The life of a World Racer is full of interesting twists and turns. Like Pocahontas, we wake up each day wondering what’s around the river bend for us. What will our contacts ask us to do? What crazy opportunity will God place in front of us? What skills will we use, or what new ones will we learn? Everyday the answer is different. At the end of the Race, I’m going to have quite the collection of random experiences to add to my resume, and one of those came this month.
In Bethel, the town we are spending most of our time in here in Nicaragua, the youth group is very active. They meet weekly and participate in most of the church functions. They also dance. In the churches we worked in in South America dancing was strictly forbidden, but not here in Central America. Here they not only clap along to the beat and shuffle their feet…there is choreography…and sometimes ribbons.
How thirteen gringos got roped into joining them, I’m still unsure, but we were asked to join the Bethel youth group in a dance that they were preparing to perform at an evangelistic crusade. We showed up for the first day of dance practice and discovered that a large concrete church building with exactly two fans + four hours of dancing + 100 degree heat = exhaustion. We also discovered that Americans/Canadians don’t quite have the naturally ingrained rhythmic ability that Nicaraguans do. In my case, The Nutcracker was a long time ago. After several hours of slowly learning the dance we took a break to rehydrate. During the break the head dancer who was teaching us came over and informed me that it was time to start learning dance number two. What? We tried to politely suggest that it might be better if we only scar one of their dances with our “talent,” but they insisted.
So that is how our two teams found ourselves dancing in front of a few hundred Nicaraguans at an outdoor crusade a few weeks ago. As my friends from Wheaton can tell you, karaoke and/or dancing in front of people are my worst nightmares. After being wrangled into performing a choreographed dance in Air Jam with my RA staff junior year, I swore I would never dance on stage again if I could help it. Well…this is where never gets you.
