Time sure flies

We have almost been here 5 months, hard to believe. We are doing well. Sarah's parents are here visiting for 13 days. We have already visited a lake, a volcano, and the oldest colonial city in Central America (Granada). We will be heading to Bromadero, the village we live in, tomorrow. We are excited to be able to share this with our family and we look forward sharing it with other family members in the future.

We will be heading to Costa Rica the second of April to visit Seth's dad, Mike. He will be there with a short term medical mission team. Unfortunately, we will not be able to be there the entire time they are in Costa Rica, but at least we will be able to go visit for 4 days. We will probably be helping out in the clinics and hanging out with Mike. Once we return to Nicaragua we will be starting some projects in our community.

Bubbles and Cheese

Well Seth and I are back in Managua for a quick respite after being in the campo for 2 weeks. We had a great first couple weeks out there, but found it hard to have time for ourselves. We constantly have kids at our house or are visiting families in the community. People in Bromadero are very friendly and nice. We are welcomed eagerly when we visit people’s house and are always given a tortilla with cuajada (a dry, salty cheese) and a cafecito (coffee). People are very generous, even when they do not have much to give. We have been invited to several houses for lunch and dinner, so we have only made 5 meals for ourselves in the last two weeks.

The kids are a lot of fun to play with, making the time pass. We introduced bubbles to them and they loved it. Every time they come to our house they ask to play with them. One thing in the last two weeks we have noticed with the kids is that many of them don’t wear shoes while running around, though most of them have shoes/sandals of some sort. It seems that parents don’t make them wear them. Seth and I have made a rule, if kids want to play at our house they have to wear there shoes/sandals. Also, we are talking to the kids about the importance of wearing shoes. There are cows, pigs and chickens everywhere, therefore their feces all over, so this is a public health issue we need to work on, but we figured we needed to start somewhere.

Another thing we trying is to always have fruits and veggies in our house to give to kids as snacks so they will get used to eating them. We will do workshops with families about nutrition and and growing vegetables in home gardens. Right now the area is very dry and people don’t grow things during this time, so we will have to try in our own yard to see how things work.

We have been attending the Mennonite church in the village 20 minutes from where we live. The Sunday church service lasts 3 hours, which is something we are still trying to adjust to. We are trying to be open to see how God is working in the church and not focus on the things that are different from what we are used to. We are constantly reminded that the reason we are here is most of all to show Christ’s love to others and not to complete projects, so we are really trying to focus on relationship building in the communities. Right now our focus is on the community we live in, Bromadero.