Asar en Arizona!

We had a great time in Phoenix, despite the temperatures reaching 45C/113F! It was a good experience for our team to work together and apply some of the principles from our school and bless a ministry with some extra pairs of hands. We primarily served a community project called the "Guadalupe Learning Lab" which is an after school tutoring program. The people of Guadalupe are indigenous Mexican in heritage, but were re-located to Arizona nearly 100 years ago. Guadalupe has it's fair share of challenges that tend to be common to many Native American communities like substance abuse, un-employment and broken families. The "Learning Lab" was a community response to many parent's desire to see improved educational opportunities for their kids. It's run primarily by people from Guadalupe who want to see a better future for their town and are taking initiative to see that happen.

A typical day at the Lab's summer program sees 30-50 kids between 4-16 years old breaking into different age groups to practice their reading, spelling and math in the morning and then we would often end up playing all sorts of games or doing crafts in the afternoons. Our team was only there for a couple weeks, but we really got to connect with the kids and leaders as we took the time to talk, ask questions and hear their stories. It was great to see people in the community providing a stable and positive place for kids to hang out and learn, which is quite a contrast from some of their home lives.

On a couple of occasions we got the chance to connect with a small YWAM team who are in the process of starting a base in Phoenix. We prayed with them about a property that they want to purchase and heard about their vision for future ministry in Phoenix which was cool for us, and encouraging to them. We also arranged a couple interviews with key community development leaders who are based in the Phoenix area and were able to glean from their experiences of their work both locally and abroad.

Thanks again for joining us on this journey,

we couldn’t do it without you!

Eliza and Tim

#transformation #training #communities #development #ontheroad #phoenizaz