Miranda Stoner, accompanied by twenty members of the Harrisonburg Church of the Nazarene, went to Zacapa, Guatemala on July 28th for a one week mission trip.
Stoner was first approached to join the trip by members of her church.

“They kind of asked me first. They said ‘Hey, Do you wanna go on a mission trip to Guatemala?’ so I said ‘Yeah! That sounds awesome, I’ve never been out of the country before, it sounded like a good opportunity, so I took it,” Stoner said.

In order to fund the trip, the missionaries had to raise money through fundraisers which gave them the money they needed for the group.

“Not everyone was a high school student, we also had a few adults and college students go,” Stoner said.

The group stayed on “The Hope of Life” campus,“It was really nice, and it had a pool and palm trees,” Stoner said.

The purpose of the mission was specifically to help out less fortunate children, most of which weren’t living with their families.

The missionaries visited an orphanage, “We would play games with the kids, we even had a fiesta night. We also went to a special needs center for young children and bonded with them, we told them stories and used as much spanish as we knew. We made a puppet show for the kids with songs in spanish. We did Taylor Swift’s ‘We Are Never Getting back Together’, it was hilarious,” Stoner said.
Outside of the mission trip Stoner and the missionaries didn’t get to be tourists, but they did get to try some of the local cuisine.

“We went to the restaurant ‘Pollo Campero’, it was so good! The chicken was great and I’m probably never gonna have chicken like that again in my life,” Stoner said.
The group also saw some of the harsh reality of living in poverty.

During the trip the missionaries visited a local dump, “There were kids living in it without a home,” Stoner said.

For most of the group, these images brought many emotions to the surface that they had never experienced.
“There was this one night when I completely broke down. It was really emotional for all of us, because of all the stuff we saw. They tried to prepare us by making us read a book about Guatemala, but it didn’t prepare us at all for the reality of the situation,” Stoner said.

Stoner is grateful that she had the opportunity to go on the trip.

“My favorite part was interacting with the kids, getting closer to God, and becoming better friends with the members of my team. The experiences I had were absolutely life changing and nothing can compare to going to a third world country and seeing the things that we did and feeling the things that we felt. It was incredible,” Stoner said.