United Methodist Volunteers in Mission
UMC Churches from Ohio & Tennessee
Multiple Departments in Guatemala
January-February 2018

Click on a date below to see the photos from that day. Click on any photo's thumbnail to see a larger view of the photo. From there you may click on the larger photo to see the next one.

• Tuesday, 1/30/2018 - Participants fly to Guatemala City.
• Wednesday, 1/31/2018 - We meet in La Toma with Pastor Felix and his son, Sergio, to understand the effects and progress of past projects and explore the possibility of a new one to build a trade school in the community. From there we go to San Antonio Aldea Barrios Uno to visit the John Wesley School that three of us built in 2004.
• Thursday, 2/1/2018 - We journey to Xela (Quetzaltenango) and meet with the Executive Committee of the National Methodist Church of Guatemala. We talk about many of the successes and challenges of past projects, and we dream about the possibilities of future projects. VIM Guatemala presents "thank you" gifts for all of the hard work that past UMVIM mission teams have done. We then visit the Association for Creativity and Development, a nonprofit Lucía Muñoz Argueta founded and for which she is the CEO. They provide a number of vital services for at-risk children in a dangerous area of Quetzaltenango.
• Friday, 2/2/2018 - In the morning we attend the scholarship renewal program for The Living Heritage Foundation and renew relationships with many of our scholarship students. In the afternoon we visit the John Wesley Clinic. This clinic was built by several VIM teams in past years, and I had the honor on being on two of them. Unfortunately, the clinic has not been used in a few years, so the people in the area are not getting the health services they need. We seek a solution for that.
• Saturday, 2/3/2018 - We meet with Kristen Rinaldi, the new Executive Director of Salud y Paz in Camanchaj. Discussions have been reopened about the prospect of them helping us make the Juan Wesley Clinic operational in the future. Much more research and planning are required, but we are excited by her openness to the possibilities.
• Sunday, 2/4/2018 - We visit Ruth y Nohemi, a Methodist Church cooperative established in 1993 to aid widows and orphans from the Guatemala Civil War which killed most of the men in the village of Chontolá. We met Pastor Diego who was instrumental in the founding and success of the cooperative. On the same property is the Dios con Nosotros (God with us) Methodist Church. We join the congregation in worship and praise, with Pastor Jason delivering the message.
• Monday, 2/5/2018 - We drive to San Sebastián Lemoa in the Quiche department of Guatemala. This is the location of the retreat for Iglesia Evangélica Nacional Metodista Primitiva de Guatemala. The center includes a sanctuary and general assembly room, meeting rooms and dormitories. Pastors, district superintendents, lay delegates and members of the Executive Committee gather for their annual conference. Rev. Juan Pablo Ajanel is in attendance. It was Juan Pablo's presentation at Lake Junaluska about 20 years ago that led Norris Allen to lead many VIM teams here in Guatemala. After attending a portion of the conference, we drive to Antigua for the night.
• Tuesday, 2/6/2018 - We have breakfast at Cafe Condesa and then depart for Guatemala City to fly home to our respective cities.