I’m a little late blogging, so I’m sure a lot of what I will say has already been said on the team blog, but here goes anyway. My half of the team is living at La Quinta Esperanza, which is a compound run by a woman named Juanita who has an amazing story. She takes in kids and teenagers from the barrios around Diriamba and takes care of them and sends them to school. There is a preschool on the compound and a church (the pastor and his family also live here). We live in what used to be Juanita’s house, but is now used to house mission teams like us (15 of us in 14 beds in 3 little rooms with 2 bathrooms…makes the house I’m moving into with 11 girls this year sound like a piece of cake). My bed is the most accessible in the main room, and we all hang out/have team time in here, so it has become the couch (so I sleep in a couch bed and it feels like I’m right at home at the Shamba). The church here is working on a project they’re calling “Misión 70” in which they are reaching out to the barrios and trying to get 70 new people to know Jesus and join their church. So, for our first month here we’re working with them on that. It’s nothing like what any of us were expecting, and it’s been kind of frustrating at times, but we’re learning to have patience with the language barrier (no translators, so one of the leaders and I are doing our best) and trust that God is in control and will use our time here. Here’s what our schedule looks like for now:
Sundays:
9-11: Children’s Church
We plan a whole bunch of games and songs and such and a little lesson to do with the kids from the barrios. The kids are split up into 4 classes semi based on their ages, and I have the oldest ones. We hang out with them for about two hours and then walk them home. This past week we talked about trust using Proverbs 3:5-6 and we had a bunch of blindfolded children running around, and the week before we talked about Zaccheus.
3-5: Big Church
Mondays:
Workday
We do random work around La Quinta or whatever else they tell us to do. Last Monday we split into three groups: one built a ramp to make it easier to drive into the compound, one swept up trash and burned it, and my group took out a retaining wall and moved all the stones/concrete. That was a fun job that involved finding a tarantula, a scorpion, some kind of weird spiders, and poisonous centipedes that don’t die when you cut them in half. All of us finished way early, so we ended up being able to go into town for the afternoon.
This Monday we were supposed to paint, but it turns out we’re supposed to be painting a mural somewhere, and they hadn’t bought the paint yet, and we hadn’t figured out what we are painting, so instead they took us to San Marcos to visit an hogar de ancianos, or a nursing home (literally a home for the ancient). We just spent a few hours talking to the people there, which was fairly frustrating sometimes with limited Spanish speakers and lack of conversation topics, but I think they enjoyed having us there. Then we spent the afternoon learning new dances and stuff for a special program on Sunday for El Día de los niños (Children’s Day).
Tuesday:
Fasting and Prayer until 3
For Misión 70, everyone in the church has chosen a day to fast and pray for the ministry, and we were assigned Tuesdays. We spend time together in the mornings and then have a lot of free time to spend with God and talk to our prayer partners or do whatever. We’re thinking about asking if we can use the money that would be used for breakfast and lunch on Tuesdays to buy some Bibles to give to people we talk to in the barrios.
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday:
Ministry in the barrios
The first few days we were here, the kids at La Quinta taught us a bunch of dances and dramas that they use for ministry (we’re talking pretty legit dances choreographed by Nicaraguans, if some of you were thinking of DR or CSBC-style creative movements). Now on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays we hike through the jungle to the barrios and spend our mornings and afternoons there. Most of the time we do our dances and dramas somewhere and then the pastor explains them and we pray with the kids and families. One afternoon we just gathered up a bunch of kids and split up into groups and had stations with different games. Someone from La Quinta led each one and then gave a little devotional type thing at the end that was somehow related to the game. That was really fun because we actually got to spend some time with the kids and I think we all felt like it was more effective than the dances and stuff. Then on Friday afternoon we went back just to talk to people and invite them to church. It didn’t go exactly how we thought it had been explained to us before, and it was kind of frustrating at times, but we definitely had some good conversations, and a lot of people said they would visit the church. We’d like to be able to spend more time building relationships with people, but the pastor is not a huge fan of suggestions, and it’s kind of difficult to communicate with him sometimes.
Saturdays are our day off. We spent the first Saturday in Jinotepe, which is close-by and especially close to where the other team is staying. We used the internet and explored the market and got milkshakes. This past Saturday we went to Masaya, where there is a huge market (that is also a lot more touristy).
That’s what we’ve done so far! After July 3rd Misión 70 will be over and we’ll have a lot more freedom to decide as a team what we want to do. This is really long, so congratulations if you made it all the way through, and I’ll try to blog more often so they’ll be shorter.
Note: I wanted to have time to change this a little, but the internet is suuuper slow right now and we're running out of time, so I just had to copy paste. Sometime soon I'll have internet again...
