February 15
We arrived to our ministry site with the entire squad, about 50 of us all together. We are all staying together this month and we are living in a big church which consists of one huge open room all open to the outside with cement floors and open windows and two showers and two toilets.
We set up our tents up in the back half of the room with a divider made of fabric hanging from the ceiling to still give room for the church services.
Its been really fun for me to sleep in my tent, we thought we were going to be able to do this last month but didn’t end up using our tents. It turns out, I have the biggest tent here, one night my entire team of 7 had a meeting in my tent, it was a little snug, but it worked. And my sleeping mat is incredible; I would never know there was concrete under me.
Our squad is doing different things of ministry while we are here. My team is paired up with Beautiful Warriors, a small team of 5 girls and its been such a blessing. We are doing mostly manual labor again, but at least my hands are mostly calloused at this point, so they don’t hurt much this time.
We have done some more digging to try to level out some land of a church so that they can make a parking lot and a place for the kids to play; we also got to help build an Adobe style home. The bricks are made of a dirt mixture and so is the “glue” that keeps them together. Some of us were even able to mix the mud with our feet like the locals do. It was a lot of fun, we made sure to pray that God would bless the work of our feet and that we wouldn’t catch anything from being covered in that mud and water!
All though we are working most days outside in the hot sun, its been such an encouragement to have my team right there beside me joking around and having fun and most importantly keeping our focus on the Lord. Nothing we do here is “busy work” the Lord has a purpose for it all. The JOY of the Lord is our STRENGTH!
