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.

Cultural Changes

I went to this cultural integration seminar today and learned about the warm culture of Nicaragua and what it means to be here cross-culturally. Most of it I figured I already knew from the training in Mexico, but we did a portion on how you respond to changes, whether going to another country or to another college. It talked about how at first it is fun, and you love the new environment and what not. Then, after time sets in, you begin to fight the culture a little bit. Often you criticize the culture you are in or want it to be like the culture you were used to. This is followed by flight, where you seek another culture behind the culture you are in. You do this through doing things you used to do or trying to connect a lot to people you used to know. After you work through all your differences, you begin to fit into a new culture. It was interesting to see how that cycle happened to me differently in two different countries, and the amount of time it took me to find a place of fitting. I think whether you are living out on your own for the first time or going to college for the first time, it is not wrong to want to seek the old things you were used to but the amount you dive into them and live in them will prolong or shorten your time to find comfort in a new place.

Major Differences Between Mexico and Nica as of now.

-Mexico did not have a grocery store in the town. Nica has at least 5.

-For two months I did not watch TV in Mexico. Last night, I was able to watch the Clemson/Alabama game in English.

-Mexicans ate a very wide and tasty variety of food. Nicaraguans eat rice and beans with meat periodically.

-In Mexico, I thought we dug big holes. In Nica we dig bigger ones. ( See attached Pictures)

-In Mexico, I lived with 20 people my age. In Nica, I live with orphans 0-4,12-17 and women over 40.

Similarities to follow.

a different world

So I have traveled out of the country three times to do missions and found one re-occurring problem. The work Americans have just finished doesn't work anymore.  I think Jordan taught me this lesson when we were in Cancun because the church there before us had built a church but used a bad piece of wood as the main ridge beam for the roof.  Jordan asked the locals who

lived in the land how they would do it and that is how we built.

In Mexico we learned all about being a learner of the culture. One thing I learned is that Mexican culture is more Christian than America. When I got the truck stuck in Mexico I had two taxi drivers and a dump truck stop to help pull me out. In America, our schedules would hardly allow our friends to help us let alone strangers.

I think we have a lot to learn from the rest if the world.

I was wanting to post a blog about travels and all the stories aroundthat but failed to get around to it. But tonight I watch pursuit of happyness with the ten boys I live with. it was great for them to see a story about a dad who went through so much hell but held to his standards of raising a son. None of these guys have dads anymore but they got to see how people have those standards. It is cool to see adolfo, the house dad, and his mom jackie, the house mom, live there to give these ten boys parents when they don't have to. These are not your average good boys but adolfo and jackie give up their life to try and show these boys what a Christian family is supposed to be like.