My 9 month journey has finally begun and I am in Colombia safe and sound!
To begin, we are doing a social media fast for our first month in order to focus on growing relationships here, which is why you haven’t heard from me! But, don’t worry, I’m doing great.
We are staying on a foundation called Ciudad de Refugio. This place is actually amazing because it has 5 floors, each with a different purpose. The 1st floor is a large, open room that opens up at night to serve as a homeless shelter and is also where church services are held. The 2nd floor is a men’s rehabilitation floor that houses and provides classes to men in the program trying to become clean of drugs and alcohol, among other things. The 3rd floor is the women’s floor which serves a similar purpose, as well as rooms where the boys on my squad stay. The 4th floor has several classrooms where children attend classes during the week and church programs on Sundays, as well as a kitchen and the room where I and 10 other girls from my squad sleep. Finally, the 5th floor is the roof which has apartments for several families who work at the foundation and also a small, concrete soccer field for recreation and where the girls like to work out in the mornings.
Getting settled in took a little bit because we have a different ministry opportunity each day. What really stuck with me though was this past Wednesday night.
We had spent the day Wednesday serving the foundation by cleaning. After dinner, we all attended service on the first floor and I was able to stand up in front of the congregation and speak with my teammate, Melody. After the service, I had volunteered with a group of my squadmates to complete one more ministry opportunity before we went to bed.
This ministry was an opportunity to hand out bread and sugar water to the homeless. While doing this, we would converse with the people on the streets, hoping to convince them to join the programs offered at Ciudad de Refugio. Handing out bread and the water is how the foundation began, and here we are 20-something years later continuing the tradition.
My squadmates and I hopped in the back of a utility truck, were shut in, and headed off to the streets. After a brief ride, we unloaded the truck and began spreading out. The scene was far worse than I could have imagined. Men and women were lining the streets side by side for as far as I could see. Nearly every person I saw was under the influence of drugs and would be seen doing the drugs right in front of our faces. It was clear that many had been there for years but many were also just starting out.
In small groups, we traveled around trying to connect with the homeless. The small group I was in headed straight to a small house with barred windows. One of the girls who works at the foundation knocked through the window and you could hear little screams of joy before 3 small girls came running out. The girls jumped around and danced, we gave them candy, and we prayed with them. Sadly they went down the line and gave us all hugs, saying goodbye and heading back inside and we went elsewhere. I later learned that their mother was a prostitute and that it was a priority to visit the girls each week because they live in the middle of this chaos of homeless and drugs and bad influences and constantly see such darkness, so we need to visit and give them a positive influence and show them the love of Christ.
We walked around more, talking to more individuals and hearing their stories of how they got to the point that they are at now. We soon had to leave because we ran out of bread and sugar water, so we hurried off and headed back to the foundation. The ride back was silent because we were all trying to process what we had just seen.
What I took away from this experience will stick with me and the images of what I saw will never fade. I saw so much darkness in such a short period of time and so many people that we would try to reach, but would never seek help. But as soon as we returned back to the foundation, we saw the positive: the homeless and drug addicts who once were on the streets like what we just saw were now heavily involved in the program, getting clean and starting a new life because we were able to reach them through the little task of handing out bread and sugar water. This foundation is changing lives everyday and I am so excited to be able to spend the month working with this ministry in whatever way possible.
