This first week in Nicaragua has been all about digging in – literally and figuratively. We are working with a wonderful Pentecostal church in Palaconguina with Pastors David and Damaris. This month is an awesome opportunity for us to really immerse ourselves deeper in our ministry community than we have before. We’re living in the church, and our hosts live in a house on the same property. I have loved getting to know this family so far, they are so welcoming and good to us. It’s our first time having a language barrier with our hosts, but it’s still been so easy to connect with them.
This month I’m most excited for the chance to dig into the community around us. A big part of our ministry is going house to house and spending time with the neighbors. We did that our first full day here and met some really welcoming people. We’ll be spending some time with local schools as well. What I love is that we are able to spend time with the same people in a lot of different community events. We’re involved in three church services a week, and many of the kids we see there are also part of food assistance program offered at the church so we get to see them several times a week.
The funniest part of living in the church is that we are literally bringing ministry home with us every day. We push our tents aside and clean up our belongings three times a week so that we can set up for the church services. Three times a week some ladies from the community come over and we help them cook for and feed lunch to around thirty kids. Some of them are the same kids that we see at the schools, so they’re pretty excited to see where we live. The downside, we realized on the first day, is that now they know where we live. That first day we played with the kids for about 3 hours, then they spent another hour hanging through the bars of our door watching us get ready for church.
Obviously, getting to spend time with them is worth having visitors peering in at us all the time. Living in the church makes me feel like I’m really a part of this community, plus it’s fun getting used to living in different conditions. Outhouses with cockroaches and bucket showers take some getting used to, but this month is more what I expected from the World Race so I’m enjoying it a lot. The beautiful sunrise coming in the open door of our church/house every morning is well worth any small inconveniences.
The other part of our ministry this month is some literal digging in. We’re shoveling a lot of dirt around the church this week, and on Wednesday we met up with the other teams to dig holes at a construction site for a new church. After a month digging and shoveling in Honduras, we feel like pros!
