Day Two: Guadalupe and Work Projects

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Day two (Wednesday) brought our first work project and a trip to the neighborhood of Guadalupe.

Each day, usually in the morning, we do work projects to help support the church we're visiting. Wednesday morning we started organizing old accounting files in a storage trailer. The cabinet the files were in had only partial shelves, so many of the files had fallen behind the shelves and become very disorganized. While one of our team members worked on constructing better shelves for the cabinet, Marissa and I organized the bulk of the files by month and year, then Caleb joined us to sort through the loose files and papers and put them in order. Since we couldn't read all of what each thing said, it was a little like being an archeologist of an ancient culture: searching for clues that would indicate what each piece meant and where it should go.

After another marvelous lunch prepared by Rosa (pictures of food soon, I promise), we hopped in the microbus and headed to the neighborhood of Guadalupe for outreach. One of the neighborhoods that our teams used to visit, Manchester, flooded out a few years ago, leaving many people homeless. The government eventually built the neighborhood of Guadalupe for them near the dump, and gave many of them houses. The houses are cinderblock, typically with three rooms and a bathroom. It is the people's understanding that they will own these houses, and that the government will be issuing them deeds to their homes. This may well happen, but everything with government down here moves very slowly.

The purpose of our trip to Guadalupe was to visit people in their homes, asking if we could pray with them and giving them copies of the Gospel of John. Our team split into three groups and spread out throughout the neighborhood. Some people were more receptive than others, but all were polite about it. I teamed up with Pastor Cal and Cysco, the teenage son of long-term missionaries staying at Calvary Chapel Managua. We met a few people who were already saved, and invited many people to visit the church. Althought Guadalupe is much farther than walking distance, the church sends a van over each Sunday to pick up kids for Sunday school and any adults that want to come to church.

When we arrived in Guadalupe, we saw a number of kids gathered around a tree, from which someone had hung a very long piece of material. A teen boy was climbing and hanging from the material as if he was a circus performer. He was very talented at it, and did a number of tricks, much to our enjoyment. It looked like he was teaching others how to do it as well, although at a much lower height.

I'll post more on Guadalupe later, including pictures inside the house of one of our church members there.