What Happens After We Give the Chickens?
MISSION TRIPSMINISTRY REFLECTIONS
Ginny Paynter
8/29/20263 min read
There is so much happening at Untether Life right now, and we are incredibly excited and grateful to God for the increasing momentum, influence, and opportunities to provide meaningful support within the communities we serve.
Back in April, we shared about our work supporting the chicken co-op project through Heart & Hope for Guatemala. While we were in Guatemala, we had the opportunity to see the project firsthand and identify some of the needs surrounding its continued growth—particularly in the areas of chicken care, education, and long-term sustainability.
Because the truth is, it can be easy to give people a bunch of stuff.
But giving someone resources without also providing the education needed to use and maintain those resources successfully can limit the long-term impact of even the best-intentioned project. Heart & Hope understands this well. With limited staffing and funding, however, providing ongoing education to every family receiving chickens and a coop has been a challenge and something they have been praying for provision to address.
Untether Life began asking a simple question: Is there a way we can help meet this need from right here in the United States?
It turns out, there is.
A small contingent of Untether Life volunteers has come together to develop short educational videos that families can access after receiving their chickens and coops. The goal is to provide practical information that helps families better care for their chickens, protect their investment, improve egg production, and ultimately give the project a greater opportunity for long-term success.
Of course, solving one problem introduced us to another.
Our original thought was to find existing educational videos and, with the creators' permission, translate or dub them into Spanish. But there was an important piece we hadn't considered: internet bandwidth.
Many of the families in Santo Domingo Xenacoj do not have Wi-Fi in their homes and instead access the internet through phones with limited data plans. Streaming traditional online videos isn't necessarily a practical solution.
So we kept researching.
That's when we began looking more closely at WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is deeply integrated into everyday communication in Guatemala and is commonly included with mobile plans. People use it for far more than messaging friends and family—it is woven into daily life, including communication with businesses, ordering food, coordinating services, and staying connected.
And WhatsApp offers Channels.
Suddenly, we had a possible solution.
We could create short, data-conscious educational videos and make them available through a platform families are already using rather than asking them to adopt another piece of technology or consume large amounts of mobile data.
That discovery has now led us into the next phase of the project: producing our first five introductory educational videos covering topics such as chicken health, egg production, coop care, and other foundational information families need to successfully maintain their chickens.
This week, our volunteer team met over Zoom with Heart & Hope for Guatemala to identify the most important information to include in those first five videos. Rather than deciding from the United States what families in Guatemala need to know, we wanted our partners on the ground to guide the content based on the questions, challenges, and needs they are actually seeing.
Now we're busy writing scripts that will be translated and recorded in Spanish.
Our goal is to have the first videos ready before our team returns to Guatemala in November. While we're there, we hope to introduce the resource alongside Heart & Hope, see how families interact with it, and possibly record additional "on-the-ground" videos that can continue expanding the educational library.
And honestly, this is one of the things that excites us most about where Untether Life is headed.
Serving doesn't always look like getting on an airplane.
Sometimes it looks like sitting at your computer researching technology. Sometimes it's writing a script. Sometimes it's translating. Sometimes it's editing a video, sharing professional knowledge, solving a problem, or simply asking, "What do you need, and what do we already have in our hands that could help?"
There is so much room in missions for the abilities and talents God has already given His people.
Watching those abilities come together to bless others, create practical solutions, strengthen the work of our ministry partners, and help good projects become more sustainable is an incredible privilege.
And there is room for you in that work, too.
We have lots of projects, lots of ideas, lots of work to do—and plenty of room for more hands to dig in. Whether your skills are in education, agriculture, video production, translation, communications, technology, administration, prayer, fundraising, or simply a willingness to serve, there may be a place for you to help.
Our team is also still accepting members for our November mission trip to Guatemala, where we'll continue serving alongside Heart & Hope and the families of Santo Domingo Xenacoj.
If you've been wondering how you could get involved, let's chat.
You are the somebody who can do something.
Email: partnership@untetherlife.org
Phone: (757) 289-9930
© 2026 Untether Life. All rights reserved.
Untether Life is a 501c3 based out of Virginia Beach, Virginia. We are a collective of people with like-minded hearts who want to see the gospel advance through the loving of our neighbor.
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