Today wraps up our last day at El Refugio, we’ve been here for a little over two weeks now. Here we’ve been doing lots of different manual labor and construction work. Mostly I worked on scrubbing old roof tiles to be reused, transporting them to a new building, pulling giant boards out of a wood pile to be reused, putting pieces of wood on the floor of a gazebo, putting tiles on top of a new building, and lots of mowing. Did I mention they have 300 acres here? We’ve also been hiking up the mountain with machetes to clear a path and digging into the side of the mountain to make a bigger path. I’d say that some of the most strenuous work was for sure the mowing and creating the path on the mountain. At times it was definitely hard to keep a good mindset especially when tired, but realizing how many people would be impacted by our work helped a lot. For instance there’s going to be so many people who hike along that trail or who rest in the gazebo. It really is cool once we understand how our work impacts others and how those people can be impacted by God in the same places that we were. Yesterday after half a day of trail work we were able to do the high ropes course that’s here. We did it in partners so we relied a lot on teamwork while doing it. On the first obstacle Cayden and I decided to run across the rope bridge with planks that were a decent distance apart. The only problem is we didn’t know that one of the pieces of wood was broken and when we were running it popped up, I tripped on it, fell down, and my left shoe fell down into the jungle abyss below us. Cayden so kindly offered me her left shoe to finish the rest of the course and Emily went down into the woods to find my sneaker. It’s so nice how much we’ve all grown together and how much I can rely on my teammates. We’ve also learned that life can be like that obstacle where sometimes you may be scared to go onto the next plank but you just have to leap and trust that the harness will catch you if you fall. In life sometimes you have to take big steps, like going on a mission trip, and trust that God will be with you and catch you if you fall. I’ve definitely enjoyed my time here at El Refugio and it’s definitely taught me a lot.
