Week 9- Nicaragua!

This week I was sick on Monday so I didn’t get to do ministry, I called Ryan and my mom and caught up with the family a bit. For ministry the rest of the week, I was in the kitchen a lot doing PLENTY of dishes and helping with meals, but I always love being in the kitchen because the ladies on staff are so much fun. I did drop probably five cups on the ground as I was trying to bring them out, and they all laughed at me haha, fair enough. We also did prayer walking this week handing out food which was new, we passed out rice, beans, and squash. My team gave food to widows and got to sit and talk with them which was sweet. One testimony from a prayer walk this week was a lady who had been in an abusive, alcohol addicted relationship for the last 42 years. She was telling us about her anger at her husband and God through tears, we were there for encouragement that God is still with her and hears her cries. It was a heart breaking house visit, but cool to see how the Holy Spirit moved through the words we spoke over her. The other ministry I did was working on the farm this week with my friend Aubrey, we picked up sticks and piles of grass with wheelbarrows but got to do it with these two 14 year old boys who were helping us, so that was fun to get to talk with them more. My team also has microchurch on Wednesdays every week with the kids, so it’s always sweet to see them:)

For Sabbath, I woke up at 5:30am and had personal devo time and played some guitar, then we had squad church and I took a nice nap afterward. In the afternoon I read and played with the kids that were there for church and we played soccer after church for about an hour and a half which was a lot of fun, VERY sweaty. Then I talked with some people and hung out.

For our Adventure day, me and my friend Laura went into to town and cafe hopped while the rest of our squad went to the beach. We also grocery shopped for the entire squad which ended up being a lot of fun, the list was like 9 things of peanut butter, 5 bottles of hot sauce, 4 loaves of banana bread, and more random things, our shopping carts were blindingly American haha. Throughout the day, Laura and I went to four different cafes to try out and just chilled. We talked to these two people on the side of the road for a bit, got the chance to pray over them and hear what they were struggling with, it felt like 15 minutes but ended up being about an hour which is insane.

Some random things: While we were out walking and passing food out to the widows, we got stopped by the police, nothing really happened but they had to talk to our guide for a while. One night at 10pm, so it’s dark, my friend Maisey sits up from her bed and tells me “Payton. I think I just saw something crawl on your bed.” SORRY WHAT. NO. So then I jumped up onto the ladder because I’m on a top bunk and would probably sprain an ankle if I jumped off the bed, then Maisey goes “well maybe I’m just seeing stuff” hahahah. One of our guides is named Saul and he opens his backpack and tells me to touch what’s in it, which looks like a lizard tail thing. I genuinely thought it was fake, or dead at the very least and like cut from the body, I don’t even know. Then he opens the backpack all the way and there are TWO LIVE IGUANAS HAHAHA for iguana soup, so that was an experience. Saul also got me to eat pig head last week so this kind of thing is weekly apparently haha, I love him though, he is one of the coolest people and has four boys that are my favorite kids ever. Funny story- I grabbed my phone and then a FREAKING LIZARD DROPS onto it. So I proceed to scream, jump (pretty sure I caught air time), and throw my phone all in one motion. And then the 14 year old boy I was playing basketball with hears me scream, so I explain to him in Spanish what happened. Then he just laughs and starts looking around, grabs a basketball to throw at a different lizard on the roof, grabs the lizard and PUTS IT ON MY SHOULDER. HAHA WHAT. I told him we were no longer friends hahahah.