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L A C E S
Latin American Christian Education Services |
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El Tesoro
What is El Tesoro? Guatemala suffered terribly through a 36 year long civil war.
This civil war ended in 1996 with the signing of a peace treaty. The majority of
the war was fought in the rural and indigenous areas of Guatemala. Some of these
areas witnessed massacres of entire villages. El Tesoro is a group of Ixchil Mayans
that used to live in the Northern Nebaj region of Guatemala. When the civil war
ended in 1996 many communities were relocated to different parts of Guatemala. These
people did not want to face the horror of what they had witnessed in their own villages
by returning to the place where many of their friends and family members were killed.
El Tesoro is a village of Ixchil Mayans who now live in the Suchitepequez region
of Guatemala.
What are you doing in El Tesoro?
In 2006 Andrew and Rebecca Loveall visited El Tesoro for the first time with Glenda
Lopez the principal of Escuela Integrada and her church group. This is a village
of approximately 200 families and only 2 families were evangelicals. The remaining
families were either Catholic or practicing Mayans. In fact, during this first visit
the local witch doctor put a spell on Andrew Loveall. From that point on LACES made
the decision to start helping the village and Andrew Loveall talked with village
elders about their greatest needs. “Education of their children,” was the village
leadership’s response. Over that first year several shipments of clothes and shoes
were sent to El Tesoro. In the second year Circle of Love Foundation, a medical
mission’s team from Rockford, IL, led two separate medical missions teams to this
area. Primarily due to their evangelistic efforts there are now over 300 confessing
believers in this area.
What about education?
In January of 2008, LACES received a donation to be able to add additional classrooms
onto the local grade school. The children had been having class in an open pavilion.
There was also enough money to hire two middle school teachers for the local children
to study in their own village. The middle schoolers had been traveling a few miles
away to continue on to middle school and this was worrisome for the village leadership
since it was dangerous during the rainy season when the river filled and the children
had to cross the river to get to the other community.
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