Day 11 – Thursday, June 18, 2009

Today was our last full day in Guatemala. This morning, we got up ate breakfast, did our devotions, and spent some time cleaning the base and preparing it for the next team that's coming. Our clean-up time was actually cut short because of the threat of rain. We needed to get to Antigua before it rained. We are staying in nice hotel in Antigua tonight, which will be a nice change from staying at the base. The hotel is in the middle of Antigua and just a short walk from the market. Everyone's pretty excited to be able to sleep in a real bed tonight.
After checking into the hotel, we spent the rest of the morning and all of the afternoon at the market shopping. The market is fun because you get to barter with the people in order to get a good price. There were so many different you could buy from blankets hammocks to knifes and jewelry. It was a lot of fun and some of our students got to be pretty good at bartering. As we were finishing up at the market it started to rain, so instead of walking back to the hotel, our group decided to take a Tuk Tuk, which is a three-wheeled motorcycle with a bench seat in the back to carry passenger. It was fun to ride along as we passed cars and weaved in-and-out of traffic.
After we arrived back at the hotel, we went out for our final team dinner in Guatemala. We ate a place cale Ni-fu Ne Fa, which is a really nice steak house. They brought us plates filled with different kinds of meats from steak and chicken to ribs and sausage. The food was amazing.
After dinner, we went back to the hotel and met together to debrief the entire trip. We went around the room and every student shared some spiritual and practical lessons learned on the trip. It was so fun to hear what God was challenging students with and to laugh about so many of the fun times on the trip. At the end of the night, we able to bless Jonathan and Alicia with a very nice HD-video camera, which we brought just for them. It was a huge blessing to them and an answer to prayers because just a few weeks earlier their video camera had been stolen. It was amazing to see how God used us to meet a need that we didn’t even know they had. We spent the rest of the night hanging out at the hotel talking and enjoying our last night in Guatemala. Today was a great last full day in Guatemala.