Hello!
So I left South Africa a little over a month ago and made it to Nicaragua. After a couple days in Granada, I left for the volcanic island of Ometepe in the middle of Lake Nicaragua. I am here now with 3 other teams, 27(?) people in total. We are living and working at a children’s home called Cicrin. Our ministry has been split into 3 different categories, and the 4 teams here rotate through them Mondays through Fridays. Those 3 categories are Cicrin maintenance, Cicrin School, and a prayer walk. When my team is on Cicrin maintenance, we clean bathrooms, sweep “el rancho”, rake leaves, and do dishes. Many short term mission trips come through Cicrin, so a lot of our job has been maintaining the facilities here, enabling these teams to do their work smoothly. These high school-aged teams come from all over the US (and speak English), so we have had awesome opportunities to encourage, lead worship for, and pour into them while they are here. These have been some of my favorite ministry opportunities over the course of the Race because I can relate to these people so well. At Cicrin School, we help in the kitchen and the classrooms. The kitchen consists of washing many dishes and cleaning up the cafeteria in between lunch times. Matt Shirey, friend and teammate, speaks very good Spanish (I speak none) so he is usually helping out in the classroom. He teaches English and caters to the teacher’s needs, as teaching a class of 25 third-grade Nicaraguan children can be very exhausting. For the prayer walk, we walk through the different towns in the area (Los Angeles, San Jose, Sacramento, and Moyogalpa) and simply approach people at their homes to strike up conversation. People here are very welcoming, especially when they see a group for 6 out of place white folks walking down their streets. Here we have the awesome opportunity to pray with them and form funny interlingual relationships. Unfortunately I haven’t taken many pictures of everything that we have been doing here. Not sure why, maybe I should just start taking more. Off days have been spent hanging around the island or going to different destinations on the mainland. Some of my favorites have been San Juan Del Sur, Playa Maderas, and Playa Tamarindo in Costa Rica.
All my clothes have a faint smell of must and sweat that cannot be mitigated. My Chacos have fallen apart. I have a watch tan that would blow you away. My phone is tanking fast and will most likely be out of commission by this time next week. My hair is long. My beard is thick. I miss my family and my friends. My tube of Hydrocortisone is empty. The end is inevitably near. I am having a hard time processing the fact that I will be back in the States in 28 days. That’s less than a month. I really don’t know how I feel about it. Home is awesome. Here is awesome too. I feel that this will be the hardest transition of all. Trusting that God will give me perseverance and show me His character throughout this weird process. I’ll see y’all soon.
Jack Sentz
