Originally I had typed up a post while waiting for our flight at the airport. Sadly I was never able to post it but have decided to share it with you anyway. I want to give you all a good example of how life is here in Nicaragua.
Today Is The Day
Today is the day; we are officially on our way to Nicaragua! Currently my team and I are waiting in the Atlanta Airport on our flight scheduled for 6:10 pm. If our flight is not delayed we should be arriving in Managua, Nicaragua around 9:40 pm. From there we will find a hostel to spend the night, catch the ferry early in the morning, and be at CICRIN on Ometepe Island, Lake Nicaragua by noon tomorrow. Hopefully…
TRAINING
Training was a bear to say the least. I think I can speak for myself as well as my fellow Passporters and Adventures Staff in saying that we all had intense encounters with God in one way or another during training. Going into training I knew that it was going to be difficult, I knew we would be prepared for living in third world countries, pushed out of our comfort zones, and learn to connect/form relationships with fellow teammates.
However I was not aware that because of crazy Georgia weather, and poor planning I would not get to shower for 4 days. Yep, that’s right, all 75 of us went without showers and stunk it up every night with dance offs, hiking, and much more 4 days in a row. Great ice breaker right? Originally we were to have bucket showers available every day however, for 2 days it rained and all throughout training we had around 30 degree weather which froze all the bucket showers! To top it all off we were not aloud to use the indoor plumbing, which meant porta-potties and using water bottles to rinse off toothbrushes, wash faces, and pretty much everything else including everyday drinking water. Thankfully AIM staff took pity on our stink and allowed us a 10 min shower before we left for the airport.
But don’t let me fool you; training was so much more than pining for a shower and indoor plumbing. We were constantly pushed and challenged to find intimacy, peace, and freedom through God. We were given the chance to pray over our teammates individually, as a group, and all other Passporters. In just 48 hours I was able to connect and find a new family through my team and all the Passporters. To say it was amazing would be an understatement.
I am in disbelief at the venerability and openness that occurred in such a short amount of time. In fact I think we all are. I don’t think any of us expected to connect with each other as a family and team so quickly. So here we are, ready to go, bags in hand, awaiting God’s plan to take place. It is going to be one crazy life/world changing adventure!
Keep in touch with all of us through our team blog http://nicaragua.adventures.org/. This is a community blog where all of our post will appear. As for me I will continue to post on this blog copying and pasting onto our community blog. Be sure to leave me a comment or like on either blog I would love to hear from you!
Part 2
Now that you are all up to speed here is how things really went. First off we stayed in a church and slept on the floor. When I heard where we would be staying my first thought was “Well guess I am sleeping on the floor because I didn’t bring a sleeping pad!”. Needless to say I was super excited to find out that we would not be spending the night on cold tile flooring covered in crazy big ants and that the church was providing mattresses for us to sleep on. Another bonus of staying at the church was they actually cooked breakfast for us and served it with true Nicaraguan coffee and juice, which was fantastic! We missed the ferry due to the unexpected breakfast and lateness of our driver picking us up. Causing us to not get on the island until about one in the afternoon arriving just in time to set our bags down, meet some people and eat lunch. All in all the changes to our schedule were not bad by any means; however it was a great reminder that things are not always going to go the way we plan.
Life here is an actual island paradise! No joke, it is gorgeous! Everything is much nicer than I ever imagined! We have running water, actual showers with decent water pressure, three cooked meals a day (I have yet to eat anything I don’t like), places to hang enos, space to roam around, multiple buildings on the property, animals, loving children and so much more! It is almost to good to be true. CICRIN really does have it together and we are extremely lucky to be here.
At the moment I do not really have any exciting stories to tell. So here is what has happened so far in a nut shell: Our team celebrated our one week anniversary this past Thursday, I have learned some basic Spanish, most of us have gotten sunburned myself included, we have all done a lot of manual labor, I had my Chaco stolen by one of the puppies (but don’t worry I found it about an hour and a half later dangerously close to the edge of a drop off leading to the lake), and that’s about it.
Don’t forget to leave me a comment or like this post I would love to here from you! Remember that you can subscribe to this blog at the top right of the page as well as the team blog http://nicaragua.adventures.org/. I will probably be putting up a post once a week as I get access to internet so stay tuned!
