“Time’s fun when you’re having flies,” said the Frog.
In an unbelievable, mind-bending twist of events, our family just four years ago shifted direction and relocated to Guatemala. We needed it.
Something big, over the top, had to occur to give ourselves the jolt we needed to shake off the ruts, bad habits and general discontent we felt in life. We needed extreme circumstances to shock us from the numbness we had become accustomed to. When we look back at pictures, we looked happy, but know the minds of ourselves in those pictures at the time, and we were doing our best just to hold it all together.
Six months after we had decided to sell and give away all our earthly possessions, we were on a plane with our five little ones and ready to take on the world. We had never travelled internationally as a family; our youngest was seven months old.
And what a move it was!!
We love telling our story as it testifies to the power of prayer, taking risks, living adventurously, and the rewards of surrendering to the unknown.
When we set out to Guatemala, what we did know was that we would be putting the golden rule of “loving others as yourself” to the test. So we started a blog called thegivingexperiment.org and documented the move as just that, an experiment in living a lifestyle of putting our neighbours’ needs on par with our own.
The rewards, epic encounters with the Devine and truly adventurous stories have been countless.
To catch you all up to speed, I’ll have to indulge in some point-form paragraphs; hopefully, in the future, time will allow me to expand on some of the years and events mentioned in each point. But for now, here we go:
Year 1
We arrived in Guatemala with just 1600 USD in cash and no line of credit. We had given ourselves no way back other than to succeed while here. It was a true leap of faith and an experiment in sharing. For our first six months, we slept on the floor on straw mats in a small Guatemalan house while our five children shared a single bunk bed.
We picked up trash daily along the beach while locals watched us, eventually forming a children’s club based around that activity and making art with the garbage. We taught local kids how to grow food-bearing plants in the plastic bottles we collected and would provide lunch to the families involved by finding sponsors back in Canada.
We were blessed to be interviewed by a few different podcasts, which exposed what we were doing to the world. Several hundred donors showed up, and volunteers and letters of encouragement came our way. This led us to sign a lease for a building that would house said volunteers, who could sublet the rooms, in turn offsetting most of the kid's trash cleanup club expenses.
During this time, the leased volunteer house was named “Los Colores” for the colour and vibrancy of what it was bringing to both the local community and our volunteers. We organized weekly community potlucks with local live music, and ladies from around the neighbourhood would cook. We used donations to buy ingredients for local women to make big pots of regional cuisine to share with our entire barrio and visiting volunteers. Local kids filled their bellies, everyone danced, and the cultural exchange was on another level; volunteers almost always extended their stays, sometimes for months.
Year 2
At the beginning of this year, we began to grow too fast with the club. Having something like the kids' club grow so fast and so big in such a short time caused us to go broke. We needed to find a better way to fund than relying on donations and cheap sublets. With over 60 children assisting a week, our club lunches and budget became more than what we were pulling in with the rentals at Los Colores, and we were not prepared to shut it down. Instead, I (Owen) returned to Canada to paint houses to continue supporting my family and our community projects. We had some faithful supporters by this time, but I needed a steady income to keep us from living hand to mouth. I spent eight months that year in Canada, painting homes while Christina cared for our five children in Guatemala and continued running the kids club.
Year 3
Eventually, we realized this separation was not what God intended for our lives, so we returned to prayer and envisioned what we would be best at together. We literally prayed that we would have the opportunity to run a hotel, seeing that we had gotten so good at event organizing and hospitality through our work at Los Colores in our local neighbourhood. One week later, we got a cold call from a Guatemalan family asking if we would consider taking over operations in a hotel in San Juan, La Laguna, on Lake Atitlan.
Year 4
Doors flew open for us. We signed a lease for a beautiful Lakeview hotel with complete creative control over renovating, building, decorating, and promoting. The owner admittedly constructed the hotel without much foresight on how they would run it, as he and his wife loved their current careers. We put the children’s club on pause and shifted our community work towards helping many of the families first involved with us at the kids’ club create businesses and incomes using their skill sets. From these families, our hotel's “activities menu” was born. (Now found at culturechalk.org/activities)
Not long after we took over the hotel, we created culturechalk.org to invite guest families to support these local families' new businesses. We organize cultural immersion family retreats, women’s hiking retreats, and special events. We look around us and see our community thriving, little by little, more and more, and we are thankful.
Our life is full of all “ Los Colores.”
Year 5
We don’t know yet, but the sky is the limit!
Consider yourself informed on why we exist! (In a very, very small nutshell!) 😘
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