Help comes from 6000 miles away

Stoves, food baskets and a Bible study. Seniors Emily Stewart, Maddie Dunn and Ashley Groves went on a mission trip with their youth group at First Southern Baptist Church to Pacaya, Guatemala.

In the mornings, the mission team built stoves in about sixteen resident homes and also distributed food packs. In the afternoon, the mission team was involved in leading a Bible school for the children in the community. They had sixty-five people on the first day and over two hundred by the third day.

“Most of the kitchens in these homes were in a small room outside from the main living area,” Peter Cunningham, the youth pastor at First Southern Baptist Church, said.

The people of Pacaya did not have functioning stoves. The group made about seven stoves for families.

“This room was always covered in black tar from cooking over open flame. [We were] teaching them that this smoke that left residue on the ceiling and walls was also in their lungs making them sick,” Cunningham said.

The group used the new stoves as a metaphor to teach the villagers about their beliefs.

“We helped them [understand how] sin affects our personal lives,” Cunningham said. “It pollutes us toward our relationship with God. The flue that we installed on the stoves removed all of the smoke from the stove. When we had completed the stove for the family, we would teach them how to use it and then illustrate to them that the flue represents Jesus [and] how Jesus came to take away the sins of the world, to be the sacrifice so we could be right with God, in a similar way that flue delivers the smoke away from the house.”

According to Dunn, whenever the group was building the stoves, the villagers asked if they wanted some water or if they needed a chair to take a rest.

“You don’t have to talk to them to have a conversation,” Dunn said. “The people were just happy to have them there and grateful for all their hard work.”

Just being there and handing out the food baskets to the villagers was Dunn’s favorite part.

“These people got something so simple as in a bag of food and they want to go out of their way to help us,” Dunn said.