Day 5 - And today we walk!

Written by Tim:

Hey everyone, so I just sent everyone back to their host homes for the evening. We have had a very blessed time. Tonight was our mid-outreach debrief. We sat together for a while and shared about our ministry experiences and then prayed for each other. I'm not gonna lie, there were many a tear shed tonight.

God has been so present to us in all of this. I've had the unique experience of being what is called the 'rotating leader' which means that I can spend a day in whatever site I want to visit. Well, the first day I jumped in to the Social Work site with Javier, Jenn and Will. My heart has been there ever since. It's so hard to see the living conditions in El Gorreon. We are living and doing lots of work in Magdalena which itself is quite poor. But compared to El Gorreon, Magdalena is Vancouver. The big difference? Water. Magdalena has fresh water - aqua pura - and the Gorreon does not. My heart hurts with the depth of need in EG.

Although we have had a lot of work to do, the SI team has also planned a few things for us for when we have time off. Today we hiked up the Ecological Park above Magdalena. Basically this was 1 hour zigzagging up the mountain through quite dense forest. For many of us this came minutes after returning from EG which is a 20-30 minute walk uphill! It was lots of fun, but after talking tonight, I think that will be a more powerful memory.

Please continue to pray for us. Many in our group are feeling like they aren't doing enough - we all come back from our job sites and talk to each other and have these great stories, but a couple have not yet experienced that. Some of us are feeling the Spanish frustration acutely, we often sit and listen to whats happening in our job sites without being able to say anything to help. And I think that God has lit a fire in many of us for Missions. To hear people talk tonight and cry over the people they have met was such a blessing, God is shaping in us a heart for the poor. Pray that we would continue to allow him to work in us.

Tomorrow we head into Antigua for the day. We have time to shop and explore as well as we are touring a coffee plantation (guess who's the most excited about that?), it will be a full day and we are looking forward to the time to recharge our emotional batteries.

Thanks for following our stories every day. Tomorrow hopefully we'll have some more time (we were running all day today) and some of the students will be able to blog again. See you soon!