WORLD RACE – MONTH 4
Where:
Potrerillos Arriba, Panama
When:
April 2nd – April 26nd
Who:
The Worthy Pearls (Abbie, Anna, Jourdan, Jackie, Kerri, and Maddie)… AND Agape Rooted (Christian, Tanner, Evan, Alyssa, Lindsay, and Scarlet)
Ministry:
YWAM (Youth With A Mission)
Hosts:
Rick and Debbie Tracy
David Tracy
Kari Weiss
Sam Sorvaag
Grier Butterworth
Currency:
Balboas and USD
Dress Code:
The dress code here is super chill. Basically you just have to wear clothes and that’s it. Most days include manual labor so that means you get to dig through your dirty laundry and pick out an outfit that smells the least…There are some days like church, evangelism, and fellowship night where we are asked to dress up a bit and not look super ratchet.
Food:
We are the chefs, the servers, the consumers, and the cleaners. Since every meal here serves about 50 people, including racers and YWAM people, all hands are on deck for meal time. We have a schedule and each day certain people have to cook certain meals. It’s been a lot of fun and a lot of frustration cooking 3 giant meals a day. But on the bright side, i’ve only cut myself 4 times with a knife…
Lodging:
Bunk rooms! We have been blessed again with beds and mattresses. This month the Pearls are sharing the room with 3 girls from the Agape Rooted team. Our room is always a mess and smells weird, but it’s our home and we love it. The boys have the same type of room across the building.
Bathrooms:
Right next door to our bedroom is the bathroom. Inside there are two stall toilets and two showers. The showers sometimes have warm water and other times it’s like you’re showering under an ice bucket. This month we are allowed to flush our toilet paper which has seriously been so difficult to adjust to when for the past 3 months that has been the biggest no-no… I’m just so thankful that we haven’t been forced to squat in the woods yet.
Laundry:
Laundry today or naked tomorrow! There are several washing machines and one dryer. It costs $1 to wash your clothes and $1 to dry. Or you can go with the more economical route and hang dry your clothes (if you want to risk them getting rained on). We do laundry about once a week and it’s still just as boring as at home.
Ministries:
• Evangelism
On several occasions, our teams have headed out into the community to talk to people and pray with them. It has been a super strange, yet rewarding ministry to actually get to share the gospel face-to-face with people who barely speak your language. I’ve learned that it’s all about just being relational and getting to know the person and letting them know you. We have gone everywhere including a hospital, a park, a women’s prison, a boys home, and around the local town of Boquete.
• Manuel Labor
– Tilling dirt: we have created a garden in the back of the property by digging up ant-infested grass and loosening the soil. This has been the hardest and dirtiest work by far! One day our dirt patch turned into a wrestling ring and all I can say is that I lost…
– Planting plants: after all of the tilling, we began planting tons of different plants such as pineapples, banana trees, terra root, yuca, collard greens, green beans, celery, tomato, squash, peppers, and much more.
– Painting: there have been several painting projects including touching up the main base building and painting a mural on the pig pen. The mural included flying pigs and in the words of Alyssa “we wanted to give the pig (Lady Marmalade) a hope before she dies and we eat her”.
– Moving rocks: we created several rock borders for the driveway to the pig pen and around the gardens. For this project, we were given keys to an old stick shift truck and had to drive back and forth to collect rocks from a random pile and dump them at the rock site. This job was super trilling because we actually got to drive a vehicle for the first time in 4 months. Some people even got to learn how to drive stick!
– Picking oranges: out to the fields we go! We picked sooo many stinkin’ oranges. We filled about 3 huge coolers full (which doesn’t sound like a lot… But it is!) and then we spent the entire day juicing the oranges to make delicious orange juice for breakfast. It was miserable, buggy, and sticky work, but that juice made it so worth it.
– Kitchen cleaning: the kitchen was a MESS before we got here. There was no organization and it just felt chaotic. Several of us were assigned to deep clean and organize it. And after 3 days of gross sweaty work and finding about 30 cockroaches, the kitchen is now beautiful and sooo much more efficient!
• Children
– School: every day two of us were assigned to teach in the classroom on the YWAM base. There were 11 kids ranging from age 1 to age 12. We taught all different kinds of subjects and got the opportunity to know the kids pretty well. It was a strange experience teaching kids who actually spoke our same language, but it was super rewarding.
– Kings kids: one weekend we hosted a sleepover kids camp. The camp included several talks on different ways to communicate with God and how to spend your quiet time. We loved getting to pour into the kids and hang out with them all day.
Adventures:
– Boquete: pretty much any free time we had, we spent on the local town of Boquete. While there, we toured a coffee plantation, climbed a waterfall, broke into an abandoned castle, ate gelato, joined a parade, went to church, and met tons of retired north Americans. You could say we are pretty much locals by now.
– Panama City: during the month we saved up a couple of our adventure days and headed to Panama City a couple days early. While there we stayed in an awesome hostel called Villa Siriri and explored the city, including the famous Panama Canal. It was so cool to get to meet other backpackers just living life day-to-day. We had no agenda and were able to do what we needed to do in order to get ready for Africa.
Overall, this month was a great month for spiritual growth. We had a lot of time and our manual labor ministries allowed us the opportunity to get to talk a lot and really get to know the other team. This is the last month in Central America before heading to AFRICA! And as far as we know, this is the last month team Worthy Pearls will be together 
. When we get to Africa, we will be assigned new teams. And as much as this seriously breaks my heart and I’ve already cried several times about it… I get it. The World Race isn’t about being comfortable… It’s about continuous change and learning to seek God in every situation, regardless of who’s around you. I love my Pearls sooo stinkin’ much and they’ve forever changed my life. I know that this isn’t goodbye and that we’ll be in each other’s lives forever (I mean what else would you expect when you live with a group of girls for 2,640 hours straight…), but it’s still really sad. It’ll be okay! I promise! Don’t freak out! We can make it through this!
Thank you sooo much for your continued prayers and support. It means the world to me.
If you want to reach out to me, please do! Even just to say hi! Facebook is the way to go and I’ll reply as the the wifi allows.
Love you all!
Dios Bendiga!
– Abigail Sheckells
