A Complete Update from Sara Salguero
What a year!
Is 2020 over yet?
How much longer until things go back to normal again?
I am sure many of you have been saying a version of one of these phrases throughout the last several weeks and months. It has been a crazy year. It has been one of those years that we will all look back at one day and say things like, “Where were you during the coronavirus?” or “How did you all quarantine?” or “How did it affect you and your family?” Or perhaps you will be one of those people telling a story about how God radically changed your life or family during COVID-19.
Whatever the case may be or whatever story you all end up telling, for sure this year will be one that no one will be forgetting anytime soon.
That is also true for us at Casa Bernabe…only we believe that God started sifting us even back before 2020 or the first known case of coronavirus. It started for us around October of 2019.
We had just recently had our annual board meetings with our international board of directors. The meetings had gone well but they also had been slightly tense at times because the reality was we weren’t bringing in enough money to support our general fund needs. For a myriad of reasons, in 2019 we were struggling to bring in enough funds both domestically and internationally to cover all of our operating costs. We spent our meetings brainstorming, dreaming, discussing, and planning, but in the end, Edgar and I knew that cuts were going to have to be made. Our desire is to always operate in a way that is not only transparent but also is not above our means. We believe God gives us great dreams and He offers us the wisdom we need as we make plans, but in the end, we trust that provision comes from Him alone. So while we had spent over a year developing what we felt was a very solid strategic plan for our ministry, if God was changing the course, we knew we needed to trust Him to show us our next steps.
With our administrative team at Casa Bernabe, we began discussing then what those next steps in fact were. We prayed. We fasted. We asked God to show us clearly His will and to give us the strength to be obedient! Shortly after this, one of our long time house parent families, Hector and Laura of Casa Alabanza, came to us to let us know of their decision to not return come January 2020. They loved Casa Bernabe and loved their girls, but after 7 years as house parents, they felt God was moving them on to something new and different. We, of course, were very saddened about their decision, but we also could see clearly that this was God’s plan for this beloved family.
In the weeks that followed, Edgar and I both felt God stirring us very strongly that this was just the first sign of those new, next steps we had been asking Him for. Instead of moving forward with hiring new house parents for that house, we were going to wait out the year of 2020. This would give us a chance to save money for this year on the salaries for that house as well as just the general operating costs for another home (electricity, gas, etc.) and hope that our fundraising efforts were successful to help boost general fund, but more than that, it would give us a chance to really pray and seek God as to what the need in Guatemala was. Did we still need 4 boys houses and 4 girls houses and 1 baby house? Did we need a house just for special needs children? What about a house for children who had been either recently deported or lost in the frequent migrant caravans traveling through Guatemala, as we had recently had an influx in those cases? We felt this would give us a chance to really not only prepare financially but also prepare physically and spiritually to whatever God was asking next of us.
Come January, however, God changed things for us once again. Our plan had been for the girls that were still in Casa Alabanza to move to the other three existing houses. There had been several girls from the other houses as well as Casa Alabanza who would be reintegrated with their biological families, so we knew that there was going to be space.
Except then that didn’t happen. Only one of the families were able to have a successful reintegration, so we now had 4 girls houses, all almost to maximum capacity, and no house parents for Casa Alabanza. While our initial response was to panic, God showed us He had already been writing a different story all along.
Right before our eyes, only we weren’t paying close enough attention, we had stopped receiving phone calls to receive babies. It had been over a year since our last call to receive a baby and in Casa Angelitos, the baby house, we only had 5 children, none of which were under the age of 1 and most were already 2, 3, or 4 years old, and we had 5 adults working to care for them. After speaking with our social work team and talking with others we knew that worked in the court systems, we began to see that more and more often babies that were being removed from their homes were going directly into foster families rather than homes like ours. This was the trend and no one seemed to think that would change any time soon. So after much prayer, discussion, and planning, we decided that God had led us the right way in deciding to not hire new house parents, but that the house we had been thinking about closing for the year was not the right one. His plan was for our long time, faithful, Casa Angelitos house parents Russell and Sara, to move over to Casa Alabanza. Most of their little ones would move with them, as all but 2 were girls anyway. This would achieve the same purpose of saving funds this year as well as give us an opportunity to really gauge the need in Guatemala, so when it was time to reopen that home, we were ready with a house that could meet the actual need in Guatemala, with house parents trained to also meet that need. This also would give us a chance to fix up the existing Casa Angelitos home as over the last decade and half it had seen a lot of wear and tear and was desperately in need of some TLC.
And just to give you some perspective, this all happened before COVID-19!
God is faithful though! We have seen His hand time and time again, and we believe that He will continue to provide for us and guide us as we make hard decisions and as we love and serve His beloved children.
Sadly during this time, we also had another set of our house parents in Casa Daniel who made the decision to step away from our ministry. It was not our plan or even theirs when this year started, but it was clear that this was in fact God’s plan. We praise God that in the midst of surprise circumstances such as this, He already had the solution for us in a young, newly married couple that had been quaranting with us to help in our education department. Their response when they heard of the need was “For such a time as this God brought us here!” We are grateful for their sacrifice and desire to help us, and especially the boys in Casa Daniel, during this season of transition.
As the worldwide coronavirus crisis has continued to develop both internationally and domestically here in Guatemala, we know that the need is only growing in Guatemala for ministries like ours. Just yesterday our head social worker shared with our staff statistics on human trafficking and sexual abuse worldwide and here in Guatemala. We are hearing that the cases of sexual, physical, domestic abuse and neglect continue to rise during this time of quarantining and social distancing. Many families that were barely making it before are not surviving and have to resort to standing on the highways and streets holding white flags to announce their need for basic things like food and water. The courts are currently closed here in Guatemala, but we have no doubt that once things began to resume, the phone calls are going to begin pouring in, and we want to be ready. There aren’t many ministries like ours that are able to provide essential care to children and youth in need of protective services but are also able to walk alongside their biological families in hopes of reintegration in the future, so we know that the need for our ministry will only grow post-coronavirus. We are so very thankful that God led us to keep that house empty at the start of the year because we know now that there will be great need for it very soon.
And we want to be ready. We don’t know what comes next but we know that God goes before us. As He has continued to provide for every need during this time of crisis, leading us even when we didn’t understand what He was doing or why He was doing it, we trust Him to continue to do even more than we can imagine. Our trust is fully in Him.
Thank you for your prayers. Thank you for trusting us with your donations. Thank you for believing in our work in Guatemala. We continue to pray for you and your families during these uncertain times, and we look forward to the moment we can all meet again in person.
