On our last month of the race we got to do Unsung Heroes. UH is when you don’t have a contact who you are going to be working with that month. Rather you go out into the area that your team is assigned to find contacts and start looking for them.
We started off in the capital for just a few days since we needed to meet with Andrew to meet up with some people that he wanted us to see, he was going to be with us for part of the month but he need to go Peru due to the earthquake. We starting reach out almost right away and after a few meeting and about 3-4 days of being there we left to go to where there were more people for us to meet with that AIM wanted us to meet with.
So we packed out bags and left to go off to the bus station. We got our tickets and waited, and then shortly after our bus was going to leave we found out that we only had 10 minutes to make a “10 minute” trip across town to get on our bus that was at the other bus station waiting for us, but we could not make it there in time so we had to wait and buy new tickets since they would not give us a refund for the bus that we missed.
After getting to our hostel we settled in for the day and had a chance to relax after the travel day and started setting up meeting with all the contacts that AIM wanted us to meet. One of them was a ministry for the blind and the person leading it was also blind himself. After talking to him about what he does we decided that he would be a great contact and he set us up with 2 other contacts as well.
One of them runs a church that is full of the Holy Spirit. Some of the churches that I have been to lacks the Holy Spirit and I could fell the difference in my heart when they worshiped and did the message. We were invited to come back after having a meeting with him to his church on Sunday. We came back with some of my team and we got to be part of the church service. We went back later that month and we did a little bit of painting and we got done much faster than he expected us to. We got to help move a washing machine to one of his family members homes and then got a great dinner that we did not need to pay for (always a huge blessing when we get this happens.)
We traveled to several different places to sleep in order to say “in budget”. After a few days we found a place that was within our budget. So we all move our stuff to the new place and get settled in for what we thought would be for the entire month but it was only for 1 night. After the day was done we went to bed and when we woke up we found out that there were bedbugs in our beds and we needed to leave that day. We were unable to find anywhere within our area that we were assigned to but we got a good deal on our final debrief hostel and we just stayed there for the remainder of the Race.
One of the things that we did differently than my first team was that we all split up on ministry days to go to different areas. One day my team leader took us to the place where he thought was where the bus comes to get us. After we waited around 30 minutes I asked him if he was sure that this was the right place and he said that it was. After another 10 minutes he asked the guy who works for the bus company if this was the right place since we started seeing some of the same bus numbers and he said that it was not the right place to be and it was at the other place that I was telling him that it was. We all had a good laugh after we got on the right bus to where we needed to get to for our meeting that day.
Final debrief is was a lot of fun and I don’t want to spoil it for future racers. I was in the city of final debrief for each time we had it so I knew where to go and what places were good to eat at and what ones were not as good to eat at.
I will be having one more planned blog post after this after that I might post some more but I am not sure if I will or not.
