Nicaragua: Part 1
by Ben HeileHey everybody! I wanted to put together a picture heavy post as a semi-guided tour of our Nicaragua mission trip. The goal of this post is to encourage you about missions around the world and to thank you for your prayers on the team’s behalf and making everything run so smoothly while we were gone!
This first picture is an introduction of the team. We had 10 Americans (Gringos to the locals) travel down to hike up into the mountains. The two guys in the front who don’t look like their from Middle Tennessee are in fact Nicaraguan Pastors who accompanied us as guides, translators, and as spiritual leaders. We are standing in front of First Baptist in Ocotal. Pretty cool.
In this picture, you can see some of the locals at the first village we visited, El Coco. We are on the Soccer/Baseball field in the village, a pretty nice one too. They are gathered facing some of our team playing some game with the younger El Coco children. This picture also expresses our value in a place where only one of our team members spoke Spanish. We were a spectacle. The curiosity that 10 Americans draw in the severely rural Nicaraguan town can be a huge tool.
And we used that tool to draw folks to the movie. All day we would do publicity for the Pelicula Americano (American movie) to be played at 6:30, which was about when the sun would set. In El Coco, a big village for the area, we had 100s of folks turn up to watch the film. Seriously. The movies we showed were evangelistic and we showed one each of the nights we were there. As we went to two different villages, we watched the same two movies in each village. I wasn’t particularly excited about re-watching the movies but couldn’t complain when I found out the missionary had watched the other movie called Last Flight Out litterally over 100 times. Probably a world record.
At the end of the film, Alex Rodriguez, the other handsome fella in the green shirt seen in the first picture, would give an invitation and we watched all the crazy junk we had gone through, all of our discomfort and anxiety, washed away in a beautiful flow of God’s grace. Over the course of the trip we saw 60 Nicaraguans come forward. In El Coco, we saw 23.
This is a picture to show you a little of the Village life. You can see two different homes in the background and this fella crusin’ the strip. A bit of a show off really. The villagers would have these animals, and more, just walking around everywhere. The bulls were pretty big, but nobody seemed to scared of them so we acted tough too.
I’ve realized that this trip is a little too big for one post. You’ll have to tune in next week for Bueno Vista de Ventilla, the Village of Beautiful Views, the second part of our Nicaraguan adventure.