i think i am absolutely in love with this place. Our big goal for this summer is to completely re-vamp a local community center into a youth center. Right now it doesn´t have electricity and water, but hopefully by the end of these two months it will have a new soccer and baseball field, a library/computer lab, kitchen and dining hall, auto mechanic school, and boys/girls dorms. I´m so excited to see how God´s going to turn this place around and make it a light in the darkness of this city. My favorite thing we´ve done so far is the children´s ministry in the barrios (espanol for...

Yesterday we spent pretty much the whole day at our church, La Quinta, in Diriamba. We were told we were going to spend the morning helping out with the childrens´ service. I pictured my days as a child at Children´s Church, where we would sing songs, sit and watch a cartoon Moses talk about the Ten Commandments, and then get lollipops as our parents picked us up. Oh how different Nicaraguan children´s church is! Picture about 30 or 40 little whirlwinds between the ages of 6 and 10 with bubbles, little hands grabbing American cameras, and loud music blaring from the speakers on the...

I´ve been writting in my journal pretty regularly just so I can remember all the  wonderful experiences that I have while I´m here. One morning I woke up extra early to write and I went to the roof of Casa Mateo, the hotel that we are staying in for now. This is what I saw, at 8:18 am the4 sun is already high, birds chirping, the bark of dogs, the occassional crow of roosters echo, cars are buzzing and people working fills my ears. A cool breeze blows across my faceas the sun attempts to warm it. Some of the girls are runing laps around the roof before breakfast....

We´ve been lifting 270 bricks that weigh 140 pounds each. We´ve been playing soccer and games in the blazing sun. We´ve been speaking in a language that we mostly don´t understand and rarely form correct sentences in. Yet, even with daily portions of rice and beans, rice and beans, rice and beans– we are living in such joy. God has really created a community in my team, in spite of how many of us there are.   Every morning, I wake up at 6… not being able to sleep because of the fireworks and street noises. I run on the rooftop while learning new bible verses in my head as...

The other morning we got the chance to just walk around Jinotepe and see what God led us to. My group had no idea what to do but I felt like we should walk down this one street. After much wandering and doing good things, such as praying for a Mormon Church, praying for a blind man, and visiting a Catholic Church, my group still felt like we didn´t have much of a purpose. We soon stumbled upon an old lady buying something at a store window and we stopped and made small talk, which I thought nothing of. But we offered to carry her bags home, which ended up weighing around 40 lbs, I have no...

This week in Nicaragua has been such a blessing. It has only been a week and already I am changed for the better. The people I have come to know are more than I could have imagined. All of my expectations have been changed and exceeded. The way we have put it is that you can´t un-ring a bell. I will never be able to go back. I have realized the importance of surrounding myself with young men and women that truly have a desire to grow and mature in Christ. To the Mama´s out there who have raised the boys on this trip — Props! They have all forever changed...