Day Four: February 5th, 2012

Dear Internet,

The bus I rode

Just as a heads up, from here on in the days were all busy and a lot of things pulled at my heart strings. I'll try to keep these posts short, but I have a lot to say! :)

Day Four was a Sunday and we went to church! I thought we left a little early for church, but I just looked at the schedule and we actually had lunch late. I think what messed me up was that I actually woke up earlier than usual due to my extended nap the day before. :)

They had pancakes for breakfast, but didn't eat much due to my stomach. :( Some of the kids came over and had breakfast with us too.

Inside the bus

We had two buses for our church adventure and my team members split up between them. I rode on the bus that I hadn't ridden on before, easy choice. :) One really cool thing about the buses in Nicaragua is that they are rarely all one color. They are painted really fun colors and often have names painted on the front (I never figured out the reason for this). The bus I rode on was no different. Inside the bus, some of the kids' names are on really big stickers. It was way cool.

Once we were all on the bus, we went from the Team Center up to the Casa Bernabe building to pick up the rest of the kids. It was fun to see them all dressed up for church! One of the "middle-aged" kids (about 12 years old) sat with me. Her name is Candida. She read the whole way, my kind of girl! :)

Going into the church building

I found that the bus rides made me feel a little car sick from here on in in the trip... which wasn't really surprising if you think about it. The roads are pretty bumpy and we always had the windows down, letting all the lovely aromas of the street waft in. :) There was also a lot of dust. Oh and I was on the "cologne" bus too... very fragrant!

We picked up a few other people along the way too. The ride was about 45 minutes long. The church is on a side street and I had a few "aren't we there YET?" moments. :)


The church and out buildings are all walled in (which is the norm in Nicaragua). The church itself is a long, skinny building with the bathrooms on one end. It is actually air conditioned, which was very nice. There were a few other buildings, but I didn't ask what their purposes were. They have a store there called Una Mujer that is a single mom ministry. They make jewelry... very pretty! I brought some home for presents. The store wasn't open, but Christian brought some to the Team Center for us.

The layout of the church

We sat towards the back of the church. The stage and "tech booth" are in the middle of the room. There were screens that they had the words to the songs projected on. They sang a few familiar songs in Spanish. My favorite was the Revelation Song!!! It was beautiful!

The pastor is a Verbo Church missionary (the church that started and runs Casa Bernabe) and is from the USA. He preached in Spanish, but Christina translated for us. They had a really cool system for that too. Christina's voice came thru what I can best describe as a hearing assistance device. They look just like the OHS Auditorium's hearing device things. So only the people with the devices could hear her translating, and we could adjust our own volume. :) The sermon was about the parable of the sower and the seed. They had warned us that church often runs long, but I didn't find that it was boring or too long at all! Oh, I forgot to mention that after the worship portion of the service was done, the kids left to go to Sunday School. They came back at the end of the service. We all then piled in the buses and headed back to Casa Bernabe.

Getting ready!

I finally ate a normal lunch! Yay God!

After lunch was the second photo project that my team had planned... a photo booth! We brought down some funky hats and boas too. There were three different "stations" going on and the kids rotated between them. There were two different games and then my photo booth. Essentially I put my camera on a tripod and took pictures of them having fun. I tried putting a chalk line down and told them to stand on the line, but it quickly got worn off and I just turned the camera if they weren't in the same exact spot. :) We were set up in the overhang part of the Casa Bernabe building, so we were in the shade.

The youngest girls

The youngest girls had the most fun with it! At one point, I think Jaja had four fake mustaches on. In many of the photos you can hardly tell its her, she had that much stuff on! She and Paula LOVED it. They also enjoyed dressing US up, and even once dressed up their caretaker. :)  The older girls had fun with it too. The boys liked it for about five minutes, and then they had had enough. I laughed a lot!

This is Jaja!

It was also fun to watch the other games going on. A lot of them were what I would call "trust" games, or games that teamwork was very important. They had three legged races, and that kind of thing. Once, they expanded on the three legged race and had three people at the same time instead of two. It was so funny to watch.

That night we had dinner and porch time.

We had porch time early because we had to leave early the next day. Day Five is a busy one!

And, just for kicks and giggles, I made a map of the Casa Bernabe grounds. It is by no means to scale and there is a lot more land extending from the top and right sides. *Click to enlarge.

In Christ,
Laura