October greetings from Guatemala

my heart the red sun, your heart the moon clouded

Dear friends,

I began writing this letter at the end of September and *wow* the month went by fast. Rainy season is finally ending, leaving many landslides, flooded homes and washed out roads in its wake. I’ve been wiping down so many mildew-covered surfaces with vinegar, which makes the house smell like salad dressing, and the kids are intensively planning their Halloween costumes. Jeff is at clinic today in the city and I am catching up on emails, sending in metrics to Serge, writing recommendation letters for some of my high school biology students heading to college next year, and trying to figure out what to do about Christmas cards in this country with no mail system. Tomorrow I’ll be in clinic all morning, then over at the Vine bodega in the afternoon. I’m catching up on digitizing ministry files, having lunch with Nacho and trying to distribute what’s left of the medicines in the bodega before a highly anticipated container of wheelchairs and new meds arrive next month.

1. The Work Goes On

This is one of my patients (-he gave me permission to share his picture and story). He is 44, has three daughters the same ages as ours, and recently lost his leg to a festering diabetic infection. He’s got a janky wheelchair, and lives in a neighborhood that is full of uneven pavement, plus he lost his job. It’s incredibly depressing. I am gripped by so many stories like his, middle aged guys that are sort of forgotten by the aid world. (i.e. lots of programs to feed and educate his girls, job training programs for his wife, but not much available for him.) He is emblematic of the patients we take care of in the basurero, and very much why we are here and keep doing what we are doing. The free care and medications he receives from our clinic are life-sustaining, and I am so glad we are here for him. For those of you who occasionally wonder where your support dollars go, this is it.

2. I Am Making My Old Clothes Do

Y’all, money has been TIGHT this year. School tuition went up, gas and utilities are outrageous, and grocery prices have gone up something like 20% (something I know everyone is feeling, all over the world). We’ve lost a few donors and our fund has been bleeding since the summer, so all of that has been stressful. We cut our grocery budget and one VERY happy silver lining is that I found a dairy farm about a mile away that sells raw milk, for about half what we pay at the supermarket. We drink a LOT of milk, so it’s been a fun project to learn how to home-pasteurize, make yogurt and fresh cheese.

3. This Kid is Alright

Many of you know that Lucie has had a bunch of disturbing health problems over the last few months. Long story short, she had Covid in May, followed by a weird fever episode in June and then very abnormal labs that prompted a bunch of diagnostic tests to rule out liver and digestive disease, bone tumors, etc. There is a small possibility that she has early Crohn’s disease, but more or less all of the recent test results have been reassuring. THANK YOU to all of you who knew about this, prayed, and encouraged us. A cancer diagnosis would for sure have sent us home, no small thing to sit up at night contemplating.

4. The Team is Alright

Clockwise L-R: Holly & Chris Steed, Linnea Ness and Heidi Johnson.

One of the parts of our job that we fail to talk about much is that we lead this team of people, all here in Guatemala working long-term with Serge. Chris and Holly have a small farm and leather-work project that provides work and discipleship for single moms; Linnea is an educator, does facilitative church planting and spiritual development in a women’s shelter; and Heidi is a licensed counselor working in a family shelter serving abuse survivors. We love each of them SO much, respect their work and are buoyed by the community life we are building together.

And! we have a new intern. Halle just arrived last month and will be with us until May. She is a recent Baylor grad, hopefully headed to med school next year, and will be helping us with some research and quality improvement projects in the diabetes program after she finishes language school in December. She has been a total delight to have around; she’s picking up Spanish at a dizzying speed, full of hilarious anecdotes about everything happening around her, and great at TikTok.

This year is rapidly coming to a close. As I count up our metrics to turn in to Serge, I am again amazed at the faithfulness of God, who “works in us to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.” (Philippians 2:13) I confess that I have been dragging lately, failing to see much good in the bleak circumstances around us, in the frequent insults to injury that beset the lives our our patients and our community here. My trust in God to be present, provident and sovereign has felt thin and distant lately. A thing that is often said of our sort of work is that we are planting seeds that will much later bear fruit, and I know that is probably true, but I also care very deeply about results right now: if we are not making a tangible, short-term, measurable impact in the physical lives of the people we serve, I fear we should not be wasting the resource we have to be here.

Encouragingly, though, as I process the lab results of the 200 or so patients I follow in the diabetes program, I am seeing a declining rate of new cases of renal failure as well as a stabilization or improvement in lab values. Only one patient has gone blind this year; I had three lose their vision last year. More than half of them have lost some weight and the majority have their blood pressure under control. 3 patients died of heart attacks or strokes in 2021; so far, none have in 2022. A lot of diabetic ulcers have completely healed, which means legs and livelihoods saved. Jeff is seeing marked improvement in the patients he sees that come in for at least 3-4 therapy sessions; it’s hard to get to that point with some folks, but those that come in consistently do get better in measurable ways. He sees a lot of ordinary people, but he’s also doing therapy with people leading ministries, pastors, teachers… people whose mental health (or lack thereof- ) meaningfully impacts their ministries and the lives of people under their care. We are full of hope for next year; we are starting a mental health treatment program in collaboration with another project across the street, and I am taking a biostatistics class online to help me better understand how to improve some parts of the diabetes project.

If you are inclined to pray for us, pray the end of Philippians 2— that we would “do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that we may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation..” That we would “shine among them like stars in the sky as we hold firmly to the word of life.”

Pray for our funding— we are working on raising more support from new friends in communities of faith in East Texas, anticipating rising costs over the next five years of service here.

Pray for our girls— I am increasingly concerned about how to accomplish Christian formation for them outside of our home, as our influence with them wanes and they look to their friends and the community around them for guidance. We would really love to find something like a solid youth group, high school girls Bible study or Young Life in Antigua.

As ever, let us know how you are! We love replies to these emails, and are always buoyed by the friendship and encouragement you provide.

Much love,

Abbie (and Jeff and the girls)