[As the title suggests, I wanted to write 11 blogs summarising my 11 months of The World Race, one by one. I want to be able to look back in a few years time and remember every detail, but I also want you to be able to live the memories with me. Each week I am going to share a blog post about a country, and also my top ten photos from that month (on my social media). I hope it gives you more of a look into what our lives have looked like this year. This is a look into Month’s 9, 10 & 11!]
GUATEMALA
I was with Team Refuge 91 this month, their first month as a new team! We travelled from Antigua to a super small mountain-side town called San Raymundo, and worked for a school there called Morning Glory Christian Academy. We arrived and immediately loved the small town because it was cold! After 8 months in 30+ degree heat we were so surprised and in love with our new temperature for the month. The month started off a little different, as it was independence week in Guatemala meaning school activities were a little different. We spent the first few days walking in parades throughout the town, helping make costumes for our dance teams, supporting said dance team’s at their competitions, and pretty much just celebrating all things Guatemala. To wrap up that week we knew we were going to watch a dance show put on by the school to showcase all of their students, little did we know though that the night before we would be asked to be in the show! So the 8 of us set to work and we performed the next night in the show haha. You can catch a sneak peak of said performance in my Guatemala video blog;
https://chloeclendinning.theworldrace.org/post/video-blog-10-month-9-in-guatemala-incl-pvt
The next few weeks in San Raymundo were more what we expected! We taught Bible classes to the students with the wonderful help of Elizabeth, Izzy & Nataly who live in Guatemala long term and translated for us. We helped children write sponsor letters to their sponsors in America, some of the girls taught in English classes, and some helped in the Pre-K classes. I loved my time with Refuge 91, and it was my 7th month with my sweet Rebs, and we were able to try and support her as she walked through losing her brother-in-law while on the field. It’s funny, because it’s so easy to look back at this month and see the fun parts, but it’s harder to look back and see the parts that kind of sucked. Rebecca – it was an honour to walk through the darkness with you this month and see you reach to your Heavenly Father when you needed His comfort. You are a beautiful woman.
EL SALVADOR
Easily one of my favourite months of the Race. This month we were partnered with a ministry in the coastal beach town of El Tunco, El Salvador. We were working with a church called La Red (which means ‘The Net’ in Spanish) and we had the best hosts in the world, Andrea & Josh. I had been praying all month before that I would get a host who disciples us and actively invests in us, as I had been missing that spiritual support and really felt like I needed it first hand, and Andrea & Josh were absolutely an answer to that prayer.
La Red is an all inclusive church that originally started out as a gathering of the Christian Surfers organisation. Over time, it grew into more than that and it became a full church gathering with men, women & children. The Castellanos family adapted with that and eventually moved from the city to El Tunco to take on the running of this church full time. Andrea & Josh co-ordinate all the mission teams who come to La Red, while also discipling the youth of the church.
This month I was with Team Fuego, and we spent the month doing whatever was needed in La Red. We painted the children’s classroom with a beautiful under water scene, we organised hundreds of donation bags for clothing drives, we took part in emergency clothing and supply drives for local communities who were being badly affected by the rain and flooding of their homes, we gave sermons at the women’s meetings, we taught the youth of the church, and we were discipled and loved on by Andrea. We did bi-weekly devotional nights where Andrea would come and speak with us and then we would enter into discussion on really hard things and things the Lord was teaching us. We would worship, laugh & cry during these times and ultimately left better than we came.
Andrea & Josh also knew that as a month 10 team we were in the stages of preparing for what was next, and they fostered an environment we could explore that so well. They also loved on us beautifully by having pool days & movie nights and just generally making us feel so loved. Off days by the beach were pretty nice too hehe.
NICARAGUA
The first thing I would say about Nicaragua is I wish I had more time there! This month we worked for REAP Granada, an organisation based on a large farm just outside of Granada. They have a staff almost exclusively made up of local men and women as they aim to build a sustainable and long term ministry in this area, which is an area heavily affected by poverty, broken families, alcohol and drugs. The ministry is hard to even capture in a sentence but they run a sustainable farm, they do outreach ministry daily in the local communities, they go to the local dump and do feeding programmes for the children there, they established and run a community centre for youth activities, they host huge soccer & soft ball tournaments multiple times per week, they disciple their staff on a one-on-one basis, they minister to the local nursing home, they run conferences that are attended by hundreds at the weekends, and they are currently in the process of beginning to unify the pastors and the local churches so they can function as one body and support each other, instead of be against one another. This place honestly does just about everything, and they have the most beautiful long term goals for the way this ministry can actively change the communities around them.
We got to partner with REAP in many of the ways above, and also through planting their new vegetable garden and undertaking a full social media project for them in the form of videos, pictures and newsletters, which will be able to be used long after we leave. We formed beautiful friendships with the men & women who worked there and on our last night together we got to celebrate Thanksgiving with them.
We could not have picked a more beautiful or filling place to spend our last month on The World Race. I will forever be grateful to REAP for the perfect month 11 and the ways they discipled and loved us this month.
