A Long Overdue Scrap of Writing

I was in El Salvador for a week over spring break, and I wrote this thank you letter to my supporters about it. It is fairly long, and instead of writing another unique piece about the trip, I thought this would suffice to give some idea to you blog-type-people what my trip was like. Here it is.


*Disclaimer*: This is a very long letter

Dear Friends, April 2, 2009

First, I want to thank you so much for the prayer and financial support that you have so graciously given for me and the team as we went to El Salvador over spring break! It was a wonderful week of hard work, growing friendships, and showing God’s love to the people of El Salvador in any way that we could. We were prepared beforehand to be flexible and ready to deal with anything that we were asked to do, and I am glad to look back and see that the Lord was pleased to use us and our willingness to serve him.
There are so many things I could write about that happened on the trip, and I will try to write mostly about the important things, but I may include a few superfluities just to give a little color to it. Of course, for anyone who has ever been on a missions trip, there is always a sense that one can’t fully communicate the essence of the trip with mere words, but there is nothing that says one should not try. So, here goes!
The first thing that struck me about El Salvador was the thick, warm, nearly tropical atmosphere. Coming from Taylor University in the middle of ice-stricken Indiana, it was definitely a change for all of us (in this case, the word “change” is synonymous with “sweat”). We arrived at the airport in San Salvador late at night and met our missionary host, David Hawk, at whose house we would be based for the rest of the week. We piled all of our luggage into the back of a quaintly-sized bus (and this should hint to you at the seating space available to twenty-some-odd American college students) and ended up singing Christmas carols and camp songs during most of the 1 1/2 hour ride to Jucuapa, a smaller town in the south eastern part of the country. This was David’s first hint that we were, in fact, loud noisy Americans. It was straight to bed for us when we arrived, with the girls staying at the Hawk’s church just a block away from their house, and us Men staying at another house about a five minute’s walk away from the Hawks.
Waking on my first full day in El Salvador is worth mentioning, because it went the same as every other morning the rest of the week. At the Man house, four of us guys thought it would be cool to sleep outside so we took our mattresses and camped out on the back porch of the inner courtyard, an area that looks much like a miniature tropical jungle, complete with palm and mango trees. This is what happens: at about 6:00 a.m. the sun is starting to peek out from behind the trees in the yard, and the cacophony is only just beginning. If the equatorial sunlight at 6:00 a.m. does not wake you up, the sound of insects/animals/nature will. There are raucous parties of crickets and bugs that fills the air with their drinking songs (if insects could drink, that is what they would have sounded like). Sometimes a mango will fall from a tree and crash on the tin roof in the yard, sounding uncannily like a gunshot; this will definitely get you out of bed. If you are still determined to sleep any later than the aforementioned hour, there are the birds. These barbarians will chase each other around the yard, flapping their wings at the speed machine-gun fire; we found that this sound can be replicated by rolling your tongue as fast as you can. That is what the birds sound like.
All this to say that we got out of bed like clockwork every morning, no need for an alarm, no sir. Breakfast was then served at 7 at the Hawks house, and much coffee was usually consumed. Mrs. Hawk was a wonderful cook, and she was very gracious to cook for all twenty of us usually at least twice, if not three times, every day. So, the mornings were more or less the same thing, but each day was its own.
The days we spent either doing presentations for youth or working on a construction project, both of which happened at several schools in Jucuapa and the surrounding area. The first school that we went to was also the poorest in the entire community. They had a large area in the courtyard/outer area of the classrooms that was dust and dirt, which turns into a giant mud pit during the rainy season. We spent two days leveling the ground (with pickaxes and shovels. No fancy machinery here) and then laying a concrete slab over this area for the kids to play on and use to walk to class. We also did two presentations at this school, one for the morning students and then again for the afternoon students, and followed this pattern of doing two presentations in a day for each of the other two schools.
At the next school, we ended up tackling two different projects at the same time: half of us painted school classrooms and office which surrounded the inner courtyard area, and the other half took apart old moldy wooden desks and rebuilt them with fresh materials. One thing that will stick out to me a lot about this school was that when dinnertime came around, the work was mostly done except for some touchup that needed to be done on the walls, and which required only three or four people.
I found myself just standing around with nothing left to do, and I noticed a group of neighborhood guys also standing around watching us white people do manual labor. And then I realized that these guys probably play soccer (futbol), since that a requirement to being a male in El Salvador; so we started a pick up game and played until it got dark. I really connected with these local guys because I felt like I was back in Albania, where I grew up playing soccer in the dusty streets just like I was there in El Salvador. I know a little Spanish and was able to say a few things while playing, such as “Goal!”, “Yes!”, and “You have the soccer skills of a tortilla!”, and they always got a few laughs out of it. I realized that doing things like painting and laying concrete to serve these people is just as important as building relationships with them, and I hope that they were able to see the heart behind what we were doing.
I have forgotten to mention anything about our presentations up to this point. They essentially consisted of dramas, skits, puppet shows, and songs that we had ready to perform in front of a group. Some of these things were funny, loud, and hilarious, while others were more sober and thoughtful; all focused on Christ and his redemptive love for us, showing a world that is hurting and broken and in need of a savior. We spent a substantial amount of time preparing for the various parts of the presentation before the trip, and we were well-equipped to use our talents and skills to share the Gospel in this way once we made it to El Salvador.
I feel like there are many more things I could write about the trip, such as people we met and the experiences we had, but there is one more specific episode that I want to share with you. It was Friday morning, and we had been working hard all week with manual labor and presentations, and this day had been put aside to kick back a little by going shopping and visiting a local coffee plantation. At breakfast that morning we heard that we had the chance to be a part of another ministry opportunity, if we were willing to go. Earlier that week a boy of 17 had been climbing over the wall of his house because the front door had been locked. In the process of doing so he fell and cut his neck on the razor wire that was on the top of the wall, and he bled to death a little while later. Jucuapa, being a relatively small community, was hit pretty hard by this horrible tragedy. We learned that Miguel, the pastor of the Hawks church where the girls were staying, had been invited to give the eulogy sermon at the memorial service that would be held later that morning at the local high school. Miguel, in turn, asked us to perform our “Everything” drama, based off of the song by Lifehouse (if you haven’t seen this skit before, I would encourage you to look it up on YouTube, because it is a very powerful drama; just search “Lifehouse Everything skit”, and there are probably a lot of different versions of it on there). This was a huge opportunity for us because the boy’s family were not believers, and we would be performing at a non-Christian public school. Miguel gave an impassioned sermon, and from the bits and pieces that I understood, it was about the beauty in God’s creation of man, the precious gift of life that he has given to everyone, and the urgency that we should have in living our lives in obedience to the Lord. After this, we got up to perform our skit. Things were going smoothly, but then as it neared the end of the song the CD suddenly skipped and stopped working. I had a moment of panic as we were all up there, in front of hundreds of people, in the middle of the skit without music at the crucial part in the song. But, the panic passed as we continued the skit in silence, and with a few minor revisions, we improvised and finished it successfully. The crowd roared in applause, and it even seemed like they clapped louder after this final performance than any of the previous ones that we had done that week at other schools. I left wondering if perhaps it had been more powerful for them to see us continue the skit with the unexpected difficulty of the music stopping. Only the Lord knows. Another praise that can be given is that since then, Miguel has been invited back to speak at the school at least once a month. This is hugely unexpected, coming from a non-believing public school!
I hope that this long (maybe unnecessarily long) letter has been able to show a glimpse of what happened on our spring break trip to El Salvador. In addition to the doors that we were opened for the Hawks continuing ministry in Jucuapa, there were some wonderful friendships formed within the team that are continuing back here at Taylor. The Lord blessed us with safety, general good health, energy, and the privilege of being a part of what he is doing in El Salvador. Thank you again for your support, in whatever capacity, and may the Lord bless you in return.