TWO NEW EMPLOYEES AND GANGS AND HURRICANE STAN. Blog day 14

We recently hired two new employees. Mario and Juan. Mario will be in charge of the nutrition programs and Juan will be in charge of the educational programs. Both are growing by leaps and bounds. Both have an interesting history that is so Guatemalan.
Mario is close to 40 and grew up in Godinez. He is a very active evangelical. He has been woroking for a trucking company in Guatemala City and his job is to bargain with the gangs. In other words how large a bribe do we have to pay you to keep you from robbing us.? Talk about a stressful job. He wanted to move back to his homeplace and away from the big city stress. He is a friend of Domingas and they work well together. He is not afraid to be a boss.
Juan is 26 and grew up in Santiago on Lake Atitlan. He is a very active Latter Day Saint. We first heard about him back in 2005, right after Hurricane Stan. The mudslide outside Santiago took out his family home and all the money he had saved to go on a mission. His brother was head of the Mormon church in that area at the time. It had rained for 4 days straaight, not hard but steady. At 2am some mud slide. Juan's brother recruited everyone with a vehicle to go with him to this vulnerable area and get the people out. Juan and the rest of his family left then. His mom did not want to leave her belongings and the dad carried her to the car and put her in. Many people did not leave. At 5 am, the big mud slide and 54 of Juan's relatives died. No one knows how many died, but Juan thinks it was around 800 who were buried alive. He lost all his possessions. His brother asked us back in 2005 if we could help him with his missionary expenses. We agreed. Juan had graduated from diversicado by working and his parents selling some land. They lost the rest of their land in the mudslide. He went to Arisona on a mission and now speaks and writes perfect English as well as Spanish and 2 Indian dialects.  He came by last July to thank us for his mission support and let us know if we ever needed a bilingual employee he was available. He will work a lot with the teams.
Last Tuesday, my husband got started with the 5 youngest homeschooling. It is a lot of work and he is dedicated and I love him for it.