In May 2025, a team of five nursing students, four EMT students and four adult leaders spent seven days serving more than 750 people living at the Guatemala City dump.
This trip marked the second consecutive year that JBU’s nursing program took students to Guatemala City, a location where JBU has established long-term relationships and taken students on various service trips for over two decades.
“The purpose of these trips is to expand students’ worldview and let them experience health care in a different country while aligning with JBU’s mission of service,” said Hope Cureton, FNP-BC, trip coleader and assistant professor of nursing education, whose sister Heidi Evans, R.N., also helped lead the trip.
Based on her experience in 2024, Cureton invited Branton Thompson, a firefighter/paramedic and instructor of JBU’s EMT-Basic course, and his EMT students. The course is a requirement for humanitarian and disaster relief majors, helping students prepare for the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians exam.
The May trip was Thompson’s first time in Guatemala.
“Listening to Hope talk about how impactful the Guatemala trip was with her nursing students, I thought, ‘This is exactly what I want to do,’” he said.
The team served alongside longtime Guatemalan ministry partners, and husband and wife team, Dr. Layla Chanquin and Pastor Saul Pérez Esquivel. Chanquin works with Corazon de Amor Clinic, while her husband leads Iglesia Bautista Cristo es el Camino — both in Guatemala City.
One evening, the team helped Pérez serve men in the community who are mentally ill, homeless or have addictions. They set up stations, washed the men’s feet and gave them new socks. Most of the men had been wearing the same socks and shoes for a long time. After cleaning the men’s feet, the pastor shared a sermon, followed by worship. The team then served the men a meal.
“It was very special,” said Nyah Andrus, a senior nursing student. “One man wept while we washed his feet and while we worshipped. He even went up front during the altar call and wept there, too. I felt honored to witness such a thing.”
Seeing firsthand the suffering of people living in impoverished conditions, such as those in the Guatemala City dump, produced new emotions in students.
“When I first got to Guatemala, I was overcome with emotion,” Andrus said. “As soon as the plane landed, we interacted with some young girls who had experienced a traumatic event the night before. This trip taught me a lot — some lessons were harder than others, but the biggest ones I took away are the love of God for us, my pride and his great church.”
Thompson described how the team came together through difficult circumstances.
“We had a couple of hard cases that we heard about, and it really brought the students together,” he said. “They were praying to God in those moments with people they didn’t know from Guatemala — praying for peace. That was spiritually impactful for me.”
Along with helping Pérez in ministry, the team provided community health education to students and teachers at a local school. They also worked alongside Chanquin at the Corazon de Amor health clinic, offering triage, lice treatment, dental hygiene services and pharmacy assistance. The team brought medical-grade tourniquets with them because gang violence and gunshot wounds are prevalent in the area. Students witnessed infants being born at the national hospital, and on their last day of the trip, they spoke with an indigenous midwife who had practiced for 43 years.
One thing that wasn’t a part of the original plan that became a highlight for students was visiting people in their homes.
“It was a good example of how we don’t have coincidences when we’re believers,” Cureton said. “Home visits only occurred because our original plan didn’t work out. We were in plan-B mode and ended up breaking into groups and taking groceries to about 10 different families. As a result, we got to be in the families’ homes, listen to their needs and pray for them.”
Seeing the living conditions of the people they served in the health clinic helped students understand why patient compliance and medication adherence are issues within the community. Thompson said home visits were particularly valuable for his EMT students as it gave them experiences similar to serving unhoused individuals or the low-income communities they will encounter in their work.
Debriefing was an essential part of the trip. Each evening, the team checked in with each other and processed the experiences of the day.
“I really enjoyed hearing the students’ perspectives — getting to hear about what they’re learning, or what God is doing in their lives,” Cureton said. “When you work in health care, you constantly see devastating things happen to people. Sometimes you personally experience devastating things. The Guatemala trip can trigger things in students that they didn’t realize would be triggered. It can bring up a lot of emotions.”
Thompson explained the importance of God’s role in preparing the team’s hearts and minds.
“With God as a part of it, instead of their faith being rocked to the core by what they see and experience, it can be strengthened,” Thompson said.
To help process their experiences in Guatemala City, the team practiced lament — or expressing deep sorrow and pain — together.
“We started debriefing with, ‘How do we lament the poverty and suffering we’re seeing?’ ‘What does that look like?’” Cureton said. “I think biblically, we are called to lament — not only grieve — especially with people in suffering.”
Through the practice of lament, some students found themselves asking big questions about God and faith.
“The question of ‘Where is God’s justice?’ has come up in debriefing on both trips,” Cureton said. “Students ask, ‘Why was I born in America, and I have all these resources? Why was this child born into poverty in Guatemala and has no resources? How is that fair?’”
She said their goal as leaders was not to answer these questions for students necessarily but rather to help students as they wrestled through them.
In 2026, Cureton and Thompson plan to take another group of nursing and EMT students to Guatemala.
“The people of Guatemala are very generous. They embrace us. This isn’t a mission trip where we just come in and leave,” Cureton said. “We serve alongside Dr. Chanquin and Pastor Pérez, who have long-established ministries. That’s why I’m for this trip. We are partnering in work that will continue even after we leave. It’s established. When we show up, it’s just enhanced a little bit.”