Time to go home! We got up and trekked to one of Steve’s favorite breakfast places for our last “desayuno” in Guatemala. Just outside the hotel, we discovered another decorative sawdust carpet being created on the cobblestone in preparation for a Lenten processional later today.

After breakfast, it was time to load up the vans again and head back to the Guatemala City airport. We hugged Steve and Victoria good-bye with smiles and tears. In many ways, it seems like we’ve been here much longer than a week. Our Guatemalan hermanos y hermanas en Christo gave us many weeks’ worth of experiences intensely packed into a few days, and we’ve come to love them dearly. In various ways, our team is grappling individually with the realities of worldly poverty contrasted with spiritual wealth. One of our devotionals this week had a quote from Jean Vanier, “People may come to our communities because they want to serve the poor; they will only stay once they have discovered that they themselves are the poor.” We discovered this week that we are indeed the poor and that many of the poor have a richer faith and live in richer communities than we do.