Getting Ready

As many of you know, this February, I spent a week with the Belize Project in Orange Walk Town, Belize, investigating a potential partnership between St. Paul Christian Academy and a Belizean elementary school. I left Belize hopeful about a partnership, thoroughly convinced it would be a messier and more beautiful adventure than I could have ever imagined. I knew within my first day in Belize that it was a place I wanted to spend more time, regardless of the decisions St. Paul would make about this partnership.

As plans to develop this partnership continued to unfold throughout the spring, I was connected with another ministry of the Belize Project. Sports Servants is a ministry committed to empowering children and youth, developing young leaders, strengthening communities, and positively impacting the future of the nation of Belize through developing sports programs for kids. Much like American children, Belizean kids love to play sports, especially soccer. However, soccer in these small villages looks vastly different from the American version of this game. It is rare that Belizean children ever have the opportunity to play on an organized team, much less have a coach or basic equipment, as most kids play with their bare feet. Even in the best of circumstances, these opportunities are generally offered exclusively to the boys in these villages.

Last summer, Vanderbillt University graduate, Abby Butler, initiated the first “girls only” soccer camp in the small village of Cristo Rey, Belize. The response from the girls in this village was so positive that not only will the Cristo Rey girls camp continue, but a second girls camp will start up this summer in the neighboring village of San Antonio, which is about 15 minutes from the Orange Walk School.

On July 9, I will help lead 2 weeks of girls soccer camps in Cristo Rey village. I will be joining two other Nashvillians, Presh Killebrew and Abby Butler (Director of Girls Camps), for these two and a half weeks of girls camp. To read stories from Sports Servants staff members, see pictures and video, or to learn about ways you can get involved with Sports Servants, please go to the Sports Servants website at www.sportsservants.org.

While my mornings will be full with soccer camps and building relationships with the girls in Cristo Rey village, my afternoons will give me opportunity to experience an equally exciting, though very different slice of Belizean life. While in Belize in February, I met a precious lady named Helen Lacy. Helen and her husband, Tom, lived in Kosciusko, MS, before moving to Belize in 1970, where together, they would plant 12 Presbyterian churches. When widowed in 1994, Helen decided to spend the remainder of her life at “home” in Belize, where she continues to serve her Belizean family and the churches there. Helen has asked me to help her with a project she began last summer. We will be using photography, digital recording and writing to document the lives of the early believers and the history of the Presbyterian churches planted by Mr. Lacy during his lifetime. I imagine that Mrs. Lacy has quite a story of her own to tell. Maybe it is actually her story that needs to be documented.:)

I have so enjoyed having you be a part of my last two summers through your e-mails, prayers and financial support. It is more encouraging than you could ever know to receive your e-mails, and to know that you are praying for and, consequently, investing in the future of these children in the small country of Belize.

I look forward to sharing this country and its beautiful people with you.