No, seriously. It’s almost summer here (southern hemisphere – wooh!) and sometimes it gets so cold that you need pants and a jacket.
But here’s the thing.
It gets to melting temperatures during the day.
In other words, it’s a daily fluctuation from sweltering, bright and sunny heat during the day at about 85-90 degrees Fahrenheit to a cool, chilly, windy 50-60 degrees at night. It’s weird. Especially when you go to bed a little sweaty and wake up shivering. But thankfully that’s actually been the worst of our problems here. Things have been pretty relaxed so far.
Saturday, November 18
We had a 4-hour long meeting in the morning (completely in Spanish) about the children’s sports ministries we’re going to be doing every Saturday while we’re here. Then, later that day we went and participated in that ministry. It was a little difficult to help because they had about 20-30 Chileans there that were already running the ministry, so our group just kind of sat to the side and talked to some of the adults and children. They told us that we were going to take over the ministry more in the following weeks, so we’ll see where that goes.
Sunday, November 19
We had our church service. It was also Election Day for Chile’s new president (still don’t know who got elected, or if anyone else knows, but as far as I know, the election happened…supposedly). Anyways, on Saturday night, the night before the service, our pastor asked one of us to preach for 20-30 minutes the next day. I wasn’t a part of the conversation, but I knew that Colby, the leader for Team Humbly United, accepted the opportunity to preach. There was also one extra thing that was discussed in that conversation that I wasn’t a part of.
It was decided that I would translate the entire sermon as Colby preached.
The night before the sermon.
Lovely.
I found this information out at approximately 10:30pm on Saturday night. I was flustered, so I did two things. I took a deep breath, and I ate one of our frozen chocolate puddings that we eat all the time.
It was delicious.
Then, Colby and I talked about it and he decided to stay up late and spend time with God and write the sermon. We woke up early the next morning and he wrote out an entire script of what he wanted to say.
His script looked like he wrote it out normally, then grabbed a thesaurus and asked himself, “What are the most complex words I can use to make this sound exquisitely magnificent?”
We spent 2 and a half hours in the morning rewriting the script to make it so I could actually translate it into Spanish words that I knew. It was a struggle, but we got through it. The next hard part was actually getting up on stage, in front of a church of about 50-65 Chileans, and speaking their native language that I’m only conversational in (as opposed to fluent). The service lasted about an hour and 15 minutes before they called us up to preach. I was mildly confident in the abilities God had given me, but like anyone else would’ve been, I was a little nervous.
The sermon went okay. It had a good message.
I was just proud that only four people fell asleep (we got one in the front row!).
All in all, it was a learning experience. Would I do it again? Part of me says “Nah, not really.” Is it going to happen again? As long as we have our pastor, I can guarantee at least 2 more times within our next 2 months here. So we’ll see how that goes.
Monday and Tuesday, November 20 and 21
These two days were our adventure and rest days, respectively. We didn’t do anything for adventure day because we were so focused on starting our new ministry here this past week that we forgot to plan anything ahead of time. In Chile, if you want a guide to explore anywhere (and our hosts recommend that we don’t explore anywhere without a guide), you have to pay for it online 2 days in advance. So that kind of throws a monkey wrench into things, considering we’re a very last-minute type of group. We’ll see how that develops over the next two months. Anyways, we pretty much rested for both days but some people went to Starbucks or something to get WiFi.
Wednesday-Friday, November 22-24
These past few days, we’ve been doing our ministry at the school. I’ve been assisting the P.E. teacher, Diego. He’s pretty cool. We both like to speak in our jumbled Spanglish. As a matter of fact, the first three days we spent together, he only spoke Spanish. Then one day he just decided to start speaking pretty clear English and it caught me so off guard that I responded to him in Spanish and told him I didn’t understand. We now help each other learn new vocabulary in our respective languages.
The students are a lot of fun too. They all want to talk to the gringo that speaks Spanish and understands them. They also love it when I stick my hand up in the air as they try to jump and touch it. It’s a fun challenge that brings a solid 20 students from Kindergarten through 8th grade into a circle, challenging each other to see who can slap my hand at it’s highest point. They seem to really marvel at my height, considering the second tallest person at our school is Diego (as far as I’ve seen), who stands at a firm 5’8.
I’m 6’1, for reference.
The students always ask me if my family back home is super tall and I love getting the reactions when I tell them my mother is 5’3. The next question that most commonly follows is, “Qué comías?” which translates to, “What did you eat?” We all get a few laughs out of it and I’m just happy to use something that God’s given me to connect with students.
Ending
Tomorrow we’re going to hopefully do more in the sports ministry so we’ll see how that goes. As far as I know, I haven’t been chosen to translate again on Sunday. Anything’s possible, though…even at 10:30pm on Saturday night.
As we continue on in our journey here in Chile, please pray that God would use us in ways that only He can. Also please pray that we would continue to build relationships with the students at our respective schools and be able to show them the Lord.
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