The kitchen sink & bathrooms are now finished, and we’re just about ready to move in! The only thing left is the electrical wiring and outlets.
Doors, Windows & Tiles
The house construction continues to progress, and I can now see the end in sight!
We’ve installed the exterior doors, windows and tile flooring these last few months. 
The tank on our roof holds the water for our house. We only receive water from the municipality for a few hours a day, so the tank helps us to always have water available.
Rick & Luke’s Visit
It has been wonderful this past week to have our pastor, Rick Banda and his son Luke here visiting us. Rick has been hugely instrumental in helping and guiding our ministry. He has a huge heart for reaching the lost, and has for years opened his own house to do it. Their visit has been a very fun and relaxing time for us to be together.
While here, Rick spoke with the parents of many of the children at Casa Shalom during their monthly “Visitor’s Sunday”. He shared about his own past and how God really is his Heavenly Father. He also spent a lot of time with our guys and also with Yuli’s family. The highlight of the trip was that Elias and Yuli’s brother-in-law Mauriel both decided to be baptized! It was amazing!
We also spent some time just relaxing together and enjoying each other’s company. Luke and I took the teen boys on a hike up a volcano one day. It was a lot of fun, but we were up in the clouds so there wasn’t much of a view.
And we went on a relaxing fishing trip another day in the beautiful lake Atitlan.
For me personally, the best times were the times in-between when we were driving back and forth between activities. I enjoyed and learned so much from our conversations. Rick has had years of experience of different kids growing up alongside of his own kids. Now with our own baby, this is so important to me. I want to be used by God to help and minister to these guys that the Lord has given us, but it should never be at the cost of being a bad parent to my own children. Rick’s wisdom has been incredibly helpful to us.
Rick has a very interesting blog about his time with us in Guatemala:
Celia & Margaret
Yesterday we had Celia & her family over again to visit. Here’s a cute picture of her and Margaret!. We love having them over and continuing to build a relationship with the family. Her mom’s concerned because she’s now in sixth grade, and there aren’t any schools in their town past elementary school. We’re praying about how we can help them this next year.
Semana Santa
This past week was Holy Week, or Semana Santa in Spanish, and schools in Guatemala are closed for the week. We invited the teenage boys from Casa Shalom over to our house under construction for a campout. It was rustic with no electricity and only an outhouse, but we sure had a lot of fun together!
About a month ago some of the guys were baptized, and we spent a long time talking about their decisions and commitment to Christ. It was a really great time, and I love to see them grow in the Lord in love and maturity!
Potter’s Home Video
We’ve made a new video about the vision of the ministry, and it includes an update on the progress of our construction.
January in Guatemala
Happy (Late) New Year!
So I’m learning how hard it is to get some quiet time to sit down a write at home now that we have a baby! I’m already slow enough at writing! The past few weeks have been so busy that I wasn’t able to send out an email in December, so here are all the updates for the past two months:
We had a great Christmas break! My mom was able to visit us in early December in order to meet our new daughter Margaret. We had a great time with her (as always), and this time she got to spend a lot more time with our guys. It was really fun to all be together, and our house sure felt full with 7 people living here! While she was visiting we also got to visit the kids at Casa Shalom, and we had a baby dedication for Margaret at our church. Yuli and I also celebrated our third wedding anniversary. We’re so grateful that God brought us together!
Elias celebrated his 22nd birthday. He’s been looking for a job now that he’s graduated high school, and he got an offer at a tech support call center which he just started at. It’s a long bus ride everyday, and it takes him about two hours to get there during rush hour. So he’s been pretty tired. He’s currently in training, and the first week he came home one night and asked, “Brent, what’s outsourcing?” (I thought it was funny because you hear so much about it in the USA) His company answers calls from Spain, and he’s learning slang, accents and customs from there. I think that it’s a good experience for him. There’s also a chance that a local computer repair store might offer him a job close by, so we’ve been praying that God would show him where the right place is.
Benjamin changed to a new job at the end of last year, and he now works in sales at a cell phone company. He works in the streets of Guatemala City selling different phone plans, which is quite different from his accounting background. He really seems to enjoy it, but my concern is that it’s commission based, and I see his attention now solely focused on how many phone plans he can sell and how much money he’ll get at the end of the month. He’s also just starting to study telemarketing in college on the weekends. I ask that you pray for him and his heart.
Edwin doesn’t actually live with us, but he’s always here anyways! We love Edwin. It’s been great watching him grow up from one of my kids to one of my friends. In early January my visa in Guatemala expired, so I had to travel to Mexico to get it renewed. Edwin came along to give me company during the trip and to get to experience a different country. Well, we didn’t understand the rules, and the passes for Guatemalans to visit Mexico had been all used up by the time we got there. So we ended up only making it about 50 feet into Mexico! But we had some great conversations during the 10 hour trip about his hopes and dreams. His older brother died last October, and his younger brother and sister depend on him a lot. It’s all been really hard on him. He could really use your prayers as he seeks God’s will for his life.
The construction on our house stopped for a few weeks around Christmas to give everyone a break. In December we stuccoed the walls and installed the drainage lines. In January we’ve poured a cement floor and are installing tiles now. I hope to record a new video this week to show the progress. The big prayer request is that we still don’t have any electricity, and I’m not sure how much longer it’s going to take because there’s still no power lines on our road.
Whew, I think that’s enough for this month.
Thank you so much for your support and prayers for Yuli, myself and the ministry with these guys. We’re grateful for all the support that we’ve received this past year, especially with the additional expenses of the guys now living with us and our new daughter. Thank you for enabling us to serve in Guatemala!
Brent & Yuliza
Snow
We’ve heard that many of you in the USA have been experiencing a cold front this past week. Well it actually snowed this morning here in Guatemala!
This picture is from a newspaper here, and the snow fell in a region about 5 hours away from us close to the Mexican border. But we also heard that a volcano about 13 miles south of us also received a dusting on top this morning.
As for us, everyone here has been talking about the incredible cold with the highs only in the upper 60’s. (About 10 degrees below normal)
I sure love living here! 🙂
Elias’s 22nd Birthday
Yesterday was Elias’s 22nd birthday! We had lots of fun celebrating the day with him.
He’s now been with us for a little over a year ago, and it’s been a fun, challenging, and exciting time. After graduating from high school last October, he’s been searching for a job. He’s just been offered a job at a tech support call center, and his training starts tomorrow. The job is on the other side of Guatemala City, and it will take him about two hours to get there during rush hour. So it’s not exactly an ideal location, and he’s still waiting to hear back from some possible jobs near our town. But we’ve been praying about it, and it should be a good first experience for him, and he can learn a lot at this job.
Visiting Clara
Clara grew up at Casa Shalom with her sister Flora and brother Carlos. She moved away about 3 years ago, and had a baby about a year and a half ago. Well, she had a second baby a month ago. Flora and Carlos have been staying with her during the Christmas break, and we got to spend time with all of them. The good news is that she and her boyfriend have decided to get married! They could really use your prayers as they take this important step together.
Her daughter Rosemary was very curious to meet Margaret, but she’s incredibly shy around us. This was the best I could do to get a picture of her before she saw me watching.
Clara, Flora and Carlos came to Shalom in 2004, and Clara had always worked hard as a surrogate mother for her siblings. When she became a young adult she went a little wild, and it has caused a lot of problems for her and created a tough life for her. We’re always praying that she commits all of her ways to the Lord and follows His will for her life. I hope that this wedding is the first step.
Her brother Carlos broke his arm in late October while playing with some friends, and I’ve gotten some time together with him this Christmas break while taking him to get his arm checked up and his cast removed. He’s a fun guy!
It’s extra funny because my very first job at Casa Shalom in back in 2004 was rushing him to the very same hospital when he broke his other arm! I started just a few weeks after Clara, Flora & Carlos had arrived. Here he is after the first break eating a cupcake. He was so cute back then! (which he would hate hearing me say now)