I’m not even going to attempt to go back and blog individual days since our team has been here. So much has happened, but I will try to cram it all into a single entry.
First off, our team just kept getting delayed and delayed and delayed. We basically gave up rewriting their schedule until after they finally made it on Friday after 7:00, about 24 hours after they were supposed to originally arrive. Their luggage didn’t make it until Saturday night, and what we didn’t tell the team at the time was that we didn’t expect it to make it at all. Dana said Saturday morning “It will be a miracle if it gets here today, and it will be a miracle if it gets here tomorrow.”
God’s timing is something that just continually blows me away. The verse for the day in our Luke bible study for the interns was in Luke 9 where Jesus sends the disciples out without luggage. That was even the verse that Pastor Jennifer read at our commissioning service at Christ Episcopal last year. The team loved it when they heard that, and they had such fantastic attitudes all day despite dirty clothes and a general lack of toothbrushes.
By the Grace of God (and Bryan and Dana and the Suburban) it was in the meeting room of the Hostal seven hours later and we were able to leave for Tena on Sunday rather than canceling our entire trip to our primary ministry site.
Hostal Vista Hermosa in Tena is aptly named. It was beautiful, and our meeting area looked out over the jungle community and was covered, but otherwise pretty much open air and was perfect for debriefs every night. We arrived Sunday and Juan Carlos took us over to the church in Shandia for an evening service in which the team gave their testimonies. I felt during our run-through in the afternoon that a few of them felt like it had to be a certain length or that they had to impress somebody. But standing in front of all those loving people, having kids crawl all over us and just loving them and them loving us, none of that came through. Every one was very genuine and heart-felt, and you could tell that the people there could tell and truly appreciated it. We felt very connected and truly all brothers and sisters in Christ. Several songs (in English, Spanish and Quechua) and many handshakes and hugs later, we headed back to the Hostal.
Monday morning was work in Shandia. We sanded the entire outside of the church and painted it. It’s amazing what a coat of paint will do, and that place looked fantastic when the joint gringo/Ecuadorian team finished up. It was definitely hard work getting the walls smooth and doing some of the hard-to-reach areas on the doors, but we had a blast doing it, and even got some of the little kids to help, which was hilarious (they were all skipping school because the gringos were around).
Sarah spent much of the morning treating minor to semi-major medical issues in the kids there. It’s sad to see how lacking in medical supplies the community is, and some of the really horrible medical conditions some of these kids just put up with. They are seriously tough, but they are still just kids, and some of the infections we saw were not something I want to imagine ever dealing with, much less see a five-year-old go through. I was really thankful for Sarah’s nursing studies and I know she was too. It was truly amazing to see God work through her two years of training and a very basic first aid kit to touch them.
After lunch was VBS. We spent a lot of time in training going over “how to save a VBS,” so it was refreshing that the team (thanks very much to the two very brave Spanish-speaking team members) was not only prepared but just poured out their hearts through that part of their ministry. Even the people who said that their “primary” job was the work team or sports was on the floor making crosses out of paper hands and loving the on the children and being Jesus in the same way we got to see Palabra de Vida doing that for the Huaorani. Hannah and I went back to Tena during the afternoon to get water (we never have to tell these guys to drink water. 24 people went through 25 gallons in one day!) and when we came back everyone had kids in their laps and tons of natural face paint on them, obviously drawn by children. (I’m thankful I missed that, solely for not having to wash it back off, but it was really one of the highs of my day to see).
Capricho was basically the same as far as ministry, but we walked around the town first inviting kids to the VBS. Unlike Shandia, the church is not very old and faces a very strong opposition from the local Catholic church and problems like witchcraft and substance abuse in the community. It was encouraging seeing how many kids did come back with us, though and how connected the group felt to them, but it is definitely a harder ministry site and harder anyway when you have to deal with feeling ripped out of a site every single day. Somebody asked if the kids realized we weren’t coming back the next day, and it really hit me that we wouldn’t be coming back, which was a tough pill to swallow.
Tomorrow is Mitad del Mundo before El Refugio for a much-needed Sabbath, and we still have Carmen Bajo left as a ministry site. I’m looking forward to seeing how God continues to work through the team here in Quito.
