Supply the Love: Guatemala
Supply the Love: We supply the camera and film and you supply the love! We would love to have you be an ambassador of Print the Love! If you are traveling to an under-resourced community anywhere on the globe in the next year and would like to participate in spreading random photo kindness to the local people, lets chat! Together we can make a difference! Application is online.
The Supply the Love program is 100% supported by donors. If you are not travelling, you can still donate funds towards the camera and film for those who are.
As part of the program, we ask that ambassadors write a short description of their experience. All the words are their own.
Nina in Guatamala
Just when you think you have it figured This Spring I was blessed to fulfill a calling to study abroad and live in Guatemala for 4 months. When I chose my program I had already known about Print the Love for a while, as Ceallaigh had been a mentor of mine at Bethel University. When she posted about the “Supply the Love” initiative it seemed like an instant fit, I had to apply! After all, I was coming into a community as a foreigner with, if I’m honest, little to offer other than a heart for learning Spanish and knowing their culture and people. One short week later I was having hundreds of pieces of undeveloped, potential-filled film hand-checked by airport security, on my way to Guatemala City!
A big part of our semester was the internships that I, and my 8 classmates, worked at in a small village in the mountains called Magdalena Milpas Altas. I worked at a school for students with special needs where we taught anything that met their needs, from potty training to sign language to math. Even cooler, though, was the opportunity to teach them the Gospel and remind them daily that they are capable, bright, beautiful, loved and worthy of being poured into. By the end of the semester with my students I could have written a book about everything they taught me and I was excited to return some of the love they had shared with me. Most of them had had their photo taken before, but few of them had ever had a picture of themselves. So we spent the last day of class taking pictures of each of them with their full-time teachers, treating it almost like their own little class yearbook.
A couple of our internship sites, the special ed school and the women’s social work site, also hosted big Mother’s Day parties where we were able to feed the hard-working mamas and share our appreciation for them. The main event was taking photos of each mother, and making frames together to put them in. Their excitement and appreciation was priceless, many of them wore their best church clothes and dolled up for the “photoshoot”! It was really special for us to love on the women through these pictures.
Another time we were able to give away photos was during home visits, where we got to talk to, play with, and pray for families in the village. One of the families I got to know pretty well was one with a deaf daughter, Gaby. She and her little brother had unlimited energy and were such a fun reminder to me of the universality of joy, smiles, and the preciousness of a family photo!
Through the grace of God, and the generosity of Print the Love, my classmates and I were able to distribute hundreds of photos in the community we had grown to know and love so much. The richness of this experience is almost indescribable, but the word that explains it best for me is gratitude. Those photos were a token of the enormous gratitude we had for the acceptance, grace, and incredible love we had been given. My prayer was always that I would find a way to return it in some way and Print the Love gave us such a unique way to do that. My life, and the way I appreciate a simple photograph, were changed by my semester in Guatemala with those people and that little camera, and I will never have enough words to explain my thankfulness for the experience.
