Rest in the Race

October 2018

I feel as though I shouldn’t be surprised that the end of my time in Guatemala is only a few months away. I shouldn’t be surprised because my life back in Seattle seems like it was ages ago. A whole lifetime in the past. This in and of itself shouldn’t surprise me either I suppose, it usually goes that way. But here we are. It is mid-October and I still am not sure what my life will look like three months from now. Not even if I will be putting Guatemala in my rear view mirror or not. I am in the process of applications and prayer about where and what is next. My desires for stability and new experiences are more at odds than ever. However, before I ramble too much about the future, I will start by telling you about this past month.  

In mid-September I was FINALLY able to leave the city for a weekend in the nature of Honduras. This was my first time really being able to be in nature since before I hurt my knee and I didn’t realize until we arrived how sorely I needed to get out of the city. The weekend was full of new friends, kayaking, and adventuring behind a waterfall. In the time by the campfire between the trees I completely forgot my life in the city. The only thing that was real was there in Honduras. My roommate who was there with me, described it, when we came back to Guatemala, as if a cloud passed over. I can honestly say that I have never felt so in the moment in my life. I had let my mental state deteriorate and shoved down my trapped feelings for so long that when I was away nothing else mattered. Through this all I learned what mental health here looks like for me and that means getting away on a somewhat regular basis.  

When I did come back to my life here I stepped into an extremely busy time in the office. A day after I got back I went with only our external lecturer to Xela for two days to give a presentation for judges there about the testimony processes in cases with children. We also had a national meeting for judges from around the country scheduled for the following week and had to pull an art installation together with our client’s paintings.  For the first time ever the topic of the national meeting was child sexual violence. We had a high ranking member of the Catholic Church flying up from Argentina to help lead a mass on Freedom Sunday. And in the midst of it all we were all preparing for the office to close for a week for the first ever organization wide gathering of all IJM staff from around the world. Miraculously, the national meeting was postponed until after the team came back from the gathering which gave us time to put the art installation together and finalize all the details.  

Our WHOLE team flew, for the first time for many of them, to Dallas to take part in this special week. I asked our receptionist, Jackie, if she was excited to leave the country for the first time and she told me she was terrified. Bewildered I asked her why. She said she had never been on a plane before and she was convinced something would go wrong. It hit me in that moment that I couldn’t remember my first time on a plane because I was so young. That my privilege of where I grew up made something like flying mundane for me, but for her this trip may be the only time that she gets to travel on one. And Jackie wasn’t the only one, probably around half of our office had never flown before. I told her that I loved flying and how safe and reliable planes were. When I saw her after the office reopened she was grinning ear to ear and told me that the plane ride went great. 

While our Guatemalan friends were in the states, my roommate and I decided to visit another country as well. We spent 4 days on an island in Belize snorkeling, lying on a beach, and eating amazing Caribbean food. It felt like living in one of the Jimmy Buffet songs that would always be playing in our house growing up. I may have even had a margarita or two.  

Then the National Meeting of Judges rolled around. It was one of the most stressful projects that I have worked on during my time here and one of my favorites. We gathered over 80 judges from all over the country to speak about themes surrounding child sexual violence and to strategize on ways to better protect child victims. At this event we put together and art installation with 28 paintings from our clients and their families called Project Light (Proyecto Luz). Each painting included a short story about the abuse the child suffered and about what gives them hope to keep fighting for justice and restauration. Watching the reactions and hearing the commentaries of the judges, who have worked with these types of cases for years, was powerful. One of the best reactions we received was from a judge here in the city who has shown a lack empathy for victims in the past and has given our prosecutors problems on cases. He said that “protecting kids from being afraid of the things they love, like football or their families, due to sexual trauma, should be why every judge comes to work every day.” In that moment this man felt the heart of IJM. He understood who we were. 

Now we are ramping up for another big event tomorrow with the National Civil Police (PNC). And that’s how we work. We keep running to try and get everything done in time, but we know why we are in this race. It’s to make sure that no child has to fear being violated by the people they are told to love and respect. To make sure that no child has to live with the sexual abuse of a football coach, neighbor, church leader, uncle/aunt, or mother/father ever again. And to make sure that the System in Guatemala is doing all it can to have the same finish line.   

While I think about my future and where I will go or what I will do next it is nice to have those reminders of the present keeping me focused on the work that is yet to be done. I don’t know what’s next and my anxiety tries to convince me that that is a terrible thing, but today I am just happy to be a part of this fight.  

Prayer Requests: 

• - Prayer for our legal team as we continue to phase out of case work and give cases to external lawyers, that they will feel at peace that God will be with those children and cases moving forward.  
• - Prayer for my knee, which I reinjured in Honduras, that it will heal completely and that I will not have to worry about it anymore.  
• - Prayer for the future and all of the imminent decisions that I will have to make about what my future will look like.  

• - Prayer for our advocacy team that is working closely with the Ministry of Education here to create a programing for talking about this topic in schools. (AND praise that yesterday we got the final permission from them to enter schools with our curriculum) 
• - And lastly prayer that the timeframes of cases moving through the justice system here will be shortened miraculously and that the system with be transformed in a way that only God can do. 
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"There is meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveler"

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer