"Look for a Guatemalan"

Rolando works for La Mision. His wife is Guatemalan/American and he used to teach English so his English is perfect, which makes him invaluable when hosting American mission teams! He's also got a GREAT sense of humor and a passion for the work of La Mision. Upon arrival in Guatemala City, he gave us our "Intro to Guatemala" talk; the little speech about things you should know when in a new country re: culture, water, food, dangers, etc. Rolando's was the funniest intro speech I've ever heard. Two things stuck out as memorable. First, I've never had an intro speech that talked about what to do in case of an earthquake, but Guatemala has many active volcanoes and earthquakes aren't uncommon. His advice? "If there's an earthquake, just do what the Guatemalans do. "Look for a Guatemalan: if they don't look worried, don't worry. If they're running for cover, maybe worry." Second, Guatemala City is notorious for it's crime, so the intro speech included lots of safety info (mainly, don't leave the church compound. Under any circumstances. Ever.) But Rolando did want to clarify that Guatemalan's like firecrackers. A lot. They buy them for many occasions: birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, graduations, it's Thursday, it's 5:00 a.m., I had some money and wanted to buy them, etc. Apparently, in the past people have been frightened by the firecrackers, thinking them gunfire based on the safety speech. Rolando's advice? "Look for a Guatemalan: If they duck, DUCK!" :)

Guatemala (in one fell swoop!!)

I have decided to revive my travel blog from Europe, in order to share a bit about other travels, as I realize few have heard reports of my recent travels to Guatemala.

Side note from Yma, the snow nurse: "I was unable to accompany Amy on her recent trip to Guatemala, not because I was not qualified (after all, it was a medical mission and I'm a snow NURSE), but because Amy flat out FORGOT to take me along!"
(For those not familiar with Yma, please read the first entry from this blog.)

So here goes: Guatemala in one fell swoop! This could be lengthy folks, so you might want to grab a snack and sit in a comfy chair! I'll try to pare things down a bit.

Background: I traveled with a group of 20 people, all from Wenatchee area, June 16-25. The team was led by Drs. Dave and Susan Weber, who have now led 5 teams to Guatemala. A large portion of the team had been there before and were excited to go back. I've wanted to join the team for several years now, but this year I made it a priority. Six members of our team worked on construction projects at a church and a school. The rest of us worked in medical clinics. We worked with and were well cared-for by a Guatemalan mission called La Mision. La Mision is led by a Guatemalan doctor, Tito, and his 4 amazing staff. They were wonderful to work with and their passion for their work is inspiring.

Day 1 (or "Hit the ground running"): We left Wenatchee early in the morning to make it to the airport in Seattle with plenty of time to check in. I dutifully set my alarm for 4:00, figuring that would give me 20 minutes to wake up and get ready, and settled in for a short night's sleep. Five hours later, I was awakened by a light knock on my front door. Sure enough, I'd set the alarm for 4:00 p.m. and my ride was wondering if they had the right house. Fortunately, I've perfected the ten-minute prep time in an effort to sleep as long as humanly possible when clocking in to work at 0630, and 10 minutes later I was out the door. The drive to Seattle and check in process went remarkably smooth for a group of 20 people and none of our huge checked suitcases full of dental and children's supplies were over the 50 pound limit.

Traveling through Dallas/Ft. Worth, we arrived in Guatemala City at 7:30 and were warmly welcomed by La Mision who had vans waiting to take us home. "Home" was Iglesia La Comunidad de Fe, a church in Guatemala City with bunk rooms, bathrooms, kitchen and living area. A delicious meal of baked spaghetti was waiting for us, lovingly prepared by Tito's wife, Brenda who did all our cooking while we stayed in Guatemala City.

First impressions of Guatemala: 1)They should make a video game of driving in other countries. While tamer than Vietnam or Naples, Italy; Guatemalan driving was a sight to see. I adapted one of my favorite Bible verses, Psalm 4:8, for driving in Guatemala--"I will sit down and ride in peace, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety." :) 2)I'd forgotten that it gets dark early year-round in the tropics so it was already full dark by 7:30. I missed long summer evenings. 3)Guatemala has NO mosquitoes! I love this country!!! 4) HUMID! Sticky skin. Rain, rain, rain. Rainy season was just beginning when we arrived. 5) "House plants" grow wild and huge here. I'm always amazed by that in tropical places.

The team enjoys our first meal in Guatemala. I never actually ate much Guatemalan food. They fed us well, but they fed us American and Italian for the most part.

In contrast to the title of this entry, I've decided to divide the posts up over some time, seeing as it's taken much longer than anticipated to write this one. So stay tuned for future postings!

Auf Wiedersehen!

That's a picture of Yma and Amy ready to go HOME!
Whew! I'm home! As I look back through my blog and pictures I wonder...is anyone sick of seeing me wear that black jacket yet? I think it's on in every picture! :) Great purchase, Mom!! Thanks! Best item of clothing I brought along!

Abbey and I got into Wenatchee this morning around 1:30. After dropping Abbey off, I came home to a light on (thanks, Megan!) and a welcome home sign and balloons (thanks, Smeltzers!)

By the time I pulled in to my driveway, I think I'd been up 25 hours and had been in the process of traveling 24.5 of those! 13+ hours on planes, 3+ hours of driving, and the rest of the time spent in navigating airports, etc. That's exhausting. We did okay driving home...kept the sunroof open for some cool air, sang along with cd's, and stopped at a rest stop and ran and jumped around a bit to wake up! But it was worth it for my own bed! Nothing feels so good after that many hours of travel and that many weeks away from home!

I think I fell asleep immediately and I slept the clock around and probably would have slept longer had I not set an alarm! The day's been spent unpacking, calling friends, doing laundry and making some space in the house for my new roommate! My housesitter, Megan, is going to be my roommate for the next few months until she heads off to school in the fall. I've warned her that I haven't had a roommate in 6 years, but she seems willing to take on the challenge of living with me :).

Jet-lag is starting to hit, but I've found the best way to fight it is to immediately get on a normal schedule, so I'm off to listen to music at Cafe Mela with some friends lest I fall asleep on my couch at home. Hopefully I can interact like a semi-normal human being! I took a walk over to see a friend this afternoon and was out of breath about 20 steps up the hill in front of my house! After a month of walking miles and miles a day around European cities, I couldn't figure out how I was so out of breath so fast...then I remembered my body thought it was more appropriate to be sleeping than walking at that time of day!

Thanks so much everyone who kept in touch with my blogs! It's been so great to hear your feedback and know that you've been thinking of us on our travels. We had a GREAT time and we're still friends after 24 days of 24/7 companionship! We traveled well together, and I really miss Abbey today! I haven't seen her in 17 hours! :) But we have talked on the phone...my Netherlands lost to Russia in the Euro-Cup today. That's a major upset for those who don't know (which I wouldn't have, had I not been so closely introduced to the Euro-Cup in my travels!) I may post some blogs yet about my readjustment to home, but the exciting adventures of Yma and Amy to far-flung places are now completed (until next time....)

Auf Wiedersehen!

Homeward bound!

I’m sitting in the Toronto airport, having just made it through US Customs Preclearance. The nice gentleman who checked my passport said “Welcome home!” Well…almost there! Abbey and I have divided our journey home into three phases…Berlin to London: Check. London to Seattle: Half-check. Seattle to Wenatchee: yet to come. Our flight to Seattle is a little delayed at this point.
Our last day in Berlin was nice and lazy. Kristen asked, ‘Is there anything you guys want to do before you leave?” to which we replied, “Nope!” We walked to the grocery store with Kristen and helped her carry home some heavy grocery bags filled with snacks for a party for their students, and other than that we hung around the apartment until John and Kristen drove us to the airport (SO nice that they drove us…that much less lugging about of the backpacks!)
We got checked in and sat around the Berlin airport, and decided that we much prefer North American airports over European! In our experience at European airports on this trip, you wait in line to check in, then wait in line to check your baggage, then wait in line to check your boarding pass, then wait in line in security, then wait in line to send your shoes through security, then wait in a waiting area with totally insufficient seating for your gate to be posted (because they never post it more than an hour before), then join the mad dash to your gate once they post it, where you wait in line to go through passport checks, then wait in line to get you boarding pass checked to enter the boarding area, where you wait until they actually board the plane and then you wait in line to get on the plane! You may have noticed a theme here. :)
We made it to London without any problems…a little late, but no connections to make, so no big deal. Amy was most excited to see English books in the bookshops; Abbey was most excited that we knew exactly how to navigate all the transportation! We caught the Gatwick Express back into London where we caught the Underground out to Heathrow, where we found our Yotel. For those who don’t know, a Yotel is a little hotel located in the airport. This one is in Terminal 4 at Heathrow, tucked in between some restaurants and an internet area. It was so cool! The rooms are small, but definitely more spacious than our first London room, and you can’t get much more convenient than sleeping comfortably at the airport! We had bunkbeds with really nice linens, a tiny little fold-out table, and a huge bathroom with the nicest showerhead ever! Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the internet to work, but we went to bed on time instead. We got to sleep in a bit in the morning and then catch the transit to Terminal 3 and check in around 10:00.
We left Heathrow about an hour late…there was a wheelchair rugby team on our flight and it took a while to get everyone in place, but thankfully, we had a three hour layover here, so we didn’t stress too much about the delay. The flight actually went pretty quickly from London (about 8 hours). We love in-flight entertainment. I watched three movies, a BBC sketch comedy, and listened to XM radio. Now that helps pass the time!
And now I’m off to buy some food before the flight since apparently our five hour flight only offers “food for purchase.” I’ll be posting this from home!!

Down by the sea

Our agenda for today? Eat lunch at a cafe by the Baltic Sea. Mission: Accomplished.

We had a day left on our Eurail pass and a day in Berlin with nothing planned, so we decided to head north to see the Ostsee (Baltic Sea) today. We didn't really know where to go, so we picked out a couple of seaports on a map and looked them up online and managed to find Stralsund, a little port town whose Old City is an UNESCO World Heritage site, so we decided to go there. It was about a 3 hour train ride away, so we set out around 9:30 and got there just in time for lunch. We had no map of the town (this seems to be our M.O.), so we headed in the direction of the big church steeples we'd seen as we came in to town. The Old City is situated on a bit of land surrounded by lakes and an inlet of the Baltic Sea. We found a pedestrian/bike path and bridge out to the old city which led us directly to one of the two remaining gates in the 14th century wall. We walked straight through the center of old town to find the sea and got lunch at a little cafe. I had the daily special which turned out to be fillets of three different kinds of fish (neither I or the waiter could interpret what kinds of fish :)! I didn't realize they were all different, so I filled up on the first kind, which was really good, and I wasn't too sad I didn't have room for the others because they weren't my favorite. The waterfront was undergoing lots of construction for a new events center, so it wasn't exactly peaceful, but mission accomplished :).

After lunch, we had no agenda, only a list of trains returning to Berlin in the evening, so we set out along the waterfront for a while and got away from construction. It turned out to be a really cool old town. It has lots of nordic connections with trade, etc. so it looks quite different from other towns we've seen on this trip. And there aren't too many German port towns, so we were glad to see one :). We found the other remaining town gate and entered through there, finding the Rathaus, St. Nikolai's church, Johanneskloster (an old Franciscan monastery destroyed by the war), a cool shopping district (when the sun came out in the early afternoon, the pedestrian traffic increased dramatically!) and the Marienkirche. Is it just us or does every town in Germany have a Marienkirche? This Marienkirche is just beginning a restoration project, so it was interesting for us to see what these old churches look like before they pour a ton of money into restoring them. It was a huge church. It also had a strange monument just outside the church that we couldn't figure out...there was no plaque left on the monument...at the top was the communist hammer and sicle and below was a relief of a "comrade" shaking hands with a "working man" we think...leftover from the days of East Germany? There were also lots of memorial stones around the church yard with apparently Russian names, all of whom had died in 1945.

As we left the church, we checked our watches and saw that we had about 18 minutes before the next train left for Berlin, so we power-walked to the train station (first hurrying we'd done all day) and made it in plenty of time to by some beverages and snacks, catch the 3:39 train and be back in Berlin for dinner with John and Kristen. Perfect day! The scenery between Berlin and Stralsund was mostly farmland, (including lots of "wind farms" for power) and it could have been scenery from the Midwest except for the very German-looking towns (if you could ignore their "Golden Arches") and the poppies growing wild along the fields. We were wondering if they harvest the poppies along with crops...opium for the cows?

So going back to yesterday...sorry that we're out of order here but I thought I'd start with what was fresh.

Yesterday we slept in a bit, had breakfast all together, and then Kristen took Abbey and I around Berlin a bit to find some souvenirs. We started out at the Kurfursterdamm shopping area, which was mostly worth seeing for the Keiser Wilhelm Memorial Church there. The church was bombed out in 1943 and the congregation elected to leave the ruins of the bell tower. It's now open to the public as a testament to the destruction of war, as well as to the call of Christ to forgive those who have sinned against us. It's a powerful testament indeed.

In the evening, we went to pick up John's sister, Stephanie, at the airport (the one we met in Erfurt). She was returning from a trip to the states. After we'd dropped her off to get some sleep, we all headed to John and Kristen's Tuesday night student gathering. It was so much fun to meet some of their students, share a meal with them, worship with them and visit with them afterwards. Most of them speak excellent English, but they made Kristen translate for them so that she could practice :). Abbey and I were so excited to be able to see this part of John and Kristen's ministry here...what a wonderful community for these Christian students in Berlin!

So we fly to London tomorrow evening. Thus begins our travel home! Hard to believe our time here is almost over. The biggest challenge remaining may be repacking our bags and keeping them under the weight limit. We're not too excited about hefting those again, but it's the home stretch. Literally. I had to laugh today...on the train ride back from Stralsund, it smelled like something was burning and Abbey's response was "Well, if the train's on fire, at least I don't have to heft my bag!"

Downtime...

Good morning! (and it's 1 a.m. back home as I write this, so I guess that's the correct greeting :). We had a lovely day of doing nothing yesterday (so sorry that the web album pics won't be exciting pictures of all we saw...more like goofy pictures of the little we did). In fact, all we did yesterday was catch up on computer time (including sharing of favorite YouTube clips with eachother), go to the post office and grocery shopping with Kristen and then had a great "girls' night in." Spaghetti with homemade sauce for dinner (ah, home-cooked meals! Abbey says she really misses cooking...me? not so much :). After dinner we had a movie night...we shared "Stardust" with Kristen and she shared "Hoodwinked" with us, both excellent and entertaining movies. John and Kristen don't have a TV (they're heavily taxed in Germany) so we watched on a laptop. We still somehow didn't get to bed before midnight, but that's per usual for this trip...every night we say "maybe tonight we'll be in bed before midnight" and only about twice has it happened!

Today we're planning a bit of sight-seeing and European chocolate shopping before we go to John and Kristen's Bible study tonight. We're excited to meet their students and see this part of their ministry here. Hope you're all doing well! We come home in 3 days! That's crazy!

Flowers, free grace, french fries, fast trains, and fruhstuck (breakfast :)

Wow! Hard to believe it, but we're back in Berlin. Actually, what is hardest to believe is that it's only been two weeks since we were last here! Time has flown and we've packed a lot in!

It was an approximately 14 hour train trip from Geneva to Berlin!! We took the night train which left Basel about 9:30 last night and pulled in to Berlin at about 8:30 this morning. We actually both slept pretty well. The only other night train I've ever taken was in China, and at least this bed was a little over 6 feet long, more than could be said for the Chinese one! Kristen met us at the station and now we're happily fed, showered and doing laundry! We're pretty excited about the laundry thing, but I'm sure that's less thrilling for you at home :). I'm proud to say that I think I packed well...I've worn every article of clothing I've brought along and most have been laundered several times and reworn. I am looking forward to some variety in the wardrobe department though.

So going back to Geneva.... We had a lovely Sunday in Geneva. We had breakfast at our hotel and then walked down to the waterfront and enjoyed the views and the Sunday-morning crowd. We saw lots of dads taking their little ones for walks or to play in the park...we think Sunday morning is mom's day off in Geneva. :) We found Parc de la Grange, a beautiful park that contains the Villa where the Geneva Convention occured. The villa's under renovation, but the park was beautiful, especially the rose gardens! There's supposedly a rose bush for every square meter in that park...that means 12,000 rose bushes. And most were in full bloom. So we stopped to smell the roses. Actually, that's something I've really appreciated about this trip...we've fit a lot in, but we've also managed to stop and just take things in on a regular basis, too.

Church started at 11:00 so we headed back up the hill toward St. Pierre's cathedral. We attended the Presbyterian Church of Scotland service that met in the little Auditoire de Calvin next door to the cathedral. We really enjoyed worshipping in our own language again today. The church was quite full and what an international community...Americans, English, Scottish, Sri Lankan, French, Swiss, Nigerian, Korean and more! It was a cool experience for both of us because the church traditions/denominations that we were both raised in and that we attend now had their roots in that city and even in that auditorium! But more than that, it felt like the church universal meeting in that one room. How cool is that! Their pastor was Scottish (and fortunately talked very clearly and slowly...probably because English was the second language of most people there). They had a guest preacher yesterday, too, a Dr. of Theology from Sri Lanka who's a member of the church, but currently teaching at a university in New Jersey. His grandson was being baptized that day. He spoke about Jesus' compassion on the people he came into contact with and how "Freely you have received. Freely give."

After church, we set out in search of a French restaurant since we were in French Switzerland. We found a restaurant that looked good, and when we asked for a menu she said, "We only offer the one 'plate du jour'." So we said, "That sounds good!" even though we couldn't read the French :). Turns out it was really good! Salad and all-you-can-eat steak and french fries. Literal "french" fries. :) I think we each ate about a steak and a half, plus two servings of fries!

After all that food, we hauled ourselves back up the hill to the International Museum of the Reformation. The museum was pretty good. It was less about the religious reformation and more about the social, economic and political consequences of the reformation, especially Calvin's contributions to it. By the time we were done with that, it was time to think about heading back to our hotel to pick up our bags and head to the train station for our night train. We walked back by way of the original "Calvin College," a secondary school in Geneva started by Calvin. We had to climb up on a wall to see the school because it was under so much renovation, but Amy had to see the original :).

So that was our whirlwind tour of Geneva. It's a very pretty city with a very different atmosphere than any of the other cities we've seen this trip. We enjoyed it, but we're honestly glad to be headed back to German-speaking lands...not that we really speak German, but we've been here long enough that we at least know how things work...kind of...a little bit...well, at least restaurants and trains and public transport :).