EL TRIUNFO, Nicaragua -- By all rights, I should have been hysterical.

It was the afternoon of January 12, and I had just gotten my first look at my living arrangements for the next week. Frank Schroer and I would be sharing a 10-by-10 room in one end of what would, in Bedford County, be called a livestock shed.

And not a very good livestock shed.

The building was assembled from rough, weathered wood, with gaps between the boards. There was a plain tin roof. A tin wall, about five and a half feet high, separated the room that Frank and I would occupy from the room into which Teresa Sanches and her family would crowd into for the week. At night, exhausted, we would collapse into bed to the cacophony of dogs outside, voices and occasionally crying children inside. It all sounded like it was right next to us, in the same room.

My plain metal bed was covered with a patchwork of towels and sheets which looked neither comfortable nor sanitary. The family would often come into the room and make the bed in the afternoon, but that consisted of pulling a top cover over the mess.

The floor, in both rooms, was dirt. Small, stringy chickens and a dog or two wandered freely into any room left open.

Next door to the shed with both our rooms was another shed, this one serving as the family living room and kitchen. It, too, had a dirt floor. Frank and I would take our meals here, with the chickens wandering around our ankles doing, well, what chickens do.

On the back side of the living room building was the shower -- a small wooden stall with a large rain water bucket and a plastic bowl. The bather stood precariously on two wooden planks, dumped a bowl-full of chilly water over his head, lathered up and then rinsed with another bowl-full, or several, of the cold water. The ground beneath the boards became muddy, of course, and "rinsing" often resulted in a spatter of mud on the bather's calves.

The shower stall was not fully enclosed, either; the bather could peer over one wall into the living room. And the two-foot-wide entrance to the stall was uncovered, so anyone who happened to be standing in a particular corner of the back yard could, if they were correctly placed and so inclined, get an eyeful. (It never happened to me while I was bathing.)

And, please, let's not even mention the outhouse. I'm trying to forget the outhouse.

Why would anyone spend a night here, let alone a week?

That's a good question. I can give you some answers right now -- and I hope to do just that, over the next few days -- but I may not have the full picture for quite some time to come.

Telling the story

I once heard a minister of my acquaintance talk about a moving, miraculous experience that he had at a religious conference out of town. He resolved not to tell anyone about the experience for six months afterward. Why? It turns out that one of his pet peeves is people who return from a conference, retreat, mission trip or what have you and talk incessantly about it, insisting that everyone within earshot simply must go through that same program and have that same experience.

I cringed as I heard him say this; I know I've bent some ears in the past with tales of my domestic mission trips.

But what does God give us those experiences for, if not to share them with others?

And so, it's with a bit of hesitation that I offer you the tale of my mission trip to El Triunfo, a wide spot on the road to Nueva Guinea. I tell you the story not because it is particularly unique; Bedford County has a number of short-term missionaries, some of whom have made many such trips. They may have many stories more interesting than mine. One Shelbyville church had people in a different part of Nicaragua at about the same time I was there, and another church that I know of sent a team to Nicaragua last year.

I'm a writer. I tell my story not because I think I'm unique -- obviously, I'm not -- but because I enjoy telling the story and have a forum in which to do so. Why shouldn't I take the opportunity to stand up and testify?

It all started, inappropriately enough, with my own bad attitude.

For nine years, I have been a volunteer in a domestic missions program which places volunteers into the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee. It was during one such camp week, in late July 2002, that I came down with what I assumed was just a nasty cold but which later turned out to be a sinus infection. I was coughing and felt miserable all day Friday, and I really didn't get to enjoy our climactic day working with special-needs children. This tended to magnify some other relatively-minor annoyances, and I moped around feeling miserable and angry at my situation. At one point, I swore to myself that I would never come back again.

Saturday morning, I slipped out of camp after breakfast and didn't stay for the traditional camp-ending closing circle, a wonderful time of prayers and farewells.

A few days later, I was over my bad attitude and felt I needed to apologize to a few of the people I had snubbed. I had an unrelated excuse to e-mail Gail Drake, who had directed the camp, and I took the opportunity to apologize for and explain my bad attitude.

Gail was typically gracious in her response. At the end of her e-mail, she added what was almost an afterthought:

"By the way, have you ever thought about going on an international mission trip? I would love it if you would join LEAMIS sometime. We are going to Nicaragua Jan. 9 - 22. Just wanted to know if you might be interested."

LEAMIS (it stands for LEAdership in MISsions) is a missions group, based in Marion County, founded by Gail and the Rev. Debra Snellen. LEAMIS organizes its own foreign mission trips, like the one I participated in, but also helps train churches and mission organizations for their own mission trips and projects. It's separate from the domestic program for which Gail works and in which I've been a volunteer.

Our trip to Nicaragua was organized through Christ For The City International, a Kansas City-based mission group with full-time, in-country missionaries in a number of nations, including Nicaragua.

Me? Nicaragua?

I'd never thought I was even cut out for foreign missions. I'd never been out of the country, save for a few hours in a tourist-trap Mexican border town. I had every reason to believe I wouldn't be cut out for living in third world conditions. I'd reacted to previous suggestions of foreign mission trips the way people react when I suggest they go to the domestic program I'm involved in.

"It's nice that you do that sort of thing, but I'm just not qualified."

Well, here's some news for you: neither am I.

Fortunately, God is. It's said that "God doesn't call the qualified, He qualifies the called." Nowhere is that more true than on a short-term missions trip, foreign or domestic, when ordinary people (people, whether you want to believe it or not, just like you) get kicked out of their comfort zones and find, to their surprise, that God enables them to survive, and even minister.

Once I had made the decision to make the trip, God began stepping in. I'm a horrible fund-raiser, and I detest having to ask for money. But as soon as I made up my mind to go on the trip, strange things started happening. Two people in California that I know only through an on-line computer game sent me my first $200, and later added another $100. Friends and family rushed to be a part of the trip. I reached my target of $1,700, and even after that people gave me money for incidental expenses (such as my vaccinations, which I had to get at the Vanderbilt International Travel Clinic in Nashville).

The way in which the money came in from unexpected places at unexpected times seemed only to confirm that God wanted me on that airplane.

Fourteen team members gathered the first weekend in November in Germantown to train for the trip. A fifteenth member was added after that training weekend and our on-site missionary in Nicaragua was the 16th member of the team. We gathered in Managua on Jan. 9. Ahead of us was a time of struggle and triumph like nothing I'd experienced before.

TUESDAY: The Road to El Triunfo