Month 3 has brought me to Palacaguina, Nicaragua to work with a ministry called 516 Now. The Joy Bombs are staying at the Iglesia Bautista Resurreccion (Resurrection Baptist Church). The church is on the outskirts of the small town, and we are mostly surrounded by dirt roads, hills, and a whole variety of animals that appreciate the night life a lot more than any of us do.
The first night that we were at the church, we discovered that it was already inhabited. And its current owners were not very interested in our presence. Imagine how you would feel of someone came into your home at night and started screaming and beating you to death with their shoes. Probably not that pleasant.
The spiders.
Month 3 is the month of the spiders. There are spiders everywhere. Spiders on the floor. Spiders on the walls. Spiders on the toilet. Spiders on the toilet paper. Spiders on the shower curtain. Spiders on the outside of our tents. Spiders in our shoes.
Are you getting the idea here?
Three or four nights a week, Iglesia Bautista Resurreccion transforms from our mobile home park to a meeting place for the Christians of Palacaguina. A church. It turns into back into a church. We have enjoyed getting to know some groups that come for week-long trips, and we have started to help lead worship and give testimonies.
The rest of the week there are times when it feels more like a zoo. Local kids are often putting their hands on the bars of the windows and pressing their faces up as far as they will go to say hello and observe the gringas in their unnatural habitat, reading books on electronic devices and watching movies while sitting on stadium seating made of stacks of plastic chairs.
During the day, we have participated in various tasks. The first week that we were here in Palacaguina, we helped to build rebar posts and lift buckets of rocks out of a 12-foot deep septic pit for a new house for visiting missionaries (probably future World Racers) to live in so that they will miss out on the spider-stomping tent park. We have also started to paint a school and a clinic and dug some footer holes for a church up on a mountain.
In the evenings when there are no church services, we shower the dirt and sweat off with the spiders and sit around talk or watch movies together and eat our dinner, which is usually some variation of rice and beans and cheese, plantains or chicken. And some of these great fried tortilla and cheese things that I could wish we had for every meal.
Then we zip up all cozy in our tents and fall asleep to the sound of roosters and donkeys and geckos.
