JUST LIVING, NICARAGUAN STYLE

I so readily recall the days of life in Spain when I discovered God was trying to teach me patience.  Patience is not easy for me.  I remember struggling day after day, hurrying myself around, only to end up waiting on some person or thing until I would become distraught and then have to get on my knees and say, “God, help me learn patience.”  Gradually God answered that prayer, at least in part, after waiting for over six months for what had been promised as a two-week wait for paperwork.  Cédula de habitabilidad--those two long words tied together with a preposition (of) took a good month to learn to say in Spanish, much less to understand what it meant.  It was a word to mean a certificate of some sort needed to inhabit the property on which we were building a church. 

It was a great lesson in learning how to live in another country, especially in how to plan one’s time in order to not get tied up in the stressful moments we live in the U.S.  Now Norma and I are back in Nicaragua, this time for five months, and finding a place to stay has been quite different than the shorter stays we have made previously. 

I had my agenda all set. Day one, I would be off and running, getting moved into our apartment and settled in two or three hours.  Of course that could be done, because all we had was two huge suitcases, three small ones, and two briefcases.  That is all we carried with us. So, no problem, we could get that done quickly and then we would be off into ministry.   Sure enough, it took no time at all to get us settled in the tiny two-room apartment.   It was nice and clean, so things were looking up. 

Here, I must revert back to a few hours before landing, somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, when Norma and I begin to strategize on how we would spend our first day or two after arrival.  OK, we will reach the apartment at about 9:00 pm, if things go well.  We will just go in, get to bed and rest until tomorrow.  In the morning, we will sign the contract for the apartment, pay the deposit, call a taxi, go to get our Nicaraguan telephones loaded with prepaid minutes and ready for use, buy some groceries, and hopefully get all this done before noon. Sounds easy enough in a U.S. mentality.  The agenda is set for Day 1 and all is well.  Day 2 would entail figuring out permanent transportation for the five months.

We had previously decided that we had only three viable options -- use taxis ($600+ per month), rent a car ($600++ per month) or purchase a good used vehicle, really cheap.  Norma had spent several hours researching used cars that appeared to be good enough to get us from point A to point B, and this option appeared to be more economical than the first two possibilities.  Not only would it be cheaper, but we would not be tied down to call and wait on a taxi every time we wanted to go somewhere.  A car rental would be off the charts financially.  So a purchase seemed the best option.  Ok, Lord, we will get an early start tomorrow and check off Days 1 and 2.

UNBELIEVABLE, UNFORESEEN BLESSINGS (isn’t God just like that?): 

June 3, we land in Managua at about 8:30 p.m. and are met by a Nicaraguan friend who helped us last year and offered to meet us again and take us to our apartment. After we pushed 350 pounds of baggage ¼ of a mile through the people, the airport parking lot and the thick 94% humidity, we packed (and repack) the small car with our bags and ourselves until finally they/we all fit in. On the 45-minute ride to the apartment, we tell our friend of the myriad of things we have to get done the next day, and that we are not sure we can get them all done unless we find a taxi or transportation for the day.  He immediately said, “No problem. I can stop on our way to the apartment, you can pick up food enough for a couple of days at a late-night grocery store, and as for a car, I have a friend who has one for sale.”  Before we could open our mouths, he was on his phone dialing the friend as he swerved in and out of the busy traffic.  When he got off the phone he said, “I can swing by tomorrow about noon, and will take you to look at the car.  Also, I have another friend who has a car he might be willing to sell or rent.  We can check on them both.”

After the 20 kilometers or so from the airport, he pulls into a grocery store and tells us he’ll wait with the car because it was loaded with baggage. (It’s not a good idea to leave baggage in an empty car.  That’s an open invitation for someone to grab it. )  Item number one checked off.  We bought enough food for two days and as we took off again, I saw a little store on the side of the road that I remembered from our last trip; and it was still open. It was a place we could get SIM cards and minutes for our Nica telephones.  I asked our friend to pull off and let us check.  Sure enough, item two completed.  Now we can communicate with our “amigos Nicaragüenses.” God has already worked wonders, unbelievable blessings…and so easy! Norma likes to say that he has gone before us.

JUST LIVING BEGINS: 

With two major accomplishments down, now begins the unforeseen blessing wrapped in testing--the adventure.  What about transportation?  We make two appointments on Day 2.  One is to see a car with the idea of purchasing.   The other possibility is to rent a car from a Nehemiah Center missionary agronomist for a few days while searching for one to buy. Our friend came by to pick us up on Day 2 (our first full day) and we are off to check on the first car.  In only a few moments, we find a new friend.  The owner of the car is a pastor who makes his living as a mechanic and has a car he is selling.  He tells us to take it out for a test drive. I had forgotten my driver’s license, so I asked our friend to drive it.  We wanted to take it up the Pochocuape mountain to see if this 4WD vehicle was capable of making it up the 30º incline, rutted-out dirt roads. Up we go, higher and higher and slower as we go.  We make it part way to the top and suddenly the engine dies.  Now what do we do?  Our friend tries to start the car, but to no avail.  We sit there in the middle of the dirt road for a while, with the foot brake on, thinking and silently praying.  Then he finally discovers that we are out of gas.  We are stuck.  Our friend calls the pastor owner of the car and he says he will come to get us, but it will probably be another 30 minutes or so for him to get gas and get up to where we are.  After a short wait, our partner in adventure came up with an idea.  He puts the car into neutral and we start backwards down the mountain, watching out for vehicles, people and oxen.  We go all the way to the bottom where we can find level ground.  Once the gas tank was level, he tried again and it started.  We managed to get back to the shop, having lost only about an hour.  That’s not too bad, but once again, a reminder of what life can be like JUST LIVING. 

We left the shop, thinking we would come back later when I had my license with me to try the car and the mountain again.  For now, we went on to our other appointment to see the car that we could possibly rent.  After meeting the missionary, the owner of the second car, and after some light conversation, we began to discuss the terms of renting his car and what his ministry as a 25-year missionary agronomist entails.  Ten dollars a day plus gasoline, he said. It’s a 4-wheel drive, automatic, air-conditioned (important more for safety than comfort when driving through the city) and fully insured, following all the laws of Nicaragua.  Of course, in Nicaragua insurance does not cover the person who is at fault, so that is something we have to take into consideration.  If we wreck it and it is our fault, the insurance will fix the other car, but not ours.  And on the side of relationship, we talked through great possibilities for him to visit our Pochocuape mountain rural community friends who are just getting into composting, cultivating, banana and other crops and admittedly say they need some advice on these new programs.

There's great potential in getting them together in the next few weeks to talk over how to best take care of God's creation. We hope this will catapult their fledgling recycling and agriculture endeavors to new heights after getting some great advice from this veteran missionary who has traveled many tropical countries and has picked up valuable information in each to share here in Nicaragua. Isn’t God amazing like that? Awesome, isn't it?!

At any rate, we think it through and decide we will rent the missionary farmer's car for a few days, at least until we can figure out what we are going to do for permanent transportation.  We drive the car and it seems to run well.  We give a payment for a few days rent and no strings attached.   We drove it home.  Day 2 and all is (fairly) well. 

Day 3.  About 6:30 in the morning, we hear this unbelievably loud noise.  It sounds like a screeching 747 jet liner with hiccups.  At first, I cannot tell where the noise is coming from.  It is so loud I cannot tell if it is outside the window, in our apartment, or in the apartment next door.  I walk toward the refrigerator, and for sure, that is where the noise is coming from.  I unplug the refrigerator to end the deafening noise, and run down to the apartment complex gate to look for the attendant.  He said no one would show up until 8 am.  I went back to the apartment, patiently waiting as we begin a new day of JUST LIVING.

At 8 am, the grounds manager came to listen to the refrigerator and said it was cooling fine, but just noisy. Of course, the screeching had momentarily stopped after unplugging and plugging it in again. Now that our our fridge had settled down, we headed to the store to get some needed supplies, a mop, bug spray and a few more groceries.  (This was to become another story.) Norma wants to drive the short distance to the grocery store.  We get our shopping done. The day is young.  I take the wheel and we head back toward our apartment. All of a sudden, the engine dies…right in the middle of the busy highway.  Fortunately and by God’s grace, I am rolling fast enough to get off on the dirt shoulder.  There is smoke coming from under the hood, but I don’t immediately see the problem.  I call our friend, who had helped us the day before. He can be there in 20 minutes.  We sat there on the side of the road for a few minutes. I tried again to start the car and it kicked right off. I didn’t realize that we were only about a quarter of a mile from the gate to our apartment complex, so I drove it on in.  When we got there and examined it, water was pouring out of the radiator through a nice-sized hole.  Now what do we do?

We leave the car parked and wait for our friend to arrive on his motorcycle. We put away the groceries and supplies and Norma says, “Boy! That refrigerator sure is making a noise and it’s getting louder.” We tell the apartment manager and she said she would have someone come out to check on it.  That was another two-hour wait.   In the meantime, I call the owner of the car and asked him what we should do.  He said well, if we could figure a way to get it fixed, he would pay for the work.  We called our new pastor/mechanic friend but couldn’t find him. We waited for about three hours, when he called back and said he would be with us in half an hour.  Sure enough, there he was on our doorstep.  Now, I’m wrangling the busted radiator while Norma’s wrangling the screeching fridge. The pastor/mechanic had two men with him and right there in front of our apartment door, in only a few short minutes, they had the radiator off the car and agreed to take it back to the shop, fix it and return early in the morning.  While two of the men were working on the car, we invited the pastor/mechanic into our apartment for water and a chair. We got into a very good discussion on strategies in mission, discipleship, and integral faith in God that must touch on every aspect of an individual’s life no matter which country they live in, because we’re all God’s family.  This was an unbelievable contact that God had put in our path.  The pastor said over and over how much he appreciated the fact that God speaks to people like us and sends us all the way to Nicaragua to help advance Kingdom thinking and biblical worldview.  What a good conversation we had with him. What an unforeseen blessing to us! We hope it was to him too. They took off with our radiator in the truck and said they would be back tomorrow with the radiator fixed and ready to install. I could not help but think…only two full days in Nicaragua and stalled twice beside the road.  What are the chances of that happening again?

About an hour into this car repair, which was happening five feet from our front door, the man came to check on the screeching refrigerator.  His diagnosis was, “Don’t worry about the refrigerator, it is just very loud.”  We did not agree, but oh well, it is not our refrigerator, and therefore not our problem when it goes out.  Another day of JUST LIVING.  The fridge got worse by the minute, so we called the manager back a while later. We unloaded all our groceries we had just put into the fridge and they removed the screeching machine. An hour later, they brought another fridge. We loaded food back into it and within the hour, it became as hot on the outside as any heater. We called the manager again, waited an hour and the diagnosis was the same…it’s functional, but normal to get hot to the touch. Another hour and it was actually heating up our tiny kitchen/living room area, so we call the manager AGAIN. They brought a third fridge…we unload the food AGAIN and reload into the (hopefully) last fridge. It’s worked for almost a week and we are grateful to even have one! Two days...two vehicles...three fridges!

We just try to stay focused and remember why we are here.  In one way, very little was accomplished that day, but, in God’s economy, in only two days, we made three new friends to minister with in this country that has much need and much to offer.  God is so good in his infinite grace and we are thankful for his blessing upon us.  Relationships are what Kingdom living is all about – our relationship with God and each other.  Stay tuned, more to come…