See you later Nicaragua! We’re actually already in El
Salvador for month number five, but I wanted to wrap up Nicaragua before moving
onto blogging about El Salvador.
Here Are the Numbers
Number of places I made my bed/slept in: 4
Number of wireless Internet networks I used: 3
Number of meals that included rice: 47
Number of times I was woken up by a squirrel: one too many
Average number of degrees Fahrenheit of the daily
temperature at our ministry site: 99
Number of hours out of the way we had to drive to purchase
bus tickets to El Salvador: 6
Tips for Future Racers
If you come to northwestern Nicaragua, stay hydrated!
If you work with Vision Nicaragua, you will LOVE the staff
there! Mario, Thelma, Antonia, Stella, and the others are so wonderful, and
they really have servants’ hearts. You’ll also love the people of Bethel.
If you work in Bethel, get to know Connie. Tell her the
Mafia girls sent you and she’ll be your new best friend…and probably invite you
for a sleepover and to play with her parrots.
Try to spend a free weekend in Granada…it’s pretty sweet!
And go ziplining at the Mombacho Volcano while you’re there. I’ve done quite a
few zipline canopy tours across Central America, and this was one of the better
ones.
Don’t be shocked if you’re asked to do strange things that
don’t seem like typical missionary assignments. For an example of this, see my
previous blog.
If your team gets to a ministry contact and they don’t have
a particular schedule or assignment for you, don’t panic. Think of it as an
opportunity to ask the Lord what he wants you to do this month. Get to know the
local people and see if a certain need stands out to you. That is how we were
led to make the documentary that we’re working on (see Ministry Summary section
below).
If you’re in Nicaragua (or really anywhere in Latin America)
during Holy Week and you plan to do any traveling, BOOK YOUR TICKETS FAR IN
ADVANCE!!! Literally everything sells out and closes down for the week. Schools
are out, stores are closed, and all the bus tickets get bought up weeks in
advance to accommodate all the people coming into town for the Semana Santa
festivities. We realized this a little late and had to drive six hours round
trip to Managua just to get tickets to leave for El Salvador at the end of the
month.
Try to go volcano surfing at the San Cristobal Volcano. We
ran out of time and didn’t get to go, but we’ve heard it’s quite a thrill. And
if you go, wear long pants and good shoes…you can skin yourself up pretty bad
trying to snowboard down a mountain covered in pebbles and volcanic ash.
In Nicaragua and many other places in Central America,
mangoes grow all over the place. People will give you mangoes from their trees
everyday. In general this is a good thing, especially if you love mangoes like
I do. However, as several of my teammates can tell you, the sap that is on the
mango skin can be problematic. It can make your skin break out and your lips
swell up and burn. Chapstick doesn’t fix it, and medication doesn’t get rid of
it. You can eat the mangoes, just peel them first.
Ministry Summary
We spent the month living at Vision Nicaragua, a ministry
that specializes in community development through microloans and building
projects in a local village called Bethel. Most of our time was spent doing
relational ministry in Bethel. We got to know the people, prayed for them, and
helped out with church services and youth events. We also helped paint the
Vision Nicaragua compound. But the part of the ministry that I focused the most
on and enjoyed the most was filming a documentary about the rampant kidney
failure sweeping through the town due to unfavorable working conditions in the
sugarcane harvesting industry where most of the men work. We are still
translating and editing it, but when it’s done the documentary will be
available here. To see pictures of our time in Nicaragua, see my previous blog.
Prayer Requests
Most importantly, please pray for the town of Bethel as so
many of the men have died or are dying slow, painful deaths from chronic kidney
failure. Please pray that just settlements are won in the ongoing lawsuits and
protests against the companies, and that the companies start to care more about
their workers’ conditions. Please pray for healing for the men and for the
money to provide them with the kind of medical care that they need.
Also, please pray for our team as we are already into our
ministry in El Salvador. It’s the beginning of the rainy season here, and that’s
been affecting our team’s health since we got here. Several of us have coughs,
headaches, and sore throats, either from a virus going around or from an
allergy to all the mold that seems ever-present during the Central American
rainy season. Thank you so much for your prayers! I’ll write more soon about
our ministry here in El Salvador and our plans for this month.
