August 13-20, 2011

For the past several days we have been blessed by having a teem from "Joni and Friends" that came from the USA to work with with us.

Grant and Rhoni Standefer who are with Joni and friends showed up a few days ahead of the rest of the teem.

Rhoni had collected some money for shoes from friends and members of her church so on Saturday we took about a dozen of my kids shoe shopping. This was a big blessing because the school year is about half over and many of them had shoes that were totally warn out.

Thanks Rhoni and everyone else who made this possible.

On Tuesday we we loaded up the 2 Bethel Ministry vans and headed out for 5 days on the road. Among other things we visited several families in their homes and did wheelchair distributions in 3 different towns here in Guatemala. The entire group has really rolled up their sleeves and pitched in to help make this week a huge success.

Not only were over 165 people blessed with new wheelchairs but many of the people that we worked with gave or rededicated their lives to Jesus.

Local pastors from each town that we did the distributions in worked with us and they will be following up on all of these people.

I am still working on trying to get some of the teem members to write a few things about thier

experiences this week but we have all been quite busy. When and if they do I will be sure to post what they wrote.

Chris and Donna's daughter Cindy (lower left) did an excellent job of interpreting for me at the distributions.

The little boy (lower right) was my enthusiastic mechanic's helper at the San Marcos wheelchair distribution. He shortened what would have normally taken me 3 hours to do down to about 5 hours, but his enthusiasm and the smile on his face made it all worth it.

We are now back in Chimaltenango and my house is quickly filling up with kids. Since they all want to share with me what they did this week I am going to cut my sharing short and let them have a turn sharing their experiences with me.

Goodnight,

Yours in Christ: Dick