What is life like at Cicrin Children’s Center? Well I’m glad you asked!
We wake up in time to get to breakfast at 7am. Once 14 gringos and 18 Nicaraguans pile in and get the sleep boogers out of our eyes, we all pray out loud at the same time over our food. Every month the kids memorize a different scripture; this month it is 1 Cor. 13:4-8. After the prayer and verse we each get our plate of food. The majority of the time it consists of beans, rice, eggs and plantains with the occasional treat of pancakes (corn based…that’s a fun one!) and sometimes cereal, which you have to add sugar to in order for the cardboard taste to go away.
After breakfast we do a devotion which includes me reading an excerpt of “Jesus Calling”
(awesome book…it has spoken to us prophetically pretty much every day!). All of us volunteer for some type of chore that day which is either helping prepare lunch/dinner or doing the dishes after each meal. I personally like washing dishes. To see how my food is prepared is probably not the best idea for me! We are off to work by 8am or so. The majority of the girls go to the garden to weed and water and some other random tasks. The guys are helping build a wall. Lunch is at 12:30pm and by that time it gets pretty hot outside so we have the rest of the day free. Usually I either spend time with people from my team, read in a hammock and there may be times where I fall asleep, play guitar, you know, the usual. It also helps to do laundry every few days. We have to do it by hand which is very time consuming so the less clothes you have to clean at a time the better. The kids are all at school until dinner which is at 5:30pm. You can bet your bottom dollar it will include rice and beans, we pretty much eat it every meal!
At night we do different things. Wednesdays we have been doing a bible study which includes worship, teaching and prayer. The other nights are random. Hannah Montana dance parties, watching 3 Ninjas in the satellite TV room, Apples to Apples or Uno, team bonding time, and trading English lessons for a massage.
Every night our team does “feedback” which is a time of encouragement and challenging each other to change and grow. We talk about our day, what we are learning, struggling with and want to work on. Sometimes this is the highlight of my day while other days we start so late I just want to go to sleep. Once we do go to sleep we wake up to do it all over again. So that’s the gist of it…hope you enjoy!
