Hey y’all! This is the other blog about the ministry work we’ve done the last month in Panama!
We lived and worked in Rio Sereno, Chiriqui, Panama. We stayed with the Caballero family, and whew God gave us SUCH a beautiful month of love and connection with those people! They own an 80 acre farm on which they grow peppers, plantains, and (most importantly) coffee!
The ministry that these incredible peeps own is called The Sower 365, and their goal is to support 365 missionaries – one for every day of the year, all from the profits their farm makes.
We got to work on the farm for our month there, and even though manual labor isn’t my first choice, I had the absolute best time there.
So, what did our days look like?
- 6:30 AM – breakfast
- 7:30 AM – drive to work!
- somewhere in the day between 12PM & 2PM was lunch
- 4 PM – head home
- 5:30 PM – team time
- 7 PM – dinner
- time to sleeeeeeep
For work, we did so many different things and each of them were so fun! Our first couple days were spent planting coffee beans in planters and covering them with dirt, watering them, and mixing more dirt & chicken poop to use.
Another thing we did was move the grown coffee plants to another section of the farm, where we transplanted them to their new home in the ground! A lot more work than it sounds like haha.
Next, we got to pick peppers and some other veggies that they had at the farm for a few days.
Then, we got to do the absolute MOST awesome job ever – MAKE COFFEE!!
So, making coffee and getting it ready to send to shops is a multi step process –
- sort through the beans and separate the good from the bad
- put the beans in the roaster and roast them until perfection
- take roasted beans, place them in the grinder
- bag, seal and sticker the coffee bags
- ready to ship!!!
Making coffee was always such a good time – it smelled great, and gave us space to have a ton of really fun & deep conversations.
In addition to being farmers for the month, we got to
a.) give testimonies at church and run children’s service (& make cute lions out of paper bags)
b.) travel to an indigenous people group in the Comarca region of the mountains, have a big celebration and meal with the kids & their families, and hand out Operation Christmas Child boxes.
This month was spent doing a lot of hard work, and a lot of intentional time spent with our host family. We walked away from our month in Panama not only loving the farm and our work, but loving our Panamanian family more than we imagined possible.
Panama, you have our hearts. We miss you.
(PS – this is my video about our time in Panama, put the quality back up to at least 720 p.. and thank me later haha)
