we had about 100 kids throughout the week!
This little baby was only 28 days old!
This little girl couldn´t wait to take me to her house and meet her mom and her new baby sister, just 3 days old!
Its great to always do these VBS programs for the kids, and it feels so great at the end of the day to know that you have put smiles on so many kids´ faces and really shared the love of Jesus with them. However, after the morning kids activities were done, I experienced a whole different side of Guarari that I never had before...
After our VBS program was over, the team did some work projects around the site, like rebuilding the fence, picking up trash, and mowing the lawn. One of the women named Rosa that regularly attends with her family told me about a water problem she was having at her home and asked if some of the people from the team could come and fix it. We walked with her 45 minutes downhill to her house (this is when we realized the uphill hike she had done every day with her children to come to VBS). We arrived to what is called here a ¨squatter camp¨ - basically a bunch of tin shacks built by the government for Nicaraguan immigrants (many illegal) to live in. This is the inside of Rosa´s house...
kitchen area
where the water was coming in... those sheets hanging are the walls of another family´s home.
the next day, the guys from the team came and fixed it! what a blessing!
Her mother, Marina, also had a problem with water, so they went in and fixed her mother´s as well. She had a little one room shack, about the size of my bedroom. There were holes and big gaps in her roof, and she said that rain water, cat urine, etc came in all time. Her baby was sick from everything being damp and moldy. They had a nice new mattress someone had donated for them, but they didnt want to put it on the dirt floor, because it was always wet and smelly (they had no bed frame). The only decorations on the walls of Marina´s home were a small paper picture frame made at the beginning of the week at VBS, a foam cross made at VBS with the last team, and a piece of paper with the Bible verse in Spanish ¨Nothing can separate us from the love of God¨ that my team gave her in March.
During my time there, the stories of these women´s lives unraveled and really hit me hard. First, these women are God-fearing Christians who regularly attended the VBS with their children. It seemed so unfair that this is how they have to live. I have seen terrible poverty before throughout Latin America, but this is the first time that I really met the people and knew the stories of those that were living in it.
Marina has 10 children - 7 boys, all living in Nicaragua, and 3 girls. Rosa (whose roof we also fixed), about 19, Marinita, 11, and Yipsy, 2 1/2 (who she still breastfeeds because of lack of food), are her daugters. Rosa has 2 children - Hunny, 2, and Hilary, 1. This means that Marina has a child AND a grandchild of the same age.
Yipsy (Marina´s daughter) is in the middle, Hunny (Marina´s granddaughter) is on the right.
What else is there for Marina? She can´t work because she is illegal. She doesn´t have a husband because he left her and has a family with another woman. The home she is staying in belongs to Yipsy´s father and she told us he could kick her out at any time. We were first at her house on a Friday to look at the leak, and by the time we came back on Monday, this man had come and taken the electrical cables from the home, leaving her without electricity. Seeing the desperate situation of this woman, I can only thank God that she has been saved by Jesus and has the hope of eternal life in Heaven... it´s hard to think of what else she has to live for. I´m also thankful that God sent me to minister to this family, and that I have had the blessing of being born in America and not in a situation like this.
I didn´t know anything about Marina´s situation and would have never expected it either... her and her daughter always showed up with a smile on their faces to VBS. I know we made a big difference in this family´s life by fixing the leaks and through that, showing God´s love to them in a very practical way. Gracias a Dios, Rosa and Marina´s smiles were even bigger after they told us that the repairs had worked and the leaking had stopped!
Rosa and Marina
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