Working With the People Nobody Else Will

Written: Saturday, February 19

First off I just have to tell you about our thoroughly spiffy day(s) off.  We have been incredibly blessed here, far beyond our expectations.  45 minutes to the east is the very dangerous city of Lago Agria, but half an hour to the west is the quite pleasant and (relatively) safer town of Cascales.  We spent a very enjoyable Valentine’s day evening on the town, had some good food and rode a ferris wheel.  The whole experience was like a big valentine card from God, reminding us how much He loves us!

The next day Ulises took us all up into the mountains to a hot springs resort.  We were not expecting the trip to be as long, the climate to be as cold, or the prices to be as expensive as they were, but we all agreed it was well worth it.  We were warm and clean, and after a trip to the resort’s restaurant we had full bellies as well!  All told, our little break was very much appreciated, and we feel wonderful.

Ministry has also been very good of late.  Sunday was a big day for us.  We were asked to take the children for two hours during the regular service, and we acted out Bible stories and played games with them, and even had a pinata!  That night we visited two women who were struggling with the recent murder of their brother.  As we listened to the story it started to feel almost surreal.  He had been drinking and living a very uncontrolled life, and began to involve himself with a married woman.  Her husband found her in their brother’s bed and she refused to go home.  The next night the husband set a trap for the brother and with four other men stabbed him to death in his sister’s house.  One of the sisters turned to heavy drinking and quit going to church, and their mother had barely slept at all in the last few months.  The other sister was struggling, watching her marriage fall apart.  I was amazed that through all of this they had retained trust in God and faith to put vengeance behind them.  After we prayed over them we were so glad to hear them say they were going to continue to rely on God to support them and their family.  I pray that His providence will give them an inspirational story to bless and encourage many people in the remainder of their lives.

Peter and I had the opportunity to get out to the farm this week – we planted bananas!
 Nebraska is a thoroughly agricultural state so my definition of farm was a bit off from what I experienced.  At one point as we were walking through the jungle (it took us half an hour of mud and bamboo bridges to walk to the farm) Salome pointed straight off into what I though was pure jungle and said, “My mother’s farm is over there.”  When we actually got to their farm, I had to alter my definitions a bit.  The area we were working was a clearing in the jungle, with smaller plants growing wild and trees fallen everywhere.  We spent the morning digging holes at random places all over – with machetes!  In the afternoon, Salome and Ulises cut roots from some wild bananas and we planted them in the holes.  It’s quite a bit more manual labor than I was expecting, but I had a lot of fun!  

We have also been spending time with the people at the church doing some construction – a group from the States had donated some money to expand the building, and AIM helped out with the rest, so we’ve been working a few days with them.  They are a hard-working culture, and I think their perception of us ‘gringos’ is that we aren’t quite as capable as they are, so we’ve sometimes been a little frustrated that they tell us to rest sooner than we’d like to.  We’ve been able to help out with cement work though, and we’ve started to get to know some of the people there.

Today Ignacio, our contact with Inca Link for this area, came by to visit.  He tells us he likes to spend a week or two every month out here with a handful of communities he’s working with.  He (and his adorable wife Marelis) took Katie and Elizabeth out into the jungle to visit one of those communities.  That night when they came back we had the opportunity to talk, and the first thing he said was how well we were doing at connecting with the community.  That surprised us a bit.  Especially coming from the extremely welcoming people of the Dominican Republic, we were feeling as though we were barely connecting at all with these people – but Ignacio said we were making great strides.  As it turns out, pretty much nobody wants to come work in this area.  In addition to the Ecuadorian culture we have to adjust to, there is another layer of Quichua culture that makes for an even greater gap to cross.  Further, Ignacio said, we are the first team to spend more than a week here, and the very fact that some people are opening up to us a little is marvelous.  He said these can be a very hard people to work with, and we have had some difficulty, but we’ve also been asked to share our testimonies at church, and to visit them for lunch and fun – so overall what we have done, although it can feel sometimes small, has been beneficial to the Kingdom work being done with these people.  Hopefully we will be able to continue to build on our relationships with these wonderful people.