July 11-17 Mission Trip

We started off the day bright and early here in Managua! It was a gorgeous day outside! We were so excited to see everything in the daylight that we spent some of the morning running around taking pictures, a cage of birds ended up enveloping most of them. Next we were on our way to the church; our scenery on the way was very beautiful all the mountains and Lake Managua were wonderful to look at. When we arrived at the church I instantly was in awe of how it looked. The classrooms were outside in an almost courtyard-like structure, and inside the chapel was mostly just wood pews and a small stage and the windows were open. It made me think of how much we have back in Florida and how little we need in order to share the word of Christ. It made me realize that most of the things we put in our churches are for materialistic reasons. Now don’t get me wrong, some things we need and are nice to have, but some are unnecessary; in my personal opinion they’re taking away from more important things we could be spending the money on like helping supply items necessary to keep a church running to share God’s word with their community wherever they may be.
After arriving at the church and speaking with one of the head ladies, we found out that the children were not going to be coming today for Vacation Bible School. This made us realize how fluid we must be while on this mission trip. We must be ready for anything that comes our way and be able to adapt to our next task and do it while showing God’s love. So we were then off to the nursing home here in Managua.
We arrived there, and I realized it is a lot different than the nursing home back in the United States. It actually has a home feeling to it. It doesn’t really feel like someone just put you there or it is like a hospital. The residents live in what I would call a cottage. In the first one we visited, there were four ladies that lived in a two bedroom cottage. They seemed very happy to see everyone and seemed to be getting along very well. Later on we discovered that there were ten total residents at the nursing home and that there was quite a large waiting list, but they cannot afford to expand their facilities.
After touring along through the nursing home and talking to some of the residents, we were ready to start working. We broke out all the gardening tools and started chopping away. We cleaned up a couple of trees and even took out a couple of banana trees.
There was one thing in particular that caught everyone’s attention all throughout the day. There were several trails of ants, and they were all carrying leaves. We were so amazed at how they could carry something that was probably two or three times the weight of themselves, and that they were all working together to get to an end result. When I sit and think about it, the ants kind of represent us on this mission trip. If it was just one of us by ourselves, the burden may be too much for us to carry, but as a team—and with God’s help-- we can accomplish so much more than we could ever hope for by ourselves. So after pondering over the ants and finishing all our work for the day, we headed back to our hotel to clean up and eat dinner. After a wonderful meal, we are now all in our rooms ready to go to bed so we can start tomorrow bright and early and get things accomplished.
Jillian Kelley