Month: March 2021

Hope on the Horizon

What a year it has been for all of us.

I apologize for my absence, more on that in a moment. Let me give a very brief rundown of what The Saultons have been up to this past year!

+Covid hit in March 2020 causing a complete shutdown in Guatemala. Air travel, buses, and cars were forbidden to travel, meaning thousands of men and families were put out of work right in the middle of harvest season. Families who lived on a meager $2/day now lived on nothing. Malnutrition and poverty skyrocketed. For us, we worked hard to fill in needs around the ministry. Whitney worked 24 hour shifts every 2-3 days and on her off days, Bryan would fill in cooking at the senior center. John just bobbled around completely clueless of the havoc around him. Babies, man. 🙂

+After a few months of serving very long, difficult hours (24 hour shifts in full PPE in the 100 degree heat while in your first trimester of pregnancy is no joke), we were fortunate enough to get one one of the very rare flights being offered out of Guatemala at that time. “We’ll ride it out for a couple more weeks and then it’ll be over” or so we thought.

+On July 8, 2020 my best friend Jazmyn welcomed her beautiful daughter Kira into this world. Her birth was complicated by postpartum hemorrhage, a very sick newborn with a scary diagnosis, then an alarming health complication meaning Jazmyn needed to be admitted to the hospital without Kira. Being here in the states meant we were able to step in and help her husband Jordan care for baby Kira and their 2 year old son Zuri. God was so gracious and He truly answered all of our prayers in that season! Many tears were shed, but God was so good to all of us.

+On September 28th, Guatemala re-opened their borders, allowing air travel again. We booked return tickets for our family of three, excited to return home and give birth to Flori in Guatemala. Just 2 days before leaving, we discovered Flori was no longer growing due to placental insufficiency. Carrying the pregnancy much longer meant risking Flori’s life.

+October 12, 2020 we welcomed our precious Florence Jane into our arms. Tiny, but healthy, our 4.5 lb Flori was discharged after only 3 days in the hospital.

+Early November, back-to-back hurricanes hit Eastern Guatemala devastating rural communities, roads, and completely washing out a village at the base of Hope of Life’s campus.

+In December, my sweet buddy Yolanda passed away. She was a patient of mine that I have known for over 8 years! She is already deeply missed.

+We enjoyed Christmas and the new year with our family and babies. We missed out on seeing so many people because of pandemic + preemie baby + flu and rsv season… Please feel our love, hug, and presence despite our absence! I also dealt with some pretty brutal postpartum anxiety + depression. Listen, if you are dealing with the same, Jesus is wonderful BUT SO IS ZOLOFT. Through medication, Pink Stork mood support supplements, and pressing into The Lord I think I am finally better. Could that be hope I see on the horizon?!

+In a season of waiting for Flori’s passport, my precious Granddaddy passed away. He had just celebrated 70 years of marriage to my loving Grandmother. His health had been declining, but it was unexpected. However, he didn’t suffer and we were still in the states and able to see him and take him a prime rib dinner just one week prior. For all of those things, I am forever grateful and able to see God’s goodness even in the midst of our sadness.

+The end of February and the beginning of March were crazy! We finally received Flori’s passport, we were able to book airline tickets, and receive both of our Covid vaccines. Finally, some breakthrough in this past year that has felt suffocating and dark!

Which leads me to say… WE ARE HEADING BACK TO GUATEMALA ON WEDNESDAY!

I know the transition will be hard but we are still excited to get back. Our hearts are so invested in the work God is doing in rural Guatemala! The price to pay for having our hearts in two places is that it is hard to leave, but it is also hard to stay. Although it hasn’t always been comfortable or what we expected, we have also enjoyed this slow season of being in the states. We already so deeply miss our family– John and Flori will especially miss their cousins and grandparents!

Talking about what we do sometimes feels so weird. I never want the focus to be on us. I never want the focus to be “Oh, poor Guatemala… Thank God YOU were there to help THEM.” No, the glory is not ours to enjoy. The praise goes to God alone. We just goes where He has sent us. In the same vein, because we have so many amazing financial supporters and people who carry us in their prayers, I do feel responsible to let you all know about all of the exciting projects we have supported over the past several months. Through your generosity, we have been able to regularly supply a village of 100+ families with food bags every month. We have been able to minister to mothers and families who were once patients of mine, and helped coordinate medical care through Guatemalan missionaries who travel into the regions where we work.

We look forward to keeping you posted on when we get back home to Guatemala. We’ve been gone far too long and have so much work ahead of us. We are ready to get these hands dirty again.

Until then– stay healthy, stay masked…

And know that you are loved.
-Whitney

It’s pretty impossible to reduce our time here to just a few pictures, but here are just a handful of the literal hundreds that have been taken!

  • One of our last photos as a family of 3 <3
  • We were able to see our amazing friends The O’Connors. Such a fun time seeing friends who fill our hearts and souls (and tummys!)
  • John and his BFF Zuri!
  • John and his Great Granddaddy John!
  • Welcome, sweet Flori!
  • Snuggles with Daddy
  • Flori and her Great Granddaddy
  • Our last picture with Granddaddy and of course John is picking his nose haha!
  • Precious girl
  • Christmas babies
  • How cute?!
  • Family of four!
  • John loved the snow!
  • Flori and her big cousin, Sarah Jo
  • Aunt Rachel is a pro-snuggler
  • So thankful for this whole group!
  • Proud big brother
  • … and an even prouder big cousin!
  • Kira and Flori!
  • Loved seeing our friend Kleinert and meeting Damian!
  • Four lil twerps
  • “Cheese!”
  • The sweetest.

Yolanda

She was a real life sour patch kid and the closest thing I would ever have to a little sister.

It’s ironic, really… when I moved to Guatemala I didn’t speak one word of Spanish. Yet the person I understood better than anyone else was Yolanda. A deaf teenager growing up in an extremely remote and extremely poor village in the mountains of Guatemala, she spoke her own unique sign language. Her family didn’t have the resources to care for her diabetes, so finding a school to teach her to sign was so far out of the picture that I doubt they even thought of it. It wasn’t until Hope of Life started sending her to a deaf school that she began to speak some Guatemalan sign language. Even still, she spoke her own way and it’s remarkable how well we understood each other. She wasn’t completely nonverbal though… her laughter was boisterous, the way she shouted my name was precious, and she would say (rather loudly) some pretty obnoxious things at inappropriate times… this unfortunately always seemed to happen whenever I was responsible for her and of course always in a public setting. These memories crack me up but also make me want to cry knowing I will never experience them again.

Typing this out is painful. I don’t want to put it in writing because I don’t want to believe it’s real… and I don’t know HOW to put in writing a relationship that ran 8 years deep. We weathered many storms “through sickness and in health” and I was privileged to see a side of her that not many got to see.

My selfie queen, my shadow, my sidekick, my sweet girl. I only wish I had gotten to hold your hand, braid your hair one last time, and say goodbye. I will love you and think of you forever.

Faithful

“Don’t forget to be faithful to do the thing you’ve been called to do. It’s easy to get distracted, much harder to stay focused. Nothing lasting is built without steadfast endurance, wisdom, & the ability to press through the unglamorous, unrecognized, unseen, & laborious middle.” Christine Caine

Today, and really just lately in general, have not been days that I want to place on the highlight reel of my life. Maybe it’s this season of being temporarily uprooted from our home and our work in Guatemala, maybe it’s the weird season we’re all in and all of the changes due to “the” virus, maybe it’s a little bit of a lot of different things… but today it all came crashing down on how I’m in this weird unseen middle. In my stubbornness and consternation, I sent myself to my room twice today until my attitude would improve– but that didn’t really happen until I stumbled across this quote from Christina Caine.

And I realized– I might not be where or who or what I want to be at this very moment, yet I am still called to be faithful.

For the past month, I have been grieving over sweet Brenda in the above photos. I was so worried about her returning home. Is she getting enough to eat? Is her mama doing therapy on her arm? Is she safe? I seriously thought of this precious girl ALL the time, and would whisper prayers for her safety throughout each passing day. At 3 1/2 years and only 13 pounds, her frail little body was shutting down when we received her. Could she survive the damaging effects of severe malnutrition? Miraculously, she nearly tripled her weight… but we had to discharge her to go home during a government shutdown and with the uncertainty of when we’d see or hear from her again. When I received word this evening that she doing well at home, nothing else mattered… not the things that I was mad about… nor the fact that I’ve experienced a lot of change lately and I’m just not good with changes. Knowing she was okay all of a sudden made everything with me okay.

Tonight was a beautiful reminder that when we are faithless, He is still faithful. In the anxiety and stress and confusion of this season, may we all be gently reminded of this.

You are loved.
-Whitney