Livin’ la Vida Nica

Team Wreckonciled has been living with Team Rooted in Chichigalpa, Nicaragua, which is about fifteen minutes outside of Chinandega in the northwest part of the country. The thirteen of us are living in a compound at an organization called Vision Nicaragua. Vision Nicaragua specializes in community development by giving microloans to people from a local village to help them start businesses and build their futures. The village, Bethel, was entirely built by donations and teams from Vision Nicaragua about eleven years ago. All the people who live there used to live in a different place, but when Hurricane Mitch hit Central America in 1998, a mudslide completely flooded their town. They were all relocated to where they currently live, but no one had running water, electricity, or real houses. Vision Nicaragua came on the scene and supplied them with all these things, as well as a school and a church. 

Now, there are 136 families living in Bethel, each in their own house. The children can attend school on sponsorships from American families, and the church has grown so much that it has helped to plant or disciple four other churches in the surrounding area. However, hard times are not a thing of the past for the people of Bethel. As soon as we arrived we began hearing stories about illness in the town. I asked our contact, Mario, and he explained that out of the 136 families represented, more than 70 of the men in Bethel have chronic kidney failure, and more than 30 men have already died from the disease, as well as a few women. Although the exact cause of the disease is still unknown, the staggeringly high rate in this area is known to be directly linked to the sugarcane industry. Most of the men in this part of Nicaragua work harvesting sugarcane, and the combination of long workdays in scorching heat, chronic dehydration, breathing large amounts of smoke after the fields are burned to crystalize the sugar, and extended exposure to the toxic chemicals that the companies dump on the fields to kill the insects has caused an epidemic of kidney failure that eventually kills those who suffer from it.    

Since we did not have a very defined schedule this month, we had to choose our challenge, and several of us immediately felt that this was ours. For the past few weeks we have been researching and shooting a documentary-style video about this disease, its causes, what can be done, how people live with it, and what life is like for those who have lost loved ones from it. We just finished the last interview a couple days ago, so now the long process of translating and editing the video will begin. We expect that it could take most of this next month to finish, but as soon as we can we are going to post it on all our blogs. These are stories that need to be told by people who have been forced into silence about their pain for too long. Please check back in the future to view the documentary, and help us to spread the news of the great prayer needs here in Nicaragua.

The rest of this month has been spent building relationships with the people in Bethel, praying against the forces of witchcraft that permeate the surrounding area, dancing at a couple crusades, painting at the Vision Nicaragua compound, visiting sick people in Bethel and praying for them, and doing whatever else the ministry needed. We can’t believe that it’s almost time to leave Nicaragua, but it’s true. We leave early Tuesday morning on a bus through Honduras to El Salvador for the month of May, and then we will spend a few days at debrief in Guatemala before flying to Thailand at the beginning of June. Hopefully in the next few days while we still have Internet I can post some blogs that catch everyone up on the rest of the happenings in Nicaragua. Thank you so much for your prayers, and please keep them coming!