What this picture DOESN'T tell you is that, that faucet,
it's just there to look pretty, nothing comes out of it except maybe bugs.
The blue thing on the left? It's full of water-that's the definition of running water. In this bathroom, there is a huge bucket full of water, that get's refilled daily by dumping buckets of water into it, that has a bucket floating in it. That floating bucket, you fill with water and dump into the toilet. Yes, you read that correctly. You have to dump the water into the toilet and then it just does it's thing. To the right of me in this picture is a nail sticking out of the wall. This nail holds up a towel that maybe at one point was a pretty white towel, but is so used, it has become brown and ragged.
Reality check.
Living in Guatemala, we face a lot of extremes. I work in a school that seems (somewhat) like it was picked up from a town in the states and plopped into another country. We live in a gated community where safety isn't something that we need to be worrying about. I have a car that gets me from point A to point B and when I get home at night I can flip on the light switch and am pretty much guaranteed that there will be light coming from the bulb in the ceiling. I can wake up in the morning and turn the faucet in my sink and know that most of the time water will be coming out of it. I may sometimes need to squish a few (or a lot) of spiders or bugs that find their way into my little home, but for the most part, my life is pretty comfortable. I don't really have to make a lot of sacrifices living here or anything like that.
But reality check.
When I get into the towns or areas outside of my comfort zone, and out of the city-reality slaps me in the face. Hard. Such as the picture of the sink above, or the ones below of the dump and different shots I've taken while living here. I can drive less than 20 minutes from my house and find myself at a place where houses have dirt floors and no running water and are constructed of whatever can be found to make walls. Houses with a single mattress on the floor that everyone sleeps in together. And they are thankful for what they have. They thank God daily for His provision and protection.
Just take a moment to take it all in... This is a reality.
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