Going into Nicaragua, we knew it would be a month of “lasts.” Our last country. Our last ministry site. Our last team time. Our last adventure day. These would all be checked off soon. It was weird. Not as weird as the huge beetles that shared our living space and frequently dive-bombed us, but still weird.
For the month we were with a church called Dominion Chapel, and as per usual, each day was different. Also as per usual, we really weren’t sure what we were doing until we arrived. Some of the places we visited throughout the month included an alcohol rehabilitation center, a handful of schools, and a baseball diamond where my teammate Lexi taught a softball clinic. While this sounds like a lot, it was definitely one of our lighter months when it came to ministry.
On one of our first nights there, my team discussed what we wanted our final month to look like. While it would be so easy to coast through the end, we knew that we were on an eleven-month trip and not a ten-month one. That meant that we had to give everything we had until the end.
My teammate Sarah (yes there were two of us, it proved to be confusing more than once) brought up the image of “crawling across the finish line.” We wanted to pour out ourselves into our time in Nicaragua and finish the Race with no regrets and no missed opportunities.
Of course she didn’t mean we were literally going to crawl to final debrief, but Sarah’s word choice proved to be an accurate one. Within a few days of our arrival, it was clear that the team wasn’t doing well. Some of us were experiencing uncharacteristic levels of anxiety with no obvious cause. If that wasn’t enough, we were all sick at some point in the month. I spent an evening taking care of a teammate who had been stricken with some nasty virus, and came down with it myself the following day.
(Side note – I was one of the lucky ones who didn’t get sick much throughout the Race. I had a sinus infection in Swaziland and the flu in India, but that was it. I have a high pain tolerance and can usually tough things out, but this bug I had in Nicaragua had me down for the count. It had likely been some kind of food poisoning, and the first night of chills, fever, and dehydration-related panic had me crying for mercy. I could barely get out of bed for two days after that.)
Now that I’ve sufficiently grossed everyone out… the bright side to all of these difficult circumstances was that they brought my team closer together. We couldn’t leave the house unchaperoned for safety purposes, so when we weren’t at ministry or our go-to cafe in town, we were stuck in the house. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world though, because we found ways to fill our time. We gave each other feedback, shared our dreams and apprehensions for life after the Race, made silly videos, and worked out together when we were physically up to it. Those experiences bonded us and made that last month memorable.
Now it wasn’t a favorite month of mine; I’ll readily admit that – with 11 countries and 11 months, not every single one will be amazing, However it had some highlights – I preached one more time, and finally achieved one of the items on my World Race “bucket list”: share my testimony in Spanish. I even managed to lead worship in Spanish somehow… God and Google Translate get the credit for that one.
There were also a few things I’m glad I saw the last of; the abnormally large insects, not being able to go anywhere alone, and sweating literally 24/7 -looking at you, Mozambique and India – are not aspects of the Race that I miss at all.
But the funny thing is that looking back on the race as a whole, I would gladly risk the bugs and the food poisoning again for these eleven months. I would sleep on floors and travel for 24 hours at a time and wear long pants in 100-degree weather all over again.
If I could do it again – and I absolutely would do it all again – there are some things I would change, and others I would keep exactly the same. But since I don’t get a re-do, there’s little point to analyzing what I’d change. All I can do is look back fondly, learn from my mistakes, and move on. There’s no perfect World Racer, just a bunch of imperfect human beings who did a thing called the World Race. I’m thrilled to be able to call myself one of them.
If you’ve made it all the way to the end, thank you for reading along. Thank you to all who financially supported, prayed, shared my stories, and asked questions – I couldn’t have done it without all of you. This is the last post of my World Race blog, but hardly the end of my writing. From here on in, my stories and I can be found on my new website: sarahmichelwrites.com. Hope to see you there!
