Suitcases

We have been tripping over strange suitcases for months now. One thing we have found ourselves occupied with this last year is moving donations. Since word is out that we are here and happy to do it, we are often, I mean almost weekly, on the receiving end of various donations to orphanages, some specified to go here or there, to this children’s home or that foster parent, or not. As the only advisable, cost-effective way to ship anything here, they arrive with travelers to Guatemala, mostly adoptive parents down to visit or receive their child. Invariably, these suitcases are ugly as sin, throw away or garage sale stock, but still packable, zipable, and totable. Some send shampoo and soap and deodorant, others clothes, some new, some used, and still others stuffed animals and the like. All of it needed and necessary on some level, and all, I am sure, a blessing to those that eventually receive it.



I spend a good 45 minutes to an hour a week sitting outside the lobby of the Marriot awaiting my wife inside chatterboxing with the latest adoptive parent or other—all sweet, sweet people, and my wife, a friendly face in a strange country. It’s not a glorious project, not filled with excitement, hardly memorable, but necessary.

We are glad to receive these suitcases, and move them. Sometimes we get them to Harvey, Orphan Resources International’s representative here, a Menonite from Pennsylvania and probably the nicest guy we’ve ever met, who spends his Saturdays delivering beans and rice and water, and some of the random suitcases we’ve picked up. Other times we take them ourselves. Often the timing—by grace or luck—is perfect, and the contents match the immediate need. My friend Dan Miller would call it serendipitous. Whatever the case, we are grateful to be a part of the process—from those donating and packing and lugging these things down, to the orphanage directors and kids that receive them happily.