10.6.10
Last evening we had some praise and worship in a little area in between some hostels in Antigua – the church we were going to worship at was double booked for the local YWAM (which was kind enough to let us worship there previous nights). It was a beautiful little area and we were right next to some apartments and heard some awesome electronic music playing in between songs. Ashely and I spent our last night together in Antigua. We were in a quaint little room, but it was a very nice room to usher in the World Race. We were to be up and ready to leave by 9:00am which was wonderful compared to the 4:45am wake up time that we had yesterday.
Oh, I had almost forgotten – yesterday we got up early to go to a volcano. There’s a live volcano that we hiked up yesterday morning. The guide kept telling us it was only a couple minutes left, and 45 minutes max but it probably took us about 2 hours to hike up. I pushed myself a little too hard, believing that there was actually 2 minutes left and realizing that it wasn’t. Luckly, there were local guys offering “taxi’s” which they were calling their horses. So a squadmate of mine offered me her horse since I could barely stand. I have some pics up on photobucket of the volcano. There were vendors selling marshmellows and sticks at the bottom of the volcano to toast marshmellows over the lava. There were little holes at the top that had access to the lava (though we couldn’t see it) which toased the marshmellows in a matter of about 30 seconds. Michael, on my team, shared with us that we could pay to buy sticks to “poke the lava” but I had heard him say we could buy sticks to poke the llama, so that whole day I was oddly looking forward to poking a llama with a stick, I made plans that I would borrow a stick from one of my squadmates because I didn’t want to poke a llama that bad. I guess the llama poking will have to take place later in the world race. I’m kind of tired so this may not be making a lot of sense but I wanted to blog my experience.
So, up until this morning we were engaged in “launch” which meant that we were not engaged in ministry yet. Launch and debriefing means that our whole squad was together as one. Then the teams broke up and went to their separate ministry sites: some teams went to Honduros, some to El Salvador, some stayed in Antigua and my team and another team went to Puerto Barrios. So this morning we took off to our ministry site for the month. There are two teams; thirteen people total; three men and ten women. We took about an eight hour bus ride. “Bus” is what I would consider a large van, but it wasn’t too cramped and the roads were actually smooth enough that I was able to read most of the ride.
So we arrived, safe and sound, to our site. We have a site contact named Paul who is from America, which will be helpful for us to start the World Race. He is able to translate, knows the area, and will be able to give us some good tips about the area and about cultural concerns. He has hosted several other World Race teams before and he has shared that he likes when he gets teams that are just starting the race so that he can watch as they learn to live together. We were blessed to have them buy all of our food for the first week and make our meals for the first week. Dinner was delicious – corn tortillas, eggs, black beans with a cream sauce, fried plantains, and fresh watermelon and papaya. Seriously, it was delicious. As far as the living set up, we (our teams and the local ministry site) have two houses. I am in one house with three bedrooms. One bedroom is for a man on the ministry team; one bedroom has one of our girls and one woman from the ministry site; and the other room has two bunkbeds with four of our girls. Then there’s an open area living room which is connected to the kitchen and there happens to be a bed there which is where I get to sleep. It’s nice that I’ll be able to stay up and read at night if everyone else wants to go to bed.
Paul oriented us to the area and to the ministry site. I typed up many of the things that he was sharing and I will post those in a later blog. I think that should be all for now.
