A Nicaraguan weekend

This weekend I was able to experience another side of Nicaragua as a typical Nicaraguan. On Sat. I was planning on trying to sleep past 6:30 before the sweat hit me. I had the fan on full blast and was laying in bed when i heard "Kevin, nesicitamos las llaves?" The two guys that work here needed the tractor keys about 7:30 because the guy we asked to come on wed. to get down about 60 trees showed up today.

Contrary to plans I put my boots on for a day of work. We cut down about 60 trees ranging from 20-60 feet into 6 foot sections and loaded them on a trailer all day in what seemed like the hottest day I have experienced. Once again I got outworked by the locals. The bottom post of the big trees weighed between 250-300 lbs and after lunch i was not able to pick them up unlike the Nicaraguans.

After work they invited me to watch the big fight, a nican vs. an american. I was super excited to get to to just hang out with all nicans for the first time. Julio came to the orphanage and I drove over to Jamie's house. Clearly they don't have cars but i was not going to walk 4 or 5 KM in the middle of a nican neighborhood at 11 or 12 at night after the fight.

Jamie lived in a two room house with dirt floors with two lights and two outlets. I think it is a life long proces to fix up your house because his parents lived in a very nice ceramic tiled floor house right next door. It is crazy to think that i have more invested in this laptop i am typing on then he does his house. They know everything that I have and even though i am a little ashamed to know that fact, but I pray that my wealth doesn't distance me from them.

I promise more pictures now that i can load them from my camera.

The simple beauty of google and technology

So today, living in this third world country, I found this amazing technology called Google. I am not sure if you know about it in America but apparently it does a lot.

It has this one feature that I used today. I had to do all the electrical wiring for a bathroom but had no clue how to do it so I just used the Google search option on my iPod touch. I was able to find a detailed diagram.

I then carried my iPod to the job site and carried out the diagram in real life. It was pretty amazing to see that all the wiring I did worked on the first try thanks to google. Check if out. www.google.com

Moving towards a goal

The older boys here are, for the most part, good kids but have little

direction or motivation to do things. In their free time, which this

past week was all day because they didn't have school, they either

wreak havok or sit around and through the ball.

Chris and I decided that we were going to plant a garden and teach the

boys a little bit about farming. We worked in the field all morning

explaining every step of what we were doing. When we were done, we

drank some pepsi and read the parable of the sower and talked about

it.

As cliche as that sounds, the boys really need to see a man that

reads and strives to live out the Bible. There is little masculine

influence at the orphanage compared to women. Coming from a culture

where women are not respected and your dad's mistress is practically

dinner conversation, the need for solid men is great.

An American-Nican weekend

This weekend was Independence day, so the city shut down on Monday. I lived it up big time this weekend--not like the Nican I have tried to become but just like a typical gringo for a change. Saturday, I went to the mall to just walk around and look at overpriced clothing and merchandise. You can live real cheap here, but our common luxuries are
ungodly expensive. For example. I clearly went to the hardware store in the mall and a 200 dollar drill was 449 and a 100 dollar saw was 239.

Sunday I didn't go to church because we have rotate and play guard on Sunday mornings. It consisted of me sitting around and practicing Spanish on the cook. Then at lunch we went to the beach to go surfing, and I tried my best at a very difficult sport standing up on 2 or 3 waves. Monday consisted of another surfing trip and the movies. Monday,
I successfully road a wave from the break to the shore. Enough rush to make me go again.

It was a refreshing weekend before entering the Nican workforce again.

Known similarities of Nicaragua and Mexico

Construction machinery consists of your two hands, no matter how deep

your holes are.

The Internet is horrible in the rain.

Meeting times are set with up to an hour of leeway.

Public transportation is slighty chaotic but great.

If you have white skin. Girls like you. Period.

Everything is made of concrete.

Living Among Your Mission Field

The Lord calls us to go and make disciples of the world.  We are all called to be reaching people with the love of Christ. I have learned to effectively show a person the love of Christ, you must at some level become like them. Some of the missionaries here live like a white collar worker.  In a world, where minimum wage is 65 dollars a
month, some of these missionaries stay in 350-500 dollar a month apartment complexes.   In a town where very few people have cars, some missionaries are driving 20,000 dollar cars...25 years of a minimum wage workers salary.

I would never say to be wealthy and have nice things is outright sinful but you must look at who you think the Lord is telling you to reach.  As my dream is being fulfilled, to work beside local poor Nicaraguans every day doing construction, their attitudes towards this lifestyle show.  They outright tell me that they don't respect some of
the people that work here because they show up and tell them what to do and leave.

I know that they are first and foremost here for the kids but i see the workers as a huge opportunity to begin to change the community. If you began to change workers into people that can change others, you began to improve the whole community.

Phillipans 2 says that our attitude should be like Jesus that even though he was God he humbled himself to become a man and was obedient to that... all the way to obedience of death on a cross.  I think that we need to chew on how Jesus didn't just tell us how to live but walked beside us and showed us how to live too.

How much does it rain

So they told me about rainy season and how it lasts all of September and part of October.  I thought I experienced a rainy season in Mexico when it rained like every other day for about 45 minutes.  Well, here it has rained for 12 straight days at least 3 times a day.

To give you perspective... Today it was raining, and I had, at most, a 15 foot run to the truck, and in those 15 feet, I fell in two puddles up to my calf that covered the bottom half of my body in water and the minimum of 5 gallons that fell on my head and soaked my t-shirt. After making the same run back into my house,  I had to change all my clothes to get dry.

Last night, a storm woke me up at 1AM and 4AM.  3 straight hours of serious down pour and when I went to look at my hole in the morning that I was almost finished with... it was more than 3/4 full of water and the force of all that water running down the hill knocked one wall

down.

After pulling out close to 75 buckets of water, we had another 50 buckets of dirt and broken block we had to pull out of the hole. Needless to say, work here is ridiculously slow and something ALWAYS goes wrong.