this place has both an interesting and somewhat troubled history.  Over a decade ago, it was a finca, or a large rural farm, often owned by someone very rich who employs people who are very poor.  Then it was bought by the government as a place to relocate people from the countryside, and since then these varying groups of relocated people have had a very difficult time getting along, especially when it comes to the issue of water.
When we arrived, we were greeted with a church service, including beautiful music and a great sermon by Pastor Mario, the leader of the Covenant group.

And who can end a church service without coffee hour?!  Here we enjoyed a rice drink and pan dulce, or "sweet bread."

I took this picture after coffee hour, not to censure, but to bring up an important issue:

As you can see, on the whole, the world is your garbage can here in Guatemala.  Garbage line the streets, the grass, and pretty much anywhere else you might be in possession of something disposable.  People depend on the heavy summer rains to wash away all of the trash, which causes lots of problems, as you might imagine.  Many places offer garbage pick-up, but because it costs money, many people view that as a service they can forgo.  Fortunately, there is some work being done on this problem, which I will get to later...

Here is the church, which is lined with beautiful flowers and has a very picturesque volcano background:

And here it is transformed into our bedroom!

We traveled to Coyolate with the intention of helping one sector of the town with a water project, namely to help install a pump and lay tubing that would bring spring water up to the homes.  However, upon arrival, we found out that the pump, nor the pipes, had arrived, and the gorge leading down to the river and the cistern itself were too dangerous to work on.  This kind of miscommunication was a bit disappointing, to say the least, but is is not an uncommon occurrence.  Many in the group were very frustrated because there was little we could do to be helpful.  We decided to leave a day early, but before we left, we toured another water project in a different sector.  What they have accomplished really is amazing--they pump water every three days from here:

to a tank here,

which (and I am very bad at guestimates) is several hundred hards away.  People can use the water, which is metered at each house.  It was exciting to see such an impressive project, and we enjoyed listening to them talk about all of the logistics.  It is hard to imagine carrying water that far to your home every day...not to mention the convenience of having our washing machines in our houses...