Back from an incredible trip to Guatemala with Outreach For World Hope, and before I share a bit about it, first want to say how proud I am of the 19 people who came together for this experience. They came from all parts of the U.S., of all ages, many of them with no Spanish-speaking skills, and unsure of what exactly they were walking into. Yet instead of saying “I could never do that”, “maybe next time” or “I gave at the office”, they answered God’s call with a “YES”.
In the days to come, they’d travel along with local Guatemalan doctors, translators and OWH helpers to two remote villages, a five-hour bus ride from Guatemala City, working as a team to attend to 360 families living in conditions beyond what most of us could imagine. The families they attended to live in small, mud adobe huts and palm-thatched shacks, their corn and coffee fields that would otherwise sustain them devastated by years of extended drought. The typical child they encountered suffered from severe malnutrition, often eating in an entire day only a tortilla and beans, their bodies skinny but bellies full of parasites, their growth stunted to the point that eleven and twelve-year-old children were the size of five and six-year-olds.
Barely an hour into our visit to the first village, a “code-red” child was brought to us, 4 years old but weighing only 20 pounds, his poverty-stricken mother unable to feed him. While other volunteers continued to assist patients, distribute food and clothing, plant fruit trees and help build latrines, that child was rushed to a hospital an hour away, where a blood transfusion was needed to keep him alive. He was just one of three “code-red” situations on that very first day, and will spend the next month away from home in nutritional rehab provided by OWH.
That night, while volunteers gathered for dinner, Kim Tews (founder of OWH) told us how his mother will have to stay with him, leaving the rest of her children and her husband behind, and the financial struggle the family faces without help. Before Kim could even finish speaking, one of our group members, Erica Sunshine Lee, volunteered to personally sponsor the child through OWH.
If you know Erica, she’s out there on the road working her butt off seven days a week with her music. And here she is already taking time away from that, paying airfare and expenses to be here with us. But even though she was never asked, she said YES. That $34 a month is coming from her heart, and will provide badly-needed relief not only to that suffering, hungry little boy but his family too.
Erica’s attitude is one our entire group shared, even in exhausting moments when the sheer number of people needing help seemed overwhelming, or when we were finally finishing our work only to learn about a fire that had left three families homeless nearby. There’s a “no person left behind” attitude with Outreach For World Hope. Even though our trucks were loaded and bags packed, soon two of our volunteers were administering to burn wounds after others lugged bags of donated clothing, food and toys to the families, who are now left sleeping under a piece of corrugated metal propped up against a branch.
Not only that, but Kim assured these folks, who lost every possession they owned including their animals, that OWH would help them to rebuild new homes.
OWH doesn’t run around soliciting help. But there are people out there, maybe even some reading this, who WANT to. So even though Kim has not asked me to, I’d like to share with you a website: www.outreachforworldhope.org where you can see for yourself the incredible work OWH does, and donate if you wish to. Unlike other charities with exorbitant salaries, big office overhead, etc that zap up most of your donation, Kim receives zero salary. Even volunteers pay their own expenses, including airfare to get there. The tiny office OWH runs is staffed by a handful of locals paid in Guatemalan wages, meaning every dollar donated is stretched to the absolute max in going to help the poorest of the poor.
In closing, I always think it’s a bit shameless when a songwriter quotes his own lyrics. So go ahead and consider me shameless, but given the situation, hope you’ll bear with me, with one line from “But For The Grace Of God”
“I can’t just be complacent, sit back and count my blessings, there’s more that I was put on earth to do.”