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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, my high school Spanish class name was Deigo, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
I was first exposed to the Spanish language in third grade. I don’t recall if we worked on it every week or if it was just for part of the school year, but I do remember that there was a time where we dedicated a portion of our week to learning basic Spanish words for numbers and colors.
I wouldn’t again be exposed to learning Spanish until I was in high school and required to take two years of it for college prep. As I recall, I got a C in Spanish I and a B in Spanish II. I had a lot of difficulty with the verb conjugations and the language never clicked with me to the point where I felt comfortable with it.
My kids were different. Addi LOVED Spanish in school. They took it while still in middle school, and Addi ended up taking five years of Spanish. She even signed up to take a test which, if passed, would have allowed her to graduate with a bilingual status. Unfortunately, on the day of the test she was terribly sick and had to excuse herself several times. This meant she didn’t finish the test and didn’t pass.
Colby took two years of Spanish and one year of French. His Spanish is better than mine but not great either. Although, since he started dating a Mexican girl last year his Spanish has mysteriously improved! She’s fluent in English and Spanish and has been helping him learn the language.
When I was fresh out of high school and just starting at the bookstore, I had an opportunity to use my Spanish skills. A man came in to buy a very specific book and he only spoke Spanish. The staff in the book department managed to understand the book he wanted and get it ordered for him, but they were unable to communicate with him to tell him when it would arrive.I was called over to try and help. The associate asked me if I could tell him that his book would be in on Wednesday. Easy, right? I mean, learning the days of the week was one of the first things I learned in Spanish class. But I panicked. I could not think of the Spanish word for Wednesday. Finally, someone grabbed a nearby calendar, pointed to the day the book would arrive, and he understood. Naturally, shortly after he left I remembered miércoles was the Spanish word for Wednesday. I felt like such an idiot and regretted that I wasn’t able to better help the customer.
In 2017 I received an email from a podcast associate of mine named Shawn. He and I had originally met at Podcast Movement a few years before when he interviewed me for his podcast. I had no idea at the time that he had been hosting mission trips to Guatemala every year. His wife was Guatemalan, and they spent about 3-5 months each year in Guatemala, and the remaining time in the States.
Shawn reached out to me because he was looking for help in a few different ways. First, he was looking for people to support their mission via prayer. His group provided much needed tangible support for Guatemalan families, and they also spent time sharing the gospel via Bible study and music. He asked for prayer that their efforts would be a blessing to the Guatemalan people and their lives would be physically and spiritually changed for the better.
He also asked for other support. That support could come via joining them in Guatemala for a week, or making a donation to provide a specific resource for a family.
Shawn and his group worked with a local organization called Corazón de los Niños. Corazón de los Niños provides a lot of great support for Guatemalan families. For Shawn, they helped identify families that his team could support, and prepared those families so that when Shawn’s team showed up, the families would be ready.
Shawn’s team primarily provided two services. The people he served in Guatemala were extremely poor. Their homes were built with whatever supplies they could find. They had dirt floors and they cooked over what we would consider a campfire. These living conditions created two major issues.
Because of the dirt floors, the families often dealt with diseases related to walking, sitting, or lying on dirt for long periods of time. Because of the open-fire cooking, families often dealt with respiratory ailments due to smoke inhalation. These fires also consumed a lot of wood. This was bad for the Guatemalan environment in multiple ways, but also meant that someone from the family, often children, had to spend time each day gathering wood. This meant that children rarely went to school because household needs prevented them from having the time available to attend.
Shawn’s team solved these issues in two ways. He had one or two teams that focused solely on installing concrete floors in homes. He had also partnered with a Guatemalan entrepreneur to create stoves. These stoves still used firewood to operate, but they were significantly more energy efficient, requiring much less wood to accomplish the same tasks. They also had a vent which exhausted the smoke outside.
So when Shawn asked for financial support, he directed you to a page on his website where you could purchase any number of floors or stoves. That money would then be 100% directed to the purchase of those resources for Guatemalan families.
His email came at a good time for us because our church had recently disbanded. We hadn’t yet found a new church home, and we were actively looking for places we could support with money we set aside each month for ministry.
I reached out to Shawn to learn more about the mission and determine how much I could donate to make maximum impact. Shawn was great with answering my questions, but the conversation didn’t go as I expected. Rather than simply taking my money, Shawn repeatedly emphasized that the best impact I could make was not in purchasing multiple stoves and floors. Instead, he insisted the biggest impact would be made if I joined him in Guatemala.
As I spoke with Shawn, I simply could not understand his logic. I don’t know how much money I had available for ministry at the time but we’d been saving up ministry money for a while after our church disbanded. We had somewhere between $5k and $10k set aside. That money could buy a lot of floors and stoves.
But Shawn was encouraging me to use a big chunk of that money on flights and a hotel to join him in person. Those expenses would significantly impact the number of stoves and floors I would be able to purchase and I knew there were people in Guatemala who needed those resources. How is buying fewer stoves and floors better?
Every time I offered up a reason why I couldn’t do it or suggested that just giving my money would be better, he met me with a solution or thoughtfully-considered reason why I was wrong. After talking with him and following up with my wife, we decided that not only would I be joining Shawn in Guatemala, Addi would be coming along too.
Here’s what I learned.
Shawn and his wife spent their entire summers in Guatemala doing mission work for 10 years, retiring before the summer of 2019. They knew the Guatemalan people extremely well and understood their needs. He also knew the power of first-hand impact.
That week Addi and I spent in Guatemala was incredible. Like Shawn, we too fell in love with the Guatemalan people. They are so warm and loving, generous and kind. They live in what we would consider squalor conditions, and yet have such joy and peace in their lives. Shawn had warned us ahead of time to expect gifts from families as we served them, and he taught us how to respond to those gifts as well as how NOT to respond to them.
But here they were in such poverty, and still giving us gifts. It was such a great example of love, appreciation, and sacrifice. Addi and I worked all week installing stoves for many families located in the village of San Pedro de las Huertas.
We also learned more about the great work of Corazón de los Niños. They provide healthcare and educational programming for children and their families as well as providing clothing and sanitary supplies. As families receive a stove, their children are much more likely to attend school, which gives them a much better path to eventually bringing their families out of poverty.
Corazón de los Niños also provided opportunities to sponsor a child. When a child was sponsored, the entire family benefitted. Corazón de los Niños understood that it made no sense to provide medical care for only the sponsored child if that child would then go home to a home of sickness. Therefore, the entire family receives healthcare when a single child is sponsored.
They also have a clinic and other resources available to everyone in the community for a discounted fee. Our first day there we met a young boy named Juan, his dad, Juan, and his grandpa, Juan. They were a family of wood carvers and we installed a stove for them. Addi and I fell in love with little Juan and we were able to sponsor him by the end of the week.
There was another little boy that had caught my eye throughout the week as well. He was a chubby little dude that was shy and awkward. He often stood off from other kids by himself. In many ways he reminded me of myself. His name is Christian and we sponsored him too.
Making connections with these families and understanding how partnering with Corazón de los Niños could make a generational impact is something I never would have gained by simply buying stoves and floors. Shawn was right. More impact would be found not by simply tossing money his way, but by giving my time, energy, and physical resources to the mission.
To the best of my knowledge neither Christian, Juan, nor their families knew who specifically had chosen to sponsor them. I was totally okay with this, content in knowing they were being given opportunities to improve their lives and the lives of their families.
The following year Addi and I returned to Guatemala. I interacted with Juan and Christian as I was able. It was great to see them and their families again, as well as meet many new faces. As the week came to an end we found ourselves at the local school playing with the kids at a basketball court. The kids were more interested in using it for soccer, of course.
Seemingly out of nowhere, Christian was suddenly standing at my feet, big brown eyes looking up at me, face filled with those cute chubby cheeks. And then he handed me a card he’d made. He DID know I was sponsoring him! I lost it. I hugged him and we looked at the card together. Then I realized his mom and family were standing several feet away watching us, smiling, crying.
It was a great moment. So powerful for all of us. And then moments later one of the ornery boys kicked a soccer ball into my no-no zone which took me down to my knees and brought raucous laughter from all the kids. Ah, the ups and downs of working with children. I’m so grateful Shawn talked me into taking that first trip.
It’s too easy for us to offer up money rather than our time. We can even fool ourselves quite easily into thinking that our money is making a bigger impact. But that is simply not the case. Yes, give your money as much as you’re able. But don’t stop there. Give of your time, your love, your hugs, your sweat, your everything. There’s a whole world of opportunity out there, and we each have the ability to make it a better place.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
I want you to be a part of the next Monday Mailbag next week on June 30th! The submission deadline is the end of day this Wednesday, June 25th. Monday Mailbag is your opportunity to Share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes. You can participate in Monday Mailbags by visiting the Golden Spiral Media listener feedback page.