What, Exactly, I'm Doing

“So what, exactly, are you doing in Nicaragua?”

I keep getting this question, so I think it’s time to address it, en masse.

I’m interning this summer with a Christian community development organization called International Teams (ITeams for short).  Specifically I’m a health intern in Masatepe, Nicaragua.  As the first health-related employee of ITeams in Nicaragua, my job is to analyze the healthcare in Masatepe and figure out how future teams/ employees can best assist those Nicaraguans who are looking to make sustainable improvements.

Which is to say I’m doing a lot.  I’m testing water sources and looking for ways to increase the clean water supply to Masatepe.  I am working with public and private healthcare facilities to determine how donations of time and equipment from the US can be used effectively to create long-term change driven by Nicaraguans.  I am trying to figure out a safe way to kill every dang mosquito in the entire country and, believe me, they’re motivating me.

But that is only a fraction of the crazy things God has brought me to this summer.

I’m also participating in a discipleship huddle that’s smashing through my previously shallow view of what discipleship meant.  I’m running in the mornings on routes that include everything from coffee farms to lagoon views with a group of people from all over the world.  I’m bonding with my fellow interns by climbing down the side of a mountain in the rainforest on a ridiculously steep, muddy, path, sprinting across 10-foot hoards of biting ants, and finding monkeys by yelling back to them when they scream.  I’m learning how to say useful things like, “I dropped my phone in the toilet; do you have any rice?” in Spanish.  I’m staying up late to talk with my mama Nica about topics from boy problems to how Nicaraguan familial brokenness is rooted in cultural tendencies.

In other words, I am being stretched and shaped and challenged and broken and put back together and poured out and filled up all at once.  I am changing, and yet somehow becoming more me than I ever have been before.  God is giving me the desires of my heart-- everything from vulnerable friendships to knowing him better to seeing a monkey in the wild.  At the same time He is breaking my heart for the suffering that people live through every day and for my own role in being a part of a sinful humanity.

What, exactly, am I doing in Nicaragua?  I’m not changing the world.   But I am doing everything I can to be a part of how God’s changing the world (and my heart as well).  Because I look forward to the future we’ve all been promised: on Earth as it is in heaven.