*this blog was written a couple of days ago*
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“… they will come.”
Everyone associates this famous line with a baseball diamond; probably because it comes from a movie about a baseball diamond. Kevin Costner hears a voice whisper in the corn fields, “if you build it, they will come,” ultimately referring to the great baseball players of old and the surrounding community of now.
We’re hoping it’ll be just as true for a soccer field.
We’re in Jinotepe, a relatively small town about an hour away from Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. Our ministry is at a youth center called New Life. And, among the church services, door-to-door visitations, murial paintings and promo video work, we’ll be helping to bring the vision of a soccer field on the property to fruition.
Currently, the kids play on this:
It’s an open parking lot on the property. Frequently, the youth from the surrounding “barrios” (communities/neighborhoods) come to play soccer in the afternoons.
The vision is for the kids to play here:
It’s a (relatively) open field on one of the property corners.
If there’s one thing we’ve definitely come to understand in the cultures of Central America, it’s this: they love “futbol.” Whether it’s a small game in the front yard of a Guatemalan home or on the stone pebbled concrete of a Nicaraguan youth center parking lot, soccer brings people together; especially the youth. Glenn and Lynne Schweitzer, the contacts we’re working with here in Jinotepe, have envisioned a legit soccer field on the youth center property since the birth of New Life.
Today, we started clearing the way for that field. This was my rake, a tree branch with a pronged end:
Our goal was to get all of the unnecessary grass and debris cleared from the field. Some of the kids had come to help and had already covered a great deal of ground while we were out doing visitations. The second thing we’ve definitely learned in C.A. is that the answer to getting rid of trash, debris and other unwanted rubbish is to burn it, which the Nicas had already started by the time we got out there:
My clothes and hair currently smell like I’ve been sitting on the downwind side of a campfire for hours, but my heart is happy. We not only get to help build eternal lives for the surrounding communities of the center, we also get to build something in the physical world that will last beyond the month we are here.
Eternal life and simple pleasures; what else is necessary?
[oh, and p.s.: word on the street is that a baseball diamond is part of the vision, too…. Maybe baseball won’t be (only) America’s favorite past-time.]
