everyday life...

This is an election year here in Guatemala. Already every rock and electric line pole has been painted. Because of the large illiterate population, voting is done by color or symbol so each party makes itself as visible as possible. The" free gifts in exchange for your vote" has already started as well. Anything from fertilizer to machetes are given from now until November. Government agencies such as the medical clinics find themselves out of money and supplies now. Many teachers have not recieved their salaries for many months. There is a feeling of unsettledness and frustration as voters try to sort out which direction to go. Please pray with us that God's will will be done and His purposes accomplished here in Guatemala.

Here at home, we are gearing up for a busy summer. We have two big teams and lots of individuals coming from now until the end of August. Our good friend Victor (who directs the drug and alcohol rehab center in Quiche) will be married this weekend. We will help with the flowers and decorations - a task that we all look forward to! And the next week our good friends Heidi and Chris will arrive in country to do GYN surgeries in Chichi. Then they will come out here to help us with our second outreach in Cruz Chich. We are looking forward to meeting Heidi and Matt's new baby girl, Micah who will be 6 weeks old when they arrive.

The tractor trailers wait at the US/ Mexico border to be brought through by our friend Martin. Please pray for him as he is having some health issues. I am so grateful to have all of the boys back home and for God's faithfulness to guard and protect them as they loaded and drove those two huge trucks to Texas. We pray that God will protect the second half of this journey as well!

Thanks for reading and continuing to pray!

Juana came into the clinic on Sunday with her friend Candalaria, a woman who I have know for many years and whose family we have helped on several occasions. Juana is the mother of 5 small children. Her husband recently became ill and has been hospitalized and unable to work. Juana and her children have been living on a little piece of property which they bought on payments. It does not have a house, so they have been living under a 10x10 piece of plastic...which is fine until the rains begin in just a few weeks. She came with Candalaria asking for help. So today we flew out to their village, met with one of the local pastors and went to visit Juana. What she said was true and her pastor came as well. The church is willing to help with the labor and some of the materials and we will help them with the roof. So it becomes not just the "rich Americans" helping, but the body of believers reaching out to a family in need....just the way it is supposed to be. The best part of this morning however was to see Candalaria. She is a woman for whom we have prayed for for years. Her husband drank, was unfaithful, left her for a time, beat her and the children - in short, they have been a family in great distress since I met them. Recently however, Felipe (her husband) gave his life to the Lord, has stopped drinking and is working to feed and care for his children. They live in a tiny adobe one room house...but it is theirs. It is such a testimony of the faithfulness of God to hear our prayers and His power to change hearts! Please continue to pray for them though, they are so poor. We have reached the time of year now where the corn, which is the main staple of their diet, is gone. No one can plant until the rains begin and then there is the 5 month wait for harvest. So folks who are out of corn now have almost 6 months in which they will need to buy corn - which is unaffordable for some...like this family. In the last month I have noticed the change, the desperation in the faces of women who come into the clinic, battling for their children. It happens every year but every year it hits us the same. The burden to help overwhelms us. Knowing how is the problem. So pray for us too if you think of it. We need His wisdom and His provision. "Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need." Hebrews 4:16

Cruz Chich

This has been a really busy month with lots of visitors. As the last group left, we did too. We spent a couple of days resting with our daughter Hannah and her husband Matt in Costa Rica. It was just what we needed! Hannah had a continuing education course that she needed to take and we couldn't miss the opportunity to see them when they were so close! I am including the post that I wrote and never sent before we left. We were so thankful for all the help from the Destiny team! "In the fullness of time" was the phrase that kept going through my mind as we climbed up to Cruz Chich yesterday. Cruz Chich is a large village at the top of the mountain that I have prayed for for many years now. I have always asked that Lord to open a door into that community as we have felt that it is an area in great need. It is on the outermost edge of the township of Joyaba but closer to us here in Canilla so we often see folks from this community in our Saturday clinic here. And although it is a good sized village of about 5,ooo, it has been neglected. There is very little government help there, no government clinic, they are just now building a school, and only recently have electricity. Three weeks ago we met with the community leaders to ask if we could bring a large medical team in December. They responded that they would not only welcome the team but asked if we could start monthly clinics there. So yesterday we went for the first time with the help of the team that has been here all week from Destiny Church. I expected to see only a few patients but was surprised by the well organized reception of the community and we saw 120 people. The village is very strongly Catholic - there is only one very small congregation of evangelical Christians - so I was unsure how our request to speak to the people about salvation would be received but they were very open and receptive. We prayed with many people...planting seeds and we pray that the Lord of the harvest brings many out of the darkness into the Light! Please pray for David and Aaron as they are in the US preparing a load of equipment to be brought down in the next month or so. Joseph will go to help as well this week. They will load two tractor trailers of donated equipment and drive them to the Mexican border where our friend Martin from here in Guatemala will meet them. He will drive the loads through Mexico as we have been advised that it is not safe for us to make that trip. We are so grateful to those who have donated this equipment and have been talking and planning for months about how to make all of this happen. It is a huge undertaking to get two tractor trailers...and to get them loaded and down the road safely. We are sorry that we cannot get our blogger to put this post in paragraph format! So, you can put in the paragraphs wherever you see fit :)

New Email Address!

Our Fickerfam@intelnett.com email address is no longer working, but please use Fickerfam@gmail.com to contact us from now on. If you have tried to email us on Fickerfam @intelnett.com anytime in the last 6 weeks, we have probably not received it, so if you would not mind resending it to our new email address, that would be great.

Thanks so much!

One of the hardest parts about living in this country is saying goodbye. Friends come and we have fun and fellowship, we share and serve together and then they are gone. Our children have grown up this way and I wonder sometimes if they are quiet and reserved because of it. It is hard to stay in touch once people return to the US. Despite promises to stay in touch, it is difficult...our lives are so different. So this morning was hard...saying goodbye to Lori and Don and their children. Our little girls had so much fun playing with them. And Don and Lori have become such good friends - we will miss them.

Although Duane and Joseph tried to get on the same flight as the Allison's with their buddy passes, they could not. They did get out this morning however. Joseph is ready to take his final exam for his private pilot's license and Duane wants to get the load of equipment that has been donated a little more organized. We are hopeful that we will be able to get that load down sometime this spring. I tend to get pretty whinny without my husband so pray with me that they will get home quickly.

We had an interesting morning in clinic today. After we finished with our normal patients, we were asked to do a home visit for a young man who had had an "ataque" (seizure) earlier in the day. As we walked into the house, the odor was overwhelming and an older woman was hidden behind the door, next to this young man's bed. She was vigorously rubbing his legs and feet and intermittently spitting....on him. As we tried to figure out what had happened to him, she continued and gradually moved up from his feet until she got to his face. She would spit into her hand and then rub it on his face. I soon realized that she was chewing up garlic and rubbing that on him. Then she changed and began to use "Kofal" which is a menthol rub. I was told later that whole process was to ward off evil spirits. As it turned out, he probably did not have a seizure but only passed out. He had recently returned from the "coast" where men go to cut sugar cane. It is horribly difficult work...working in hot, humid conditions, in the sun all day, cutting sugar cane with a machete. Often men take "pills" to make them work faster and harder so that they can earn more money. That, in addition to the fact that he had not eaten for 12 hours, probably caused him to faint. Just when I think I have seen it all..... So we prayed for him and trust that the Lord will touch this family.

David and Joseph were asked a couple of weekends ago to participate in another enduro race in Joyaba, a town about an hour away. They went with their friends from here in Canilla and at some point during the race, two of these young men were stopped, robbed, and their bikes were thrown down off the side of the mountain. The men who stopped them said that they were looking for the "Americanos". They were angry because the Americans are stealing their gold! Fortunately our boys were warned by their friends and they just changed their route a little.





We have not mentioned going out to the Zona Reina recently because... we have not gone. Just before Christmas the president declared that part of the country "under a state of siege" and sent the military out to protect the local people there. Apparently the drug cartels are crossing the Mexican borders and coming in, stealing land and killing those who get in their way. Any planes coming in or going out are suspect and we have been advised to wait until things settle down. That along with the murder of two men here in Canilla - gunned down by the Zetas, has made us pray for protection more faithfully. We are very grateful that the Lord has placed people in our lives who care about us and who give us wise counsel about what is really happening. As outsiders, it would be so easy to stumble into danger without really understanding what is happening.



We are not afraid. As cliche as it sounds, we know that there is not a safer place to be than in the center of God's will. As the news blasts disaster and unrest in all the world, I pray that you have the peace of knowing that you are right where God wants you today.

"Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit." Romans 15:13

My father, who was part Native American, always told me, "You can't really understand someone unless you have walked a mile in their moccasins." I always think of that here. There are so many times that I try to squeeze into the shoes of people here - to try and understand what they are thinking, how they make some of the decisions that they do. One of the hardest things for me to understand is why so many young people want to leave their homes to travel to the US illegally, making a very long, costly and dangerous trip - much of it on foot through the desert areas of Mexico. Why do young people who are equipped here to make a living here want to work in the US - many times in factories doing the least desirable work, living in the slum areas of large cities? I used to be very vocal, expressing my opinions about why they should not do leave. On one occasion we had a young man stay in the clinic overnight until we could take him into the hospital the next morning (he had broken his leg). He was so disappointed because he was scheduled to leave in the next week for the US. He had borrowed his Q40,000 (about $5000) to pay for his illegal transportation across the border. We talked for a long time and I tried to convince him of the foolishness of his decision. At one point, he looked at me and said, "How can you ever understand? You have never had to go without food, you have never felt hunger, you have never had to make the decision to not take your child to the hospital because you could not pay for the trip to get there." In that moment, I realized that he was right...I could never squeeze myself into his shoes. I have always had options. Here, young people have basically one career choice. If they are fortunate enough to be able to get an education, they are almost always trained to be teachers - whether they want to teach or not. And when they leave school, the jobs that are available are controlled by politics and money. Those who can pay the bribe required to those who hire, are the ones who will work. And even if they are able to work, they will never earn enough to buy property or build a home for themselves. As I was praying this morning for two young men who came yesterday to tell us that they were leaving, I was reminded of the scripture in Hosea which says, "...I will block her path with thorn bushes; I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way."(Hosea 2:6) Hosea's point of course, was that in those times when there seem to be no options, when our paths appear blocked, He is the way out. But it requires trust in a God that we cannot see. Please pray for these two young men, men of God whose paths are blocked on every side. Pray that they can see God in this difficult time - that instead of feeling hemmed in by circumstances, that they see that they are hemmed in by God. "Before a word is on my tongue you, LORD, know it completely. You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain." (Psalm 133:4-5) Pray that they will understand that true security is only found in by being in the center of God's will for our lives.