Driving Rains, Blinding Sunshine, and Slippery Slopes

June 16th

Artezon, Ecuador

Although I’ve been here for a little more than a week now, today was my first experience of the trip doing mission work away from the camp. With such a big M-Fuge group, the 126 students and adults were split up among 12 or 13 communities where they held a Vacation Bible School and painted school and community buildings. That was the plan at least.

The morning time proved to be a little hectic, as a group of six of the camp staff (including me), had to drive to five of the surrounding communities to talk to school directors and village leaders before the day’s events took place. Five communities in forty-five minutes. Five communities separated by dirt roads several kilometers long winding in and around the surrounding landscape. Needless to say, it was a whirlwind morning.

With directions to two villages I had never set foot in before the day began, the keys to a small, grey Nissan, and a willing group of eleven volunteers from M-Fuge, we headed up the mountain to accomplish our tasks. The ride up the mountain itself was an answer to prayer. Although in first gear, the truck stalled twice going up hill with the weight of the people, VBS and painting supplies in the back. It took a while, but eventually, we and the three trucks accompanying us made it up the side of the mountain to the villages on the other side. Our group worked in the village of Artezon today, about a 15 minute drive from the camp. In conjunction with a school from Gamboa, our first Vacation Bible School was a great success with about 95 children showing up. I failed to mention the driving rain that soaked everything for most of the morning as we enjoying recreation, music, Bible stories, and face painting outside.

After Bible school, our team mixed the paint supplies we had brought to the site and painted a good portion of the exterior of the school building. Reds and yellows dominated the walls as the group accomplished more today than we originally thought we could. With a successful day out at the mission site, we safely made it back to camp in time to play futbol before dinner.

It was a very tiring day. A day that vacillated not only in weather conditions, but also in knowing what to do. It was the first time that I was in control and in charge of a large group of people, a group with no previous experience of how to pull off an Ecuadorian VBS. Thank goodness for previous experiences with my church doing VBS or we would have been a bunch of gringo locos surrounded by an out-of-control herd of Ecuadorian school children. God is good though and helped us focus on the tasks at hand, even in the chaos of not knowing how anything would turn out in the morning before we left.

Responsibility of a high school group in a foreign country is an unnerving feeling. Especially when your Spanish vocabulary is still growing and you have only three translators for 90+ people. Yet, God doesn’t expect you or I to pull off miracles on our own. He does it though us, which in itself is a blessing.

It’s been a while since I’ve been this tired. However, knowing the work that is being done in Artezon and Gamboa, as well as the rest of the surrounding communities, makes it all worth it.

P.S. A big thank you to Doug and Janice Limbaugh who are lending me their digital camera to capture some of the action during the next few weeks. While mine grew wings and flew off, God certainly provides, and now I have another resource to show you my time in Ecuador.