Guatemalan's Visit, Part 1

~November 7 (Thursday)~

I apologize for the lack of blog posts this weekend. They’re now up, even though they’re quite late. We’ve been a little occupied , because we had 9 international guests staying in our home! Pastor D—one of the missionaries we worked with in Guatemala this past summer—brought his family as well as another family from their church to the States for a month. And they came to stay with us for four days!

It’s probably needless to say that I was thrilled when I heard they’d be visiting. As the Global Missions intern at our church, I was responsible for making the plans for their stay in north Texas.

They were supposed to arrive around 6 p.m. on Thursday night to our house (where they would be staying during their visit.) We got a call around 2:15 p.m. saying that they were five minutes away! :-0 We were not quite ready, so we scrambled a bit to finish the important things.

We were so excited to see them! Ben and I had fun introducing them to the rest of the family and meeting the four others Pastor D had brought. We sat in the living room and talked for quite awhile.

Then we decided to go outside, and some of us went on a walk. From left to right here is Ben, D and P (Pastor D’s sons), M, and S (they are cousins. M’s parents also came on this trip) and Ruby.

M and S were quite excited about getting to pet some of the horses down the road from us. J

That evening, we all enjoyed a delicious dinner of rice with crock pot pork and vegetables.

After dinner, we spent time just visiting. We played the piano and guitar, sang songs, told jokes, did a lot of laughing and spoke a lot of Spanglish (Mr. A and his wife, M didn’t speak English, but everyone else spoke it.) My sides and face literally ached from laughing so much that night!

We had Pastor D and his wife O in our downstairs guest room, Mom and Dad in their room, Ben and Josiah on the hide-a-bed couch in the living room, D, P, and M in the boys’ room upstairs, Mr. A and his wife M in our office on the hide-a-bed couch, and all of us girls (Roma, Ruby, M, S, and I) in the twins’ room. I was going to sleep in my room, but I got invited to join the “girl party.” J We girls stayed up pretty late talking and getting to know each other.

To be honest, I had been a little nervous at first. I wondered what it would be like to have 9 additional people in our house that most of us didn’t know. But after that first night, I knew we would have a hard time saying goodbye at the end of the visit! We clicked so fast, which was an incredible blessing!

To be continued . . .