“You’ll be living with an Indigenous. People. Group.”
The words resonated in my head.. what?
…no electricity or wifi?
…you mean we have to cook over a fire?
…if the water isn’t safe what do we drink?
…where’s the bathroom(that’s a topic for a whole other blog)?
…how do we communicate with a people group that hardly speaks Spanish?
…what? You want us to run a VBS in this community?
So we did.
I threw my pack in a van and hopped in. Crowded and squished I wrote half of my will as we flew around roads that many would refuse to walk on. One wrong step and you find yourself two miles down a mountain.
On day one we walked to the local school where we were holding our VBS. We gathered the kids together with hand motions. Soon we found that many of the people actually knew Spanish. However, a lot of the children still only knew their native language, Ngobe. So we started.
We read the creation story in Spanish every morning. We sang fun children’s songs in both English and Spanish hoping that they would grasp the song’s concept in some way or another. Then we did crafts that related to the creation story until the rain came that day (it’s rainy season here).
As the week came to an end, I was frustrated that we didn’t make any sort of impact with the children all throughout VBS. I mean most of them didn’t participate in our songs, a lot of them looked more interested in other things like soccer, and a good proportion of them didn’t even speak the same language we’d been using. I’d felt like all our time and energy was a waste.
The last night of our stay one of the 5 year olds fell asleep in one of my team mates arms. So when it got dark we decided to take him home so he wouldn’t have to walk by himself. He sat on her shoulders and pointed in the direction of his “casa.” After 45 minutes and a hike up a mountain we finally arrived. He then asked us in Spanish if we could pray for his mom because “she likes to be prayed for.” We ducked our heads under the door frame made of sticks and pointed our headlamps around the enclosure. It was then that all of us saw what we were least expecting. Every craft we had made with him that week had been hung up all around the house by his family. As if he was the Picasso of glue and construction paper all his work was up on display. Everything we had taught that week was here and documented. The creation story told in his home, all the time, to all that enter.
We prayed for her and left. As we tried not to fall down the mountain and die on our way back home our team mate told us that he was singing one of our songs under his breath all the way to his house.
Sometimes we get put in places where our work seems redundant, unappreciated, or fruitless. Like when we hold the door for someone and they don’t thank us, or how we do people favors and it seems like they don’t appreciate it. But as I was reminded this week, somebody is noticing, and God’s using your work somehow and in some way for himself.
Thanks for reading.
