The World Race is often assumed to be an exotic day-to-day adventure, and while it’s certainly an adventure, and it’s certainly a challenging and unique experience, the day-to-day is not always enticing.
Ministry often looks the same everyday.
Wake up around 5/5:30am, zip open my tent, throw open my rain fly hoping to avoid getting the back splash of last night’s storm. Gather all my shower belongings and change of clothes slip on my flip-flops and climb my way out. I shuffle off to one of the little concrete rooms, throw my change of clothes on top of the bunk-bed, and make my way into the shower. I turn the nob and the gas heater ignites, as the water heats, steam fills the bathroom and I’m immediately comforted from the outside mountain air. (Oh how I’m going to miss these warm showers when they’re gone).
After getting ready I head to the little gathering room inside, turn on my music, plug in my headphones and have some time alone with the Lord. By this time most of the squad is waking up and doing the same. At about 7am I eat breakfast, which is typically very mushy, yet tasty oatmeal, or plain corn flakes, *hold the milk. Coffee is the healer of the morning so about a cup or two of that starts me off well. At about ten of eight our team gathers outside to do a group prayer for the day, after which we head off on our walk to ministry. The street outside our hospital has been recently torn up for construction so reddish mud, the texture of pudding paves the sidewalks. We carefully make our way around the construction and then up through the city center we have a straight shot to ministry.
Upon arrival we head to our assigned rooms; theirs the baby room (8mo-2yrs), 2 year olds, 4 year olds, 5 year olds and 6 year olds. Currently, I’m working with the 6 year olds and boy, are they exploding with energy! It’s a day care center, so besides a few workbooks that help them with vocab, the kids don’t get much education. We spend the first couple hours just hanging out with them, the girls love to color with you, or make you all sorts of contraptions out of a collection of used clay. They go through their alphabet books several times over and bombard you with Spanish vocabulary. Then it’s your time to teach and they repeat “como se dice ______, en ingles” about a hundred times over until they’ve exhausted all your knowledge. Whenever you can’t understand each other, you just laugh, and then they laugh, and then they play with your hair.
At about 10 o’clock they get snack, which is always a banana. After snack all the classes go outside and play, they just have a bunch of hard plastic balls and a little playground so we’ve had to get pretty creative with the games we’ve played.
(We got some of the girls to play “Pato, Pato, Ganso” the other day, they actually play a much more fun version, so that was a joy to learn.)
After we play outside for an hour or so, it’s almost time for lunch. Lunch is served in the little cafeteria at noon and all age groups eat together. They eat for an hour and then have naptime, which is our opportunity to go have lunch.
At 2 we return for a couple more hours of entertainment until we head home at 4. It’s a pretty long ministry day, 8 hours, 5 days a week, and everyday is essentially the same.
It’s nothing radical, nothing out of the box, those kinds of adventures tend to take place on travel days and days off. Other than that, ministry is what you make it. It can be draining, it can be boring and daunting, it can seem pointless and it is definitely exhausting. The World Race may look like a year of bunging jumping, safari riding, and reckless adventure, and it can be those things at times, but on a day to day basis, I’m realizing that you must fight for purpose and adventure, you must choose to see the beauty in that hour of coloring, or in cleaning up that baby’s running nose. You must choose to appreciate the mundane tasks of the day to day, appreciate the long walks to ministry, the bland corn flakes. Value the 100th time you throw another kid up in the air, or the 20th time a little girl re-braids you hair.
One week in it’s very easy to realize how drained and passive one can become on the race. The race itself, contrary to popular belief is not always exciting enough to keep you engaged. You instead, must fight for that excitement; fight to see the beauty in every single moment, because only then is when you’ll truly experience this year for what it’s meant to be.
Love, Samara
