It was the best of times and the worst of times...

Monday morning came bright and early…and would soon be wet…in Rio Blanco. The team was all charged up for their first day’s work. After eating the first of our week’s worth of great breakfasts, everyone grabbed their equipment for their specific “jobs” and got on the bus. We loaded the coffin cooler filled to capacity with fresh ice and bottled water in the back of the 4-Runner. I guess I need to explain that it really isn’t a coffin, but it is this huge white monstrosity that looks like something that would be considered suspicious if found in the back yard of a psychopath…so naturally, it makes perfect sense that it would accompany Jim and me wherever we traveled.

This is off the subject but when Jim and I were on the way home from our honeymoon in Galena, IL, we spent the night in Hannibal, MO. Of course, we wanted a souvenir from there and found a 4’ tall painted figure of Saint Francis which was carved from wood. He held a tray which had a place on it for a plant…well, of course we couldn’t pass it up so we bought it…not thinking how we were going to get it in Jim’s Jeep. Finally, we got Brother Frank wedged in the back, with his head tilted up between our seats up front. We then tossed our suitcases, shopping bags, sweaters, etc. over him and headed home…all the while hoping no one would call in to some small town police chief saying we had a body stuffed in the back of our car! Brother Frank lived with us until we sold our house on Chinquapin…he’s now greeting visitors at Mandy’s house. The memory of the trip home with Brother Frank still brings smiles…the cooler was much heavier and not nearly as charming.

Okay, back to R. B. Each day the team was divided up in to two main groups with a third group formed in the afternoon. One group which usually consisted of 3 team members plus a translator named Wendy and the young Nicaraguan woman named Blanca who also helped with our meals. This group held 2 VBS sessions each day upstairs at the church…one in the a.m. for the children who had afternoon school and the afternoon session for those children who attended morning classes. So every morning, the bus would drop the VBS team off at the church for the day. We would all reunite there to eat our lunches and then divide up again. The VBS team taught the kids Bible lessons, did crafts and played games.

The kids absolutely loved their time there and the team members worked every bit as hard at their job duties as did the construction team. They did get to stay dry for the most part as the majority of their time was spent inside the church…although they did have one day that several of them took the kids to a field to play ball and while there, the heavens opened the drain plug and they were all drenched to the skin. Even so, no complaints from those folks…those team members just kept on doing what they were scheduled to do. And that was to be a blessing to those kids. They were successful whether wet or dry.

They made sure every child felt special and every child mattered. Each child, from the smallest toddler to the oldest ones, had an opportunity to share what they had learned, to be the center of attention in a positive way and to get lots of hugs and affirmation. It really touched my heart knowing how special that time was to so many of those children…they had a few hours where they didn’t have to worry about carrying water, carrying a little brother or sister or carrying the secret burdens buried in their hearts. For that brief time each day, the heaviest thing they had to carry were the things they had made to take home for that day. They got to be what they should be, carefree children, laughing, playing and enjoying life. The hours and the days passed by too quickly for most of them, I’m sure.

One of the games Jim and I got the biggest kick out of watching them play was Duck, Duck, Goose…or here, it was taught as Pato, Pato, Gonzo. The kids loved it and ran for all they were worth…their favorite tags being one of the team members as the children knew they could outrun the bigger kids…and they did! Another game the kids loved playing was Simon Dice (pronounced See-mone Dee-say) or Simon Says. I guess it really didn’t matter what they were playing, they seemed to love every minute of it and when it was time for a session to end, it was always to a chorus of wistful “No’s”. It’s amazing how such a small investment of positively focused time can make an impact on a child’s life. I wonder how many of those little ones we will someday see in heaven as a direct result of the time that was spent in teaching them about a Jesus Who not only wants them to know their Bible stories but more so, to know His heart and how much He loves them.

The remainder of the team members, after dropping off the VBS workers, rode the bus to the construction site. This is where we spent the majority of our time, as well. The construction projects were to consist of replacing leaky roofs on two different houses. At least, that’s what we thought when we started that Monday morning, anyway. We had a Nicaraguan carpenter with us who was the expert on the job. Fausto said little and smiled even less. We all wondered what he must have thought of this group of gringos who had come with much better intentions than skill in building Nicaraguan structures.
The first house was occupied by a grandmother, her daughter and a handful of children. The roof on the back part of her two room house was leaking terribly and so the plan was to replace only that part. When the guys got in to the demolition part of it, one of the posts which was holding up the roof over the outside kitchen broke off…it had rotted completely through. That end of the kitchen started to collapse and so the plan quickly changed. Not only was the crew going to replace the back portion of the tin roof, they were now going to have to rebuild the kitchen area. This didn’t look too difficult at first blush…it was a nightmare!!! The bottom portion of the broken post was obviously anchored in Beijing, China. The team all took turns trying to remove that one stub of a post. They dug all around it. That only resulted in a large hole which surrounded the unmovable post. They used a wooden pole with a narrow spade-type blade on it as a fulcrum in hopes of dislodging it. The blade broke. They attacked it with various other tools – hammers, a saw, the machete, shovels and even bare hands. What started out as good-natured ribbing among the team as to why the strong guys couldn’t move the post soon turned in to an obsession of great magnitude with every one of the participants…it was no longer an issue that the post needed to be removed in order to set a new post. Nope, it turned in to a Battle Royale…Man Against Post. It wasn’t looking good for Man.

After probably a good hour’s worth of pleading, begging, grunting, growling and other non-human type sounds, the ground gave up its bounty and the post begrudgingly came out. We were all curious as to why it would not move and there had been much speculation as to what had been holding it down there so securely. A simple notch cut in to the post. That was it. There was no cement, no rebar, nothing so high-tech and excusable as those things. It was just a notch cut in to the post with a machete so that the dirt, which has a high clay content, would pack in tightly around it and hold it fast in to the ground. It doesn’t seem like it would work that well. It does.

Meanwhile, Fausto and Aaron were focusing on rebuilding the framework for the roof as well as the new kitchen. The two were perfectionists in their own right. Fausto seemed to have little patience or regard for the gringo way of construction. Aaron struggled to understand the incommunicative Nica who was not used to working with Americans…especially, fun-loving, high-spirited young adults whose enthusiasm was matched only by their attitudes of grace and their desire to serve. It was a rocky beginning for those two construction gurus. Thankfully, by the end of the week, they had all built more than a couple of structures…they had built a friendship with Fausto and a new respect was earned and granted from all sides.


While all this construction was going up, I need to stress the rains were coming down…and continued to do so the entire week. They were the kind of downpours that permeated every layer of clothing, no matter how thick or how many; the kind that went all the way through shoes and socks and saturated hats and ball caps. None of us who were out in it had a square inch of dry skin. It is the rainy season and Rio Blanco typically does get more rain than Managua, but this was an unusually large amount of rain and for long periods of time. It rained probably 80% of our time up there. We would have a few hours where the rains would let up and the skies would seem to clear a bit, but it wouldn’t be long until you could see the rains coming in over the mountains once again. It was a beautiful sight…a soggy, tiring, frustratingly beautiful sight.


And of course, with the rains, came the mud. The mud was unbelievable…it would grab your shoes and refuse to let go. Just trying to walk became an exercise in effort. After working a foot free and lifting it up, it was usually accompanied by a couple of pounds of slimy, slick, sticky, stinky mud…held together with a paste made of never-ending rain and various types of manure. I’ve learned it’s a very effective bonding agent.

One would naturally think that all this rain would have not only dampened everything exposed to it, but also the spirits of the team. Au contraire. They came to work and work they did…and always with a smile, a word of encouragement for a fellow team member or a joke. The rain wasn’t fun but the team was and I would rather spend a really wet week with a team like that than a dry week with a team that complains about every uncomfortable, unplanned moment. They obviously were pros at the F part of SURFing.

It would have been easier to focus on the activities of construction instead of on the conditions in which the family was living. But God wouldn’t let me shield my eyes or my heart from the reality of the poverty which surrounded us. The house we were working on was a wooden shack…there’s no other way to describe it. It sat below the street level and the “steps” going down to it were nothing more than a path that had been worn clear of grass and had the vague shape of steps. Of course, it was treacherous with the rains and more than one person unexpectedly slid down the hillside. The front door opened into a room that seemingly served as both living room and dining room. There was no table and only one wooden stool and a small wooden bench – both handmade. There was a large slice of a tree trunk that served a dual purpose for the children both as a chair and a table. The only light was a very small kerosene lamp. I didn’t see a wick in it. There is no electricity to the house. There was a narrow “shelf” which ran the length of one wall…it was one of the wall boards that had been turned on its side. The uneven floor was compacted dirt…lumped up with clumps of mud tracked in by the comings and goings of our team.

There was another room similar in size on the other side of the wooden plank wall…it held a couple of hammocks, some rags or blankets, I couldn’t really tell, but they appeared to be on top of a couple of boards that was obviously a bed plus a pile of clothes. There were no extras – not that I could see. The area that had been de-roofed on the back side of these two rooms looked as though it had several rough cut wooden shelves which held a couple of mismatched dinged up pans and several plates. There was a small closed in closet-type area made of scrap wood and bamboo and it was open at the top. I’m assuming that’s where they must have kept their beans and rice and other food items…as sparse as I imagine they were. It makes sense that’s where they would be as neighborhood chickens, dogs and pigs would not be able to have easy access to them that way. As expected, the bathroom was nothing more than an outhouse with only a curtain which served as a door. It was down a path behind the house and looked as though it served several other houses in the immediate area.

The kitchen, which was a separate “room” of sorts, was joined to the house and had been made of scrap tin and wood. It held only a “stove” which was nothing more than a stack of flatter rocks that had been heaped up on top of a squared off mound of dirt. The rocks formed a ring around a fire that always seemed to be smoldering at the very least and a kettle was kept on top of the rocks. A few steps outside the door were two old 55 gallon barrel drums which held water. One for drinking and I assume cooking and bathing and the other one was used for washing dishes.

It was hard to look directly in to the faces of the women who lived there…there was no man in the house. It was much easier to love on the children, to play games with them, to take their pictures. Somehow, it seemed such an intrusion for us all to be traipsing back and forth through their home – even though that was the only way to navigate from the front to the back with the team working on the kitchen area. It was painful to see such poverty and need up close. It has always bothered me, but I have always looked at it from the protection of a vehicle, the insulation of a group or from the distance of a camera lens. Sitting in it, touching it, feeling it all around me somehow made me feel very uneasy and vulnerable. I didn’t understand it.

Like a lightning bolt, it hit me. I knew why I was uneasy. I knew why it was hard for me to look directly in to the eyes of those women for longer than just a few seconds…because they would look back. It somehow feels better to have on the “missions” smile in those circumstances…it seems to act as a protective coating, like a Teflon shield so that the poverty can’t really touch me. But that day, it did. I knew that those two women were thinking the very same thing I was…”Why me?” It was the same question but posed from two different view points.

I am sure they looked at all of the team and wondered why God had blessed us as He had. Why was it that we were there to fix their house instead of the other way around. Why did they live in abject poverty and obviously, none of our team members did? Why them? Why me? I asked myself similar questions. Why did God choose to bless me as He had?...With family, with friends, with a lifestyle that is not opulent by any means, but neither are we living hand to mouth. Why was I born in America, the land of opportunity, the land of plenty and those women were born in Nicaragua, the land of oppression, the land of want? Why me? Why them? The questions were too hard and too painful to confront. Confrontation would lead to acknowledgement which would lead to responsibility and accountability. It is much less threatening looking at poverty from a distance…somehow, it’s sanitized that way and we don’t have to worry about it getting on us. When poverty “gets on us”, it seems to cling much like the mud did to our shoes…and the stench of it is just as offensive as tracked in manure.

I wish I could tell you that all of that was followed by an earth shattering revelation…it wasn’t. But neither has it left my mind. God’s doing something with that moment…I’m just not sure what it is yet. And, whether I like it or not, I don’t think I’m finished with that family. God has taken me through those steps of confrontation and acknowledgement. It’s these last two steps of awareness which really have my attention…responsibility and accountability. I’m not going to be able to avoid them anymore than I was able to avoid those questioning eyes last Monday.

Okay back to business…to wrap all that up for you and close out today’s blog…it took the team two days to put on a new roof and rebuild a kitchen, the same amount of time it took to change the lives of that family. These last two pictures are of the dedication and blessing for the new kitchen and roof and the other picture is just several of the family members standing in the doorway post construction...the rest of the family did not want to be photographed.

Those two days were amazing. The team was at their best while their working conditions were not. The family was gracious and offered us all they had...refuge from the rain. I think each one of us learned something about ourselves on that project...there is more than one way to accomplish a goal, God will use each person who is willing to be used, there are no small jobs or insignificant acts, giving really is better than receiving (although I think this family might dispute that right now...they love their new roof and kitchen!), and for me...I think I know now with even more certainty and clarity than ever before that this is where God wants us to be.

More on the trip later.

The “A” Team is shown in the photo below in the previous blog…from left to right, front row to back:

Mary Sims, Janelle, Chris, Loren, Katie, (those last three are kneeling)
Lee, Jay, Aaron, Mary, Elaine and Wes