Spring Has Sprung

In the Guatemalan Highlands the word spring or primavera describes every day.  We have a great climate year-round with high's normally in the 70's and lows in the 40's.  People here recognize summer (dry season) and winter (rainy season) and the cold snap that is between November and February.  So spring is sort of a northern/southern hemisphere event.  But the spring season socially, is a busy time for Guatemala as Spring Break teams come to serve, tourism increases, and Lent and Semana Santa take center stage. 
Our Spring season has been a calendar full with visits and trips and new clinic openings:

• Harding PA and Pharmacy School students who came to help us get well-child checkups done for our ABC program.  Thanks for your thorough work and dedication to helping kids grow and develop!
• We travelled to Cozumel, Mexico to the Ciudad de Angeles children's home to work with our home congregation of Eastside Church of Christ--bible studies, English as a Second Language, and work projects around the site.  It was a huge blessing to reconnect with friends and meet newer members that have joined the Eastside family since we've left.
• We completed 9 years of service in Guatemala!  We don't feel that old!  Well, most days we don't.  Haha!
• Health Talents International Board of Directors meeting was here in country, giving us a time to share in person what is happening in the ministry and spend time with this great group of people!
• New central clinics in some strategic areas of Chichi are starting to grow, thankfully.  We are having new patients and regulars come, so pray for us as we look for ways to make follow up visits with new contacts and involve local congregations in reaching out to new communities.
• Cuaresma and Semana Santa (Lent and Holy Week)--this country goes all out, with purple banners and flowers decorating houses, processions every Friday commemorating a station of the cross or aspect of Christ, beautiful, vibrant street carpets fashioned of colored sawdust and flowers, incense, bread, honey, fish, and traffic jams deluxe as it intensifies each week, bursting with activity the week before Easter. It is a feast for the senses for sure.