Day four of our trip is coming to a close and it has been quite the day. Breakfast was served at 6:00 a.m. and then we piled into three 4x4 pickup trucks for a trip up into the mountains. We planned to see a new community that was started with the help of World Renew and visit the small Christian school that was completed last year.
Everything started exactly as we planned, until a small fender bender stopped our caravan in its tracks. The only damage done in the accident was the reshaping of the hood of our Toyota pickup, but we still needed to stop and wait for the police to arrive and write up their accident report. Two happy hours later, we were on our way.
Despite the delay, our trip was amazing. The scenery was breathtaking as we climbed through Rain Forest/Coffee Plantations and made our way up to the 24 family community that lives at the top of this part of the world. We spent an hour in the two room school listening to the teacher (who proudly described it as a palace compared to the shack they had before), meeting the children and members of the community, having the children sing to us and returning the favor by singing Oh Canada for them. The community leaders told us about the excitement of having land of their own, 89 acres shared by the 24 families living there. They told us about the sustainable farming practices that they try to practice while farming on slopes that were often steeper than 50 degrees, and they invited us to visit one of the farms to see their work first hand, but the rain had swollen the river to the point that it was no longer safe to drive across.
Our visit was truly inspirational. The teacher of the school expressed great thankfulness to Christian supporters from North America for the help in building their new school and she talked about how all of it was dedicated to God and His glory. And the people of the village also expressed great thankfulness at having the opportunity to have land of their own and do 'work that is real'.
We were left with much to think about.
Tomorrow we return to the mud. We are discovering first hand that it really is the rainy seaon in Matagalpa.
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