Happy “Sabbath @ Perg” Tuesday! We are in the midst of our first debrief week. This week is dedicated to allowing us to process the past month, rest for the coming weeks, and get loved on by our mentor and coaches! We’re staying in a hostel on a different side of town for our debrief, & this area low key has my
Everything we’re doing here from living and eating, to church services and outreach is with an organization called Fundación Ciudad Refugio. It’s a 5 ½ story building that has about 10 things happening at once, all the time. Their main focus is on people crippled by substance abuse and homelessness. — Minor plug, they are expanding the building to incorporate more ministries, so if you’re feeling some type of way and want to donate anything towards them directly, let me know! — I’m going to describe how each floor is used below:
-
There’s a café for anyone and everyone (the churros are sooo good). They turn the first floor into a church area for Sunday services, Wednesday night services, and Saturday night homeless services. The first floor is also used as a shelter for the homeless each night from 7:30 pm – 6 am. The first floor is also a garage for cars when need-be.
-
The second floor is for the men’s recovery program. These men are in the program for a year and it is operated like a military. Recovery participants must have a relationship with Jesus, and have had to be clean for a certain amount of time.. Each participant is a case-by-case thing. Some of the men are helping build the newest part of the building, other men work in the kitchens, some men do work projects like stuffing boxes, cleaning, etc.. When they’re not working they’re in Bible studies.. or sleeping haha.
-
The third floor is split between the women in the program, and volunteers. These spaces are very separated* My team is stationed on floor 3 and it’s truly quite the time. The women spend the majority of their time cooking and diving into scripture. Each week a couple of my teammates “join the program” with them. So far 5 of us have jumped in and each of them after has described how intense and challenging it is. For example, they have to wake at 5am and bucket shower, Bible study, then work until breakfast at 8:30am, then have a couple minutes off, then back to work until lunch, then after lunch there’s time to nap, then into Bible studies (that we lead) they go. It doesn’t look like much, but it is. On another side of that, each week, 5 of us help them in the kitchen. That looks like starting the Bible study at 6am (in Spanish, which is exhausting that early), jumping in the kitchen, breakfast, then more kitchen work until lunch. Kitchen work can be like sorting potatoes, cutting carrots, or cleaning under the stove (which I really struggle to find joy in).
-
The foundation used to have a homeschool section but now that room is used for work projects, or youth worship, or youth sleepovers, or whatever it needs to be. There’s a lot happening on the fourth floor all the time. The kitchen that the women work in is there too.
-
The other team of my squad is set up on the 5th floor, which is also a terrace. The terrace is just like the rest of the building, utilized for anything and everything. Yes we hang laundry up there, and we also teach english there, and lead Bible studies among us and for the program participants, and run youth group there, and play soccer up there, and have meals there, and yeah the list goes on hahah.
-
In Colombia, if the roof doesn’t cover the entire floor, then it’s not considered a floor. Hince the 1/2, haha. Some volunteers/employees live up there. There’s also another terrace and it’s used for things like Sunday school.
Each day the foundation tells us where they need us, and we split up and help. There are also volunteers here from France and Germany – they’re each here for a year total. We all pitch in where needed. For example, twice a week about 6 of us will go to the elderly home and spend time with them. *This is one of my least favorite things to do because they always look sad and bored.* We do a lot of prayer walks around the foundation to pray for people, invite people to the services, and inform people about the recovery programs. We do so much and now I’m blanking on all the other ways we’re serving.. WAIT this is cool, sometimes we’re asked to run the services in Spanish. That’s easily one of the cooooolest opportunities here for sure.
And my final thought, although we’re constantly interacting with people who have different backgrounds, we’re all children of God. I cannot recall one instance where any of us, or someone of the foundation, has treated another disrespectfully, without grace, or other than a child of God.
:-), K
