A dream came true

De partner vertelt... van 30 november 2017

Our main focus was the Maranatha School located in Colonia La Florida of Guatemala City. Our childcare center has a great need for more space. Alongside World Servants we were able to start completing the dream of having a third story on the school to increase our capacity, building 5 more classrooms and 2 bathrooms for our students. With both the GU117 and GU217 project we accomplished the goal of the perimeter wall, the inside hallway wall and the bathroom walls.

Community
In our country it’s always hard to get the community completely engaged. Simply because people need to work every day in order to eat every day. We planned some big events (Parade, Bible Day, and Family Day). The events went really well. We would love to have more opportunities like these to engage the community in the day to day tasks. We are trying to plan and promote specific days for the parents to come and help us.
Dutch leadership team
We had a great collaboration with both WS leadership teams. They were very committed to the project and it was a great pleasure to see their interest to invest in the lives of the participants more than anything else. We had great planning meetings and awesome times to share testimonies, stories, bible lessons, etc. We faced no major issues. Hearing from the leaders the ongoing testimonies of the participants about how they can see something happening. How they can start realizing that there is a God who loves them.

Local government
During the project we had some short interaction moments with the  local authorities. In the beginning it was mostly the municipality of the city that was very much involved. This because we had to ensure the construction license and all our paperwork had to be in order.

Cooperation
Inside our organization we were blessed to have so many people from our main office and school to support us in this task. We received much help from the Education Department to organize everything with the children work. We received much support from our Dutch interns who were 24 hours available to assist the team with housing and translation. The Maintenance Department was vital for the development of the project as well. The teachers, directors and the entire staff of Maranatha was always available for whatever we needed.

Security
This was a big concern for us in the planning. Guatemala City struggles with insecurity and we had to be really careful with this.  In order to assure the safety of the team, we stayed at our guest house in a neighborhood close by. So every morning we had to travel to the project in our vans. This because the team wasn’t allowed to be outside the gated community of the school.

Transportation
We had all of the ministry’s vehicles available for the team. We used mostly the two vans and a truck to move materials.

Interaction
I think this is something we need to all share better with the team prior to their arrival. This in order to understand that everything will get done eventually, but the interaction with everyone will be over in three weeks and that they have to look for any opportunity to share, encourage, and love the people around them.

Construction
We had almost no accidents and the construction work was done with much enthusiasm, cooperation and the results are visible. It all went really well.

Children’s program
It was really great to have teachers in the team that were leading these activities. We had many chances and classrooms to work with. The team had a good planning and were organized to work with everyone.

Cultural program
Due to the heavy traffic that we experience here every day , it was quite hard to organize a cultural program in the city.  Because of the difficulties to organize visits to companies and the bureaucracy that the companies have when it comes to accept visitors, it was a bit of a challenge to arrange these visits.

Touristic outings
We had some great opportunities for touristic outings. They were organized in the three weekends. The team was very excited to accompany  for all of them and it was well inside everyone’s budgets.