Today was our first day of construction. My group repaired one pastor’s
house, while the other worked on building a new house.
The repair team heading off to the village
Meeting Pastor Juan Pavon
We laid cinder blocks
all morning and for a few hours after lunch. Instead of mixing the concrete in
a mixer it is mixed with shovels on the ground.
In the house that we are
repairing there are seven people, two dogs, a cat, and 10+ chickens living
there.
The yard is surrounded by barbed wire and cactus, there are live wires
4-5 feet off the ground with little to no insulation, and dogs and pigs running
around.
At the other job site, the team began to build another pastor’s house from
the ground up, laying cinder blocks.
The new house construction team started with this
Moving cinder blocks into the work site
Eduardo,
the children’s ministry leader (an ex pro soccer player) and my dad were the
ones laying the blocks (the others were bringing the mortar for them.)
Macy nailing the "rebar" into the corner posts
He said it
eventually turned into a competition between the two to see who could lay the
most.
We then went to our pastor’s church and conducted VBS. We performed
the skits, did crafts,
Vale May
Today we began repair on a pastor’s house in a village about an hour away
from Managua. On the bus ride there we were waving and saying “hola” to the
people on the streets. A lot of them would happily smile and wave back at us.
We passed a school on the way to the first village and all the kids ran to the
fence and were waving at us with huge smiles on their faces, calling “Gringo,
gringo!”. The kids are the ones who usually get the biggest smile and run up to
us and hug us, they get really excited to see us coming.
Emily reading a Gospel story to the villagers
The house we are repairing is one room with seven people living in it,
along with their many animals. One thing that was amazing to me was that the
translators jumped in and helped with the building as well. The translators are
mainly here to help us communicate to others but they still wanted to help in
the repair work. Elisabeth and I got really dirty from “accidently” throwing
dirt on each other.
We finished with the first day of construction around 4:00 then headed
to the church of that same pastor to do VBS, which is much different than the
VBS we’re used to at home.
Pastor Juan's church
Once everyone arrived at the church, we did the “Chains” play for the
people and sang a song with them.
We didn’t know the song, and it lasted a
while, but hearing those people worship and to hear the joy in their voices was
amazing. After that we split the kids into two groups, indoors and outdoors. I
was in the indoor group and helped the kids make bead bracelets.
At first we
only had a few kids wanting to make bracelets but after about 20 minutes we had
about 20-30 people making bracelets and necklaces. Kids and parents made as
many bead creations as they could. We had four full Ziploc bags full of beads
and now each of those bags have less than half left. It was crazy but fun to
see all those people happy because they got to create their own things. I kept
having kids and parents tapping me and saying “muchcha” and asking the best way
they could for a bracelet or necklace. One little boy came back and wanted to
make a necklace for his younger brother and he was so happy when he was done
with it he wanted to show everyone. Seeing all the kids was probably the
highlight of the day for me.
The kids loved the bubbles
Vikki Alvarado
There was time during the day to love on the kids
A neighboring home
Because it was late starting back to the compound,
we stopped and ate at Pollo Narcy's
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