This first week really has been an eye opener that we did not come here to do what we had in mind or what we had planned, but for what God has planned. It definitely was a little tough at first to accept some changes, and it still is a little tough but I’m trying to work on accepting when there’s a change of plan. Originally when hearing about the ministries here in the past we heard about interacting with all the little kids who are so eager to teach you Spanish and learn English, becoming friends with some of the locals, and exploring around the city. I’ve come to realize that just because these were my expectations and now things look a little different, I just need to embrace it. Currently we’re staying on our host’s property doing all kinds of work, starting next week we will start going places for ministry to help out.
We don’t have any access to internet connection except through our leader’s devices, but that has allowed us to all grow within our squad and become closer to the point where we feel like family. We also aren’t able to go outside of the property to the grocery store or anywhere else, rightfully so because of covid, but we are blessed that our hosts go to the store for us every week and will get us whatever we have put on our grocery list. Originally we were thinking that we may not be able to connect to any of the children or women in our ministries because of covid, but now it appears that God has opened another door where another ministry has taken note that we’re here and is interested in having us work with the children there.
God truly is good, and when we trust in him he provides. I do want to share some of what we have been doing around our hosts’ property though. There’s one building that they want to tear down because it wasn’t built on a strong foundation so we moved boxes up the hill into a storage room, dissembled the bunk beds in there, and found places around our house to store them. Would you believe it if I told you there was one tiny room where we stacked 13 mattresses on top of each other! We also were able to find places for 8 stacks of wooden boards with 8 pieces in each stack whether it be on top of dressers or on a shelf in the laundry room. We were also sawing through pieces of wood, which I’ve realized doing by hand is no easy task, fixing parts of a driveway by rearranging rocks and dirt, and carrying doors up from the top of the property to behind the house we’re staying in. We even saw a scorpion behind one of the doors once we moved it! In the past few days that we’ve been here, we’ve been diligent in the work we’ve been asked to do and our hosts have even told us that us being here is such a blessing for them and they’re impressed with the work we’re getting done. This just goes to show that God truly has put us here to be a blessing to not only the ministries we’re going to start going to next week but also to our hosts.
