BELIZE 2011 - Revival among the Garifuna and Kekchi People

Punta Gorda, BelizeTuesday, October 25, 2011.
Revival among the Garifuna and Kekchi PeopleOur team had originally planned to charter two small boats that would take us to the Tobacco Caye island today, but those plans were cut short due to a hurricane forming offshore. In fact it is serious enough that all of the islanders were warned to come in to the mainland. But again, we hold all of our plans loosely. We had actually thought to go to Punta Gorda and the surrounding Mayan villages the following day, but decided to do that today instead.
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Punta Gorda is the furthest city south in Belize, almost all the way to the border of Guatemala. So from Corozal to Punta Gorda, our team has had the opportunity to travel the entire length of Belize and minister from the northern border to the southern border. Garifuna people live in Punta Gorda, as they do here in Dangiriga as well. The Garifuna people are descendants of Africans and have their own language and culture. We arrived in Punta Gorda around lunch time, so we found a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant owned by a lady named Joselyn who just opened up for business three months ago. We got a chance to pray for her restaurant and anointed it with oil. She was so glad that we came. We prayed for her as well. Then her friend Judy asked if we could pray for the healing of her eyesight as she could only see things blurry out of her right eye after a surgery she had a while back. Not only was the blurriness healed in her right eye, she took off her glasses and didn’t need them anymore! Then they asked if we could visit a 91 year old lady named Lois who also couldn’t see well. When we walked into her house she could only see us as shadows. By the time we had finished praying for her, she could see the color of our skin and how many fingers Jesse was holding up! Two ladies received miraculous healings of their eyesight. On top of that, some of our team witnessed to a guy named Anthony who has been struggling with alcoholism. He gave his life to Christ and we baptized him in the Caribbean Sea!

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From Punta Gorda we traveled to a nearby Mayan village called, “San Pedro Columbia.” When we arrived we looked for the elementary and secondary school which we found with the help of a Kechki man who gave us directions. San Pedro Columbia is a Mayan village that speaks the Kechki language. The Kechki are descendants of the Mayans. We found the principal, told him who we were and asked if we could minister to the children. He agreed and our team split up into groups and ministered to the different classes. Jesse, Victor, Ben and I went to a class of the older children. We gave our testimonies, spoke prophetic words and words of knowledge over them and led six of them in prayer to receive Jesus Christ! I learned how to say a few words in Kechki. “Hello” is “Yos.” “How are you?” is “Changcha Quill?” In another Mayan dialect that I heard that “How are you?” is “Bekielech?” My love for learning new languages continues as I travel throughout Latin America. I have even learned how to speak a bit of Belizean Creole.
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From San Pedro Columbia we traveled to Big Falls where we heard that some of the children from the school there were possessed by demons. We found the area that they lived but they had all been relocated to different places. We learned that they had been mixed up in some curses that came from visits to nearby Guatemala. We prayed over that area and over one of their relatives named Jose who was having pain in his shoulders. He felt much better after we prayed for him and he even physically looked different after we prayed. We truly saw revival among the Garifuna and Kekchi people today on our journey to south Belize.
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We finished off the afternoon by visiting some Mayan ruins which we could only travel to by foot as the road we closed off to vehicle traffic. It was interesting to see and it felt a bit eerie there. More than likely human sacrifices took place hundreds of years ago at these very ruins. We continue to pray that God will have His full reward in Belize.
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Christian Young