Okay, so many of you probably have no idea where I am or what I’m up to. So, let’s have this be a little bit of a recap session.
Back up to Bulgaria, Month 7. Ruach was in Bulgaria for 2 weeks working with a couple, in which the wife used to be part of YWAM and their ministry in the community was evangelism through necessary things…for example, we taught English the whole time we were there and then had kid’s clubs on Saturday afternoons. We were only in Bulgaria for 2 weeks, which is fairly unusual for The World Race, but that just means our next country, we had more time to invest in the people.
After Bulgaria, Ruach moved to Croatia. I believe we were one of the first teams on The World Race to be in the country of Croatia, but I’m excited to say, I think they will have more teams eventually. So, as I mentioned above we were in Croatia for 6 weeks. We were partnered with a church plant to help evangelize that way. So, as far as evangelism goes, Croatia is “christian,” yet really not. It’s the title, not official heart cry. With this church, we painted around the house they meet in, helped cleaned up the backyard as the previous homeowners were fairly messy, and then taught English. I had the pleasure of working with my team leader, Marian Padilla, in teaching the pastors’ kids a few lessons about the Bible and even got to make cute little crafts with them. One of the days was Daniel and the Lion’s Den and we made lion puppet heads with the kids.
A few weeks later, we went to a sister city to work with the church plant there. While we were there, we taught 14 English classes and met with the students we met in classes to talk to them more about our hearts and why we were doing this. We also met a teacher named Josip. I will share more about Josip later. To say the least, Croatia was a good month, but long as it was 6 weeks instead of the normal 4. God taught me many things during this month, which leads to another post I have to write about healing.
So, from there we went to Month 8 debrief…IN ANTIGUA, GUATEMALA! It was very nice to be able to relax with my squad in a “tropical” location with volcanoes, palm trees, avocadoes, and Spanish-speaking natives. In debrief, there tends to be team changes and nothing changed, except for my team and an all woman’s team. We lost Kat and Jamie, but picked up Tiffany Chen. We are now “Team Via Gloria,” which if you are unaware, is Spanish as we found it quite suiting since we will be in Spanish countries for the rest of the Race.
After debrief, David and Peter, instead of staying with our team ended up going to Manistry month. All the men from our squad this month had a month alone in Puerto Barrios, which I have no clue where that is, but 6 hours away from us, I think. So, as the men were together, the women were seperated into 2 different ministry sites; 20 girls stayed in Antigua: girls from Ignition, 2:20, Sound, and Beauty from Ashes. Therefore the other 9 of us women went to Chimaltenango, an hour away to work with special needs orphans. It has been quite an experience living with kids that have special needs and even going to school with them. After lots of hard work, sickness (we are all better!), and lack of sleep, we will be leaving these children and moving to Honduras to work with the rest of our squad. I do not know what there is for Honduras, but with 41 of us Z-Squaders, it’s got to be good!
