So we’re in Costa Rica. This after a very long Travel Day(s). Team FUSE! left Puerto Barrios, Guatemala at 2 AM on Friday. At 8:45 we arrived in Antigua to meet the rest of our squad for an estimated 9 AM departure that would take us all together through to Nicaragua. The bus showed up at about 9:20.
Late Friday night in El Salvador we change our plans and decide to find a place to sleep and cross through Honduras (currently in a state of political unrest) the next day. After a tasty Burger King dinner we drive around some random town in El Salvador (which turns out to be where Alex‘s dad grew up) and by the grace of God find a hotel that can take fifty weary travelers with no reservation.
Saturday morning we enter Honduras with no problem. Getting out would be another story. By the time we were prepared to exit Honduras and enter Nicaragua for the last leg of our journey, all the borders in Honduras were closing (presumably to keep the President out). After some persuasion, and six hours of waiting, we were able to cross the border into Nicaragua. Erin Winget has a great detailed account of the entirety of this journey on her blog.
FUSE! stayed in Managua (the capital) for two nights and then took a twelve-hour bus ride into Costa Rica where we will be ministering this month. The rest of the squad is working in Nicaragua. Our eventful journey finally ended last night when we took two taxis to our contact’s house from the airport where our bus dropped us off. The first taxi, with the address, took off and left four of us in the second taxi not knowing where to go (we have no phones, remember, just one for the team, also in the other taxi). Our driver called around the city on her radio to find out who had a bunch of Americans in Roble (the community where we stayed last night). We stopped at an internet café and Marisa hacked into Janina’s email account which held an email from our contact with the address. With this information and a reply on the taxi’s radio when we returned, we were able to get to our destination, where our contact Kellie and her husband Orlando graciously fed us delicious Costa Rican dinner and lined their house with mattresses for our first night in our final country.
Some people said these few days were the most trying travel experience yet. I tend to zone out at travel time. I put my iPod headphones in, or I stick a book in my face and I wait. Ultimately I know we’re going to get where we’re going. It will only be a matter of time. Someone had to tell me later how long we were at the Honduran/Nicaraguan border. Sure it was hot. There was a recent military coup. But in the end, God wanted us in Nicaragua and he got us there.
This kind of faith, and resulting patience, hasn’t always been something I could walk in. I remember in December, our first month in Africa, it took me quite a while to get used to “Africa time” and the patience needed to work within it.
Before I left on the Race my brother told me that he thought the experience would make me “more chill in the headspace”. He said seeing God come through again and again would make me more calm as I waited to see God’s plans play out. I think I’m beginning to see the fruit of that prophecy. God just brought fifty of us into our eleventh set of respective ministry locations. He is faithful and his plan will prevail.
Now that we’re at the end of the Race, believing God’s plan will prevail while sitting on a hot bus at the edge of a politically hostile country seems like small potatoes. We’re all looking at the prospect of going home in about four weeks and we’re going to have to trust God to give us the strength and faith to walk out a totally new reality in environments that are just old enough to be terrifying to our new selves.
So the reminder of lessons learned that came in this latest travel experience was just in time for month eleven and an anticipation of reentry (which is really where I wanted to go with this blog). And there’s more on that in Part Two.
