Home Sweet Jungle

So now that I’m back in Quito after a month in the jungle, here’s my first blog from Km 17, written Saturday February 12.  I’ll post one or two a day until I’m all caught up – I don’t want to flood your inboxes!

Km 17, as the name implies, is a settlement around the distance marker 17 kilometers from the city of Lago Agria.  We were told, because of the location in the jungle and proximity to the Colombian border, that drug trafficking makes Lago Agria the most dangerous city in Ecuador.  Our first trip, to pick up some food and necessities, was quite a bit less dangerous than we had been led to expect.  It’s marvelous how God manages to make any danger seem safe in comparison to the protection His children enjoy in His arms.  

Km 17 is actually a decent-sized location, with a school, electrical power, a few shops, and even a swimming pool!  The jungle is all around us, and the climate is very present, but we’re not living directly in the rainforest.  We had actually been led to expect something a bit more primitive, so sleeping in an actual house (that doesn’t even leak when it rains!) was an unexpected blessing.  We were further blessed with our host family, Hugo and his wife Salome, and their three children Wimper, Jasu, and Angel.  The kids are absolutely adorable, and we fell in love with them the first night.  They have been cooking for us (it’s delicious) and spending time in the evenings chatting.  Our ministry contact, Ulises, is also staying with them for now.  He’s a missionary from Nicaragua and has been here for a little over a year.

People around here absolutely love to play soccer (it’s called ‘futbol’ when they play on the big fields, and ‘indor’ when they play on smaller arenas with indoor-regulation dimensions).  We even visited one house whose entire yard is a volleyball/indor field.  It’s a rather abrupt, but enjoyable, change from last month in Arroyo Cano.  There we spent a great deal of time building relationships with people and enjoying life at a slower pace, here I have been happily engaged with physical activity more days than not.  We’re still waiting for an opportunity to get up to the farm run by our host family.  Apparantly the last group of missionaries to come through had a pretty rough experience so Ulises is being a bit more cautions with us than we’d like, and that includes keeping us home when it rains hard enough that chores at the farm would be very difficult (and it’s rained every morning we wanted to get up there so far).

The local church is a short walk away from the house we’re at, but our two trips there so far have been wonderful.  The congregation absolutely loves to sing, and even our first night when we were introduced they asked us to sing something in English.  We were surprised to find that this is a very bilingual society, with nearly everyone fluent in both Spanish and Quechua (the language spoken by the descendants of the Incas).  Vanessa and Shida are able to keep up with the Spanish, but the Quechua songs are completely foreign to all of us.  Two of us have already shared our testimonies with the congregation, and the rest of us are preparing something to share as well.  It’s exciting to be welcomed like this to the church, even though we still don’t know many of the people.

We’ve had one opportunity to pray over a family whose two daughters are both coming though some rough times – one pregnant by a father who ran off, and one who ran away from home and only recently came back.  We’re expecting a few more opportunities to talk to and pray over area people that Ulises knows need it, so that’s exciting to look forward to.

We’re looking forward to this month as a month of breakthrough for us as a team and individually, and we’re extremely blessed to have Ulises providing ministry opportunities for us.  This looks like a month to truly experience God’s blessing.