Mission - The Kindness of Strangers

Monday morning, 9/2/13, Chinandega,  Nicaragua.  The day broke open through clouds across the mountain peaks in the distance, like the chorus of a well-loved hymn. 

Each morning that week, I went upstairs to a table on the tidy verandah above the cafeteria, to drink unsurpassed coffee, watch the morning arrive and to journal, study and pray.  My journal entry the day after the volcano is hilarious - I incorporated some of it into yesterday's post, but I will spare you the bellyaching about my glutes and lower back pain.  Oy.

**********************************************
Another reason I've always been gun-shy about mission work stems back to Market Square Mall in Knoxville.  Market Square is an outdoor venue where businesspeople "do" lunch, farmers sell fresh vegetables during harvest season, and barflies (such as yours truly, once upon a time) frequent the nightclubs on the mall at night.

When I was a paralegal working for a downtown law firm a few blocks from Market Square, I used to take an extra-wide detour around the sandwich-board preacher screaming at passersby on the street corner about their certainty of damnation if they didn't stop and let him berate them one-on-one.  He shoved terrifying tracts about lakes of fire in the hands of those poor souls fool enough to slow down near him, and I decided that if that was how God expected people to "share the good news", then He could count me out.  No thanks.

Thus, my historical perspective on the prospect of mission work was that I would have to beat people over the head with my Bible and scare them into faith in a God they may or may not have heard of before but still convince them that He loved them, and I would be required to do all this effectively in Swahili or Afrikaans.  Again - no thanks.

**********************************************
That Monday morning, the PB&J team from yesterday got assigned to do PB&Js again.  I didn't want to be Jelly Girl again, so I shamed one of my team members into wielding the jelly knife.  (Turns out peanut butter is just as gross when you have to make 60 sandwiches.  Just sayin.)  We loaded up the bus and rode out of Chinandega to La Chuscada, a community of families living in tiny cinderblock homes just off the main highway but with no running water or bathroom facilities. 

A few words about Amigos for Christ and their mission -- Amigos for Christ focuses on meeting four basic needs:  access to clean water and modern bathrooms, healthcare, economic opportunity and adequate nutrition.  (please visit the Amigos for Christ website for more details.) 

Let me remind you that I am a reformed party girl from east Tennessee.  I've peed and pooped in country outhouses and concert porta-potties and just plain bare-assed out in the woods more times than I can count, but I've always had the luxury of knowing that there was a clean white porcelain toilet somewhere in my immediate future.  It never dawned on me until September of 2013 that having a toilet was a luxury which an overwhelming majority of the world doesn't enjoy.

Pausing here for a minute to pontificate about an important topic which doesn't get enough airtime - it's poop.  I won't do it justice, so I will send you to this fabulous TED talk which we watched while in Chinandega (Rose George Talks Crap).  Please please make time to watch it.  It will make you uncomfortable, I promise.

Anyway - I tell you all that to say that the rest of our week in Nicaragua was primarily spent digging ditches to lay pipe so that the families of La Chuscada would soon have the joy of a real bathroom.  Not really what I would've thought of as mission work.  When would we be spouting Scripture or baptizing people in a river?  I didn't see that anywhere on the itinerary.

How were we supposed to teach people about Christ, digging ditches?

*************************************************

The first family we served was actually a collection of relatives with homes spread across a common lot.  Our team split up into groups, each assigned to dig a trench from one of the homes to the main line out by the road.

The work is hard, but simple - one person swings a pickaxe to break up the soil, then another comes behind with a shovel to clear out the loosened dirt.  This was the substance of our activity all day, every day for the bulk of the week.


Did I mention it was really hot and humid?  Just as they did on Sunday, the Amigos team reminded us frequently to drink water and take breaks.  Such was our first morning, digging and shoveling and resting and drinking water and then doing it all over again.

A special gift from the Amigos for Christ team was the abundance of awesome music all week.  Whether riding the bus to/from La Chuscada, or working our butts off in the damp hot sunshine, we were immersed all day long in some fabulous music.  (To my friends on Spotify, I made a playlist called Amigos 2013 if you'd like to sample some of our daily fare.)  


*********************************************
The matriarch of this family compound was a lovely woman named Graziela. 

She brought out plastic chairs for us to sit in while we ate lunch. Towards the end of our lunch break, we started hearing rumbles of thunder growing quickly closer.  The accompanying darkened skies told us to get ready for a doozy.  I nervously envisioned the Boy, sprawled out in the dirt after being struck by violent Central American lightning while the pickaxe was in mid-swing.  Surely they would send us back to the bus.

But no, nobody was moving towards the bus.  The rain began as a sprinkle but quickly became a downpour.  As the storm intensified, Graziela beckoned us inside her home. 

Graziela and Mateo
(and her beautiful handmade curtains)

We brought her chairs back in, into a main room where it was obvious that these chairs were the main furnishings anyway.  There was an old fashioned sewing machine, and an ironing board with an iron, and then an incongruous computer monitor on a table (with no computer or keyboard). 

There was a random hammock strung across a corner of the room, and an intricately handcrafted rocking chair...and then a series of tiny rooms curtained off from the main sitting area which we later learned were their bedrooms.  There were family photos on all of the walls.

She showed us her kitchen, another room adjacent to the main sitting room and primarily comprised of a large woodburning stove with no ventilation other than the doorways with no doors.  She insisted that her grandson share some of his sweets with one of the Amigos girls and me - little single-serve fruit treats that put me in mind of a jello shot from the old days (sans bug juice, of course.)

Again, I find myself struggling to describe the emotions of that afternoon. 

My Spanish is pitiful - me hablo espanol muy poquito - and I barely understood a word that Graziela or her husband Mateo said to us during our time together.

But I understood her smile and her warmth and her kindness in opening her home to a bunch of strangers, to keep us dry and safe in a storm.