Breakfast was as I would say on point… There was Corn Tortillas,Eggs from the farm, pico de gallo,watermelon, cantaloupe, and that Nicaraguan rice and beans. I’m getting ahead of myself let me back up. I woke up at 6 in an attempt to workout but after a day of doing kitchen duties, socializing with the kids, and toughing out the heat the snooze button did it’s job. I arose 20 minutes later and grabbed my indestructible cell phone,white skull candy headphones and book “When Helping Hurts-How to alleviate poverty without hurting the poor and yourself”....

Legally the bus should sit around 13 but its a Tuesday there’s church, kids need to get home, and it is one my team members birthday’s, so ice cream is the “move” as we young folks say. The faded green bus fills up with women,children,and gringos. The roads are uneven so i lose count around 35 people. The seating is worn down and yes it’s hot. In the south chivalry isn’t dead or at least that’s what I was taught so giving up a seat is customary. I motion to one of the women talking mostly with my hands that she can have my seat. I’m hot, tired...

Tiled It! We are the tile. Broken and messy. Without direction we will continue to be broken. It’s all about the details. One bad cut of tile can mess up an entire row. You can never do anything to make God not love you, no matter how many mess ups. A relationship with God allows you to build from the ground up, just as the tile. With Him we can become new, and nothing is too hard for him. Just as the house we are on earth, but are being used for something greater than us. We are building his kingdom and we cannot do it alone. Instead of filling the gap with broken pieces of sin, fill...

The smell of rice,beans,and plantains filled my nostrils my new Nike’s(which could probably buy these cooks better cooking equipment) are covered in dirt. On Ometepe Island flies are your friends the sooner you realize that the better off you’ll be. This is only my second full day here and its as if I’ve been here for a lifetime…. Enough with the poetry, is it hot here? All the time. Food? So much better than the american diet I’ve been locked into for years. Kids? They are amazing at sports.  This is how we communicate.. Now that we have established...

Morning came and like usual on mission trips, things didn’t go as planned. We didn’t have anything to do around the community so we were assigned work on the compound. We were told to grab shovels and head out to the garbage pile on the project. When we visually took in our next mission I was like “no biggy”. Then we started. I normally don’t have a problem getting my hands dirty but it was pretty disgusting. I felt nauseous just picking at some of the rotten garbage. Unusual scary looking bugs were crawling everywhere. All the brush and cardboard boxes were...

What is so special about me? Why would God want me to go on this trip? How could I possibly help the people in Nicaragua? These are the questions that have plagued me for a long time. But that was before training camp. The first day there we were asked to write a list of what defines us and we had to figure out which attributes were the real us and which were masks we put on to hide the attributes we didn’t like. This is the first time anyone has asked me to do this, and frankly, the first time I really looked at who I am and who I pretend to be. I began to find things that I...