The Farm
The first place that we arrived at was the farm. Its located in Los Chillies (which you should look up by the way, because it doesn’t actually exist. Like, I can’t find it on any kind of map anywhere.) We’re probably about 5 miles away from the nearest town, Santa Rosa, but because of the pothole infested road that we live on, it takes almost 40 minutes to get there. Anytime we want to go into town we have to call a taxi, which costs about $20 there and another $20 back. We have to spend money, to go spend money.
The building that we’re staying in is like a large pavilion with a bunch of little buildings inside. There are three working showers, and they’re all freezing, but they do feel pretty good after a hard day’s work. There’s one boy’s bathroom, and one girl’s, which have an outside lock that way the dogs don’t get into the trash. We may have a little fun with locking people in the bathroom here and there.
Although it took a little while to see it, this farm is beautiful. The way our building stands out amongst all the cow fields and surrounding rainforest is impeccable. The sunsets here are like no other. The long term dream that our hosts’ have for this little place is that someday it will be an international rehabilitation center. A place where people can come from all over the world to get rid of their drug abuse problems. They have no idea how the money will come in, but they know it will come from God.
The Sanctuary
We stay on the farm roughly Sunday night thru Thursday. Our ministry host has been very gracious with our work week. We only have to work Monday thru Wednesday, 7-8 hours a day, but the work is very physically demanding. The Sanctuary is this wooden frame of a building about a 15 minute walk from our backyard. Our backyard is a rainforest. This building sits right on a hill, with monkeys jumping from tree to tree all around constantly. For the first two weeks of being here, our work consisted of carrying 40-50 lb palm leaves up 100 or so muddy steps leading up to The Sanctuary. The last two weeks we’ve been splitting all of those palm leaves in half, and then nailing them down for the roof of this building.
The Church
Our ministry hosts don’t actually live on The Farm. They live about an hour or two away, toward San Carlos. It’s a small little house connected to a church. We stay there Friday night thru Sunday morning. The girls all have bunkbeds inside, while we sleep on the hard tile in the church. Saturday morning we go and spend a few hours playing with kids at Christian daycares. And then at 3 p.m. our ministry hosts insist that we go and play soccer against this kid team. We literally get our butts kicked all over the field. We don’t even come close to keeping up, our average score is somewhere around 3-11. Sunday morning we wake up for their church service. Its all in Spanish, and they don’t make too much of an attempt to translate for us, so we normally just bring bibles and journals to do our own studying.
