Kevin in San Agustin

This past week, I (Kevin) spent my time in the municipality of San Agustín. It was a very wonderful and amazing experience as the absolute love and kindness and faith of the people here continues to blow me away! I stayed with an sweet elderly retired couple named Horacio and Aqueda. They told me I was going to be their son for the week, and they are also kind of like the parents or grandparents to everyone in the community. Since they are retired much of the work we did was doing things like going and visiting sick people in their homes and praying with them and as Horacio always said, bringing God’s joy to them.
One day we also went out to the poor neighborhood where Horacio blew a little horn that he had to let all the children know they were passing through town. Thus all the kids gathered to them and they gave them candy and prayed a short prayer with them. Apparently, they do this every week, but it was neat to see, because it was almost like something out of a storybook of the kindly old Candy Man that comes to town every week bringing candy to all the little boys and girls…kind of like Santa Clause! Haha,
Anyways, Horacio also told me about his dream of building comedor, or a school, there in the poor neighborhood for the kids to be able to get a good healthy meal and education there as most of them do not get a lot of food and thus are malnourished and few of them attend school. It would be really neat to see that happen!
One day while I was there, I also got quite sick, because of a bad soup I had. Anyways, although this forced me to rest pretty much the whole rest of the day, it allowed me to reflect a bit and I realized that it was a beautifully ironic opportunity that we had visited sick that morning and I was sick now…it was an opportunity for me to sort of be in solidarity with those sick whom we had visited. I realized it was very Eucharistic, because when we share in the Eucharist, in the Body of Christ, we also share in each other, we share in our joys as well as our sufferings. Thus my being sick was an opportunity to share in their suffering and offer that up to Christ, and to surrender to the helplessness of being sick and allowing others to take care of me.
All in all the whole trip was quite beautiful and amazing and Aqueda and Horacio are such kind and loving people as well as the others in the community! Next week I will likely return out there for a couple of days. Love you all!
In Him,
Kevin