EL TRIUNFO, Nicaragua -- The New Jerusalem Baptist Church is painted orange. I'm not sure why, but it stands out as you approach El Triunfo, a wide spot in the road about 15 miles or so from Nueva Guinea.

Luis Gutierrez is the pastor of the church. A short, wavy-haired man, he is, as best I can tell, passionate about his church and his people. El Triunfo's remote location has made it unattractive for mission teams, and as best as we can tell we were the first to visit the town in recent memory. Pastor Gutierrez was excited, not only for the potential to energize his own church, but for the opportunity to share some of the wealth with a fellowship of area pastors in which he is active.

The plan of our LEAMIS / Christ For The Cities mission team was to do construction work in the morning and outreach ministry in the afternoons. There is no question which was the most important to Pastor Gutierrez, who eagerly sent us out to visit the townspeople, dividing us into teams with one of the locals and two or three volunteers on each team.

Our construction work was somewhat smaller in scale than the planners of the trip had hoped or imagined, and there really wasn't enough work to keep all of us busy all the time.

We were tearing out some termite-rotted columns from the walls of the brick-and-stucco church, replacing them with rebar-reinforced concrete. There were several locals who had been hired to work, and we did the best we could to support them during the hours that had been designated for construction. They worked by themselves the rest of the time.

The Nicas (that's the term for residents of Nicaragua) perhaps had not anticipated that all of us would want to work -- even the women and the two young people on the team. It might have been somewhat disconcerting to them to see 12-year-old Alyssa Schroder helping to shovel the concrete volcano.

I'd already heard about the volcano from some friends of mine at church who went on a mission trip to Mexico last fall. It's a way to mix concrete. You start with a pile of sand, pour the cement mix on top, then mix thoroughly and form the pile into a volcano-like shape. Water is poured into the center of the volcano, and then the dry ingredients are carefully scooped up from around the edges and dumped into the center. Eventually, if you're careful, the concrete is mixed to the proper consistency. If you're not careful, water will break through the "wall" of the volcano before you're ready for it.

Once the mixture is at the proper consistency, gravel is added and mixed in.

On our last work day, we began a second project, digging out a footing for what will eventually be a Sunday school classroom for the church.

Some team members might have been disappointed that there wasn't more work to go around, but Amanda Van Deman, the full-time Christ For The City missionary who worked with our team, reassured us that it was our camper fees which were making it possible for the church to do the work in the first place. Whether or not we were providing the bulk of the labor, we were making the work possible.

Living props

Our normal schedule went something like this. We would rise and eat breakfast in our individual homes. (Two volunteers were assigned to each home.) Then, we would gather at the church at about 8 a.m. for our Holy Time Out (a daily devotion) and a team meeting. After that, we would get to work on construction until about noon. Then we would return home to lunch prepared by our individual host families. That was usually when we would "shower," which involved dumping bowls of cold rainwater on your head.

After lunch, we would return to the church, often accompanied by our host families, for the afternoon activity, which was usually visitation.

Christ For The City, you may recall, had rented an 18-passenger bus to bring us to El Triunfo. The driver didn't want to drive the bus back to Managua, so he left it in El Triunfo for the week and took a public bus back home. He left the keys with us, but he can't have realized how much use we would get out of the bus during the week.

For visitation, all 15 of the mission team members -- plus a number of locals -- would be packed onto the bus and driven around to be dropped off in different parts of El Triunfo or the surrounding neighborhoods. Each group would consist of one or two locals and two or three Americans.

But only a few of our group were fluent in Spanish. If you happened to be in a group with one of our two interpreters, or with one of the team members with at least marginal Spanish, you could feel like you were interacting with the people you visited. But I never wound up in such a team in any of my three visitation trips. There were times when I felt like a prop. I at least recognized enough Spanish to know that my church member was inviting the subject to attend the special services that night at church, and pointing out that we norteamericanos would be providing the program.

A few times, we prayed in English for the person being visited, hoping that they'd at least recognize our good intentions. On some visits, I read the Spanish-language text to the EvangeCube.

The EvangeCube, made by a company in Franklin, is a small plastic cube which folds and unfolds in different ways and has wordless illustrations designed for use in presenting an evangelistic message: Jesus on the cross, the empty tomb, and so on. The instructions that come with the cube include the standard script for using it in both English and Spanish. My Spanish pronunciation is passable, and even though I wouldn't understand every word, I could read the Spanish text in a more-or-less understandable manner. On the day when I was in Pastor Gutierrez' group, he kept calling on me to read the cube, so I must have been doing it somewhat respectably.

The third and last time we did visitation, we were dropped off at various points along a seemingly-endless country road. I referred to it jokingly as "The Bataan Death March of Evangelism," but in truth I was losing patience with the process, and I wasn't alone. Thankfully, that was our last day for in-home visitation.

Stand up and testify

In the evenings, we would have church services at the Baptist Church. Pastor Gutierrez would open and close the services, but they were primarily presented by members of our team, as interpreted by Amanda. There might be one or two personal testimonies from team members, perhaps a skit, and a message from Debra or another team member. The night of the visitation death march was the night I gave my own testimony.

The first night of services, Monday, Pastor Gutierrez had requested a program on marriage. The irony of this is that the church in El Triunfo, like many others in the area, is attended primarily by women and children. The rural Nicaraguan culture is such that men don't often attend church services -- and when a strong man does arise in a church congregation, he is often perceived as a threat to the pastor, eventually leading to a split in the church. Pastor Gutierrez, to his credit, seems to want to break out of that mold. But only one or two men were present to hear a message on marriage intended for both genders.

On Wednesday, we abandoned our normal schedule in order to conduct a pastor's conference which had been requested by Pastor Gutierrez. The conference drew 70 people representing 40 area churches, most of whom had to ride public buses to get to the conference.

Oh, yes, the buses. The highway that ran through El Triunfo was host to a constant stream of public buses. Most were school buses or transit buses from the U.S. which were too old to meet legal requirements. So they get shipped off to Latin America, where they're painted with the endpoints of their normal routes (MANAGUA ... NVA. GUINEA). Remember our eight-hour bus ride from Managua to El Triunfo, the one I described Tuesday? We stopped when we wanted to eat or when someone had to answer the call of nature. If you'd taken that trip on a public bus, well, your only hope would be that the driver might let you off the bus when and if he stopped for fuel.

Anyway, the conference covered various aspects of leadership and ministry and appeared to be well-received by the participants. LEAMIS founders Rev. Debra Snellen and Gail Drake, and our fellow team members James and Laurie Schroder, provided much of the program. Amanda, bless her heart, was on her feet most of the day, interpreting for everyone.

My own little part of the program didn't go that well. Gail wanted an object lesson for her part of the program, and she chose something called "oogley." "Oogley" is a mixture of cornstarch and cold water which, when you knead it in your hands, feels solid. If you stop working with it, however, it will instantly liquefy and run through your fingers. Gail uses it to illustrate the need for us to be deliberate in maintaining our relationships with God and others. Sonja Goold and I had both seen oogley demonstrated at Mountain T.O.P. camps back in the states, and so Gail thought we'd be able to demonstrate it ourselves. She asked each of us to find a partner and to be responsible for a separate batch of oogley. Once we had brought it to the proper consistency, we would begin passing it around the crowd, so that people could feel it for themselves.

The night before the demonstration, I asked Gail about the proper proportions of water and corn starch. She shrugged off the question, saying it would become apparent as I worked with the mixture.

It didn't, and soon both my team and Sonja's had added too much water and created a soupy mess. Gail's object lesson was ruined, or so we thought.

I was already in a bad mood because I'd been sitting in the back of the room laboriously writing the pastors' names on certificates, and I'd misunderstood someone as being critical of my work. When the oogley failed, in front of everyone, I went back to the certificates. Meanwhile, someone ran to the pulperia across the street to buy another box of corn starch. Eventually, with the extra corn starch, Gail got the oogley to work herself -- and she used the mistake as a chance to talk about how a leader must sometimes deal with the failures of his flock.

Nueva Guinea

On Friday, the good people of El Triunfo wanted to take us sightseeing. To them, the biggest and most exciting thing imaginable is the town of Nueva Guinea, a few miles down the road. It's a small city, with various merchants and amenities not available in rural El Triunfo. Many of the shops along the crowded streets looked dirty and run-down, but we drove past a spotless and very attractive little ice cream shop.

We stopped at the sad little hospital in El Triunfo in order to visit some patients. We divided into two teams. My team visited a ward with six beds, all occupied by women, ranging in age from early teens to elderly. Some of the team made balloon animals (Bob Willems is a genius at it, bringing a sense of showmanship to the party.) We also put colorful stickers on the back of their hands and passed out juice and cookies.

There was a lovely young teen girl, with a broken leg. Debra asked her if it hurt, and she said no, but she certainly didn't seem very energetic.

The other ward was occupied by three very small children, one only eight months old, and they got similar treatment.

After we left the hospital, we stopped by to visit Pastor Gutierrez' elderly, and very ill, mother-in-law. We filed through the room shaking her hand. After everyone had greeted her, as many of the group who could crowded into her room, but I began looking for the outhouse. (I was in a funk, which I'll explain further in a later installment.) Those who did take the opportunity to speak with her say she radiated the quiet grace of someone who has finished her race and is content to meet her maker. At least one person recalled meeting her as a highlight of the week.

Big sky country

Frank Schroer, Sonja Goold, Michelle Schussler and I were housed in two homes in Montevideo, a neighborhood a mile or two down the road from El Triunfo. Every morning, and again after lunch, we would have to wait for the Nissan bus to come pick us up, and then before lunch and again after church, the bus would take us home. One morning, we ended up having to walk, but for the most part this system worked pretty well.

The bus dropped us off at Sonja and Michelle's house, right off the highway, and Frank and I -- usually accompanied by the Sanches family, who had ridden the bus to services with us -- would walk over the hill.

On Monday night, I was particularly struck by the beauty of the sky. A bright near-full moon shone down on us, and a breeze offered some relief from the heat. I had a giddy feeling about the universality of human experience. I didn't want to make light of the considerable difficulties that the people of El Triunfo had to face, but we were all alive, and all happy.

Later that evening, after Frank and I had retired to our cots, I could hear the sounds of life from the other end of the shed. Children were talking. The youngest child was crying, and her mother began singing her a lullaby. One of the other children was led in what seemed to be a bedtime prayer. I drifted off to sleep with the realization that the people of El Triunfo were not all that different from people anywhere else.

My little boy

On Saturday night, we had separate programs for the children and youth of the church. The youth were in the church sanctuary; the young children were in the courtyard of the school across the street. I donned a clown wig and nose for a skit in the young children's program.

Our program broke up fairly early, but the youth program was still going strong. While we were waiting around, various members of the team who had brought Polaroid I-Zone cameras used them to make postage stamp-sized instant photos of the kids, who absolutely adored this. Night fell and still the youth service (which had a packed sanctuary) was going strong. Finally, it started to rain, and people started scrambling for shelter, such as the porch of the pulperia across the street.

A tiny little boy, perhaps one year old, was wandering near me, just starting to sob. I remembered seeing him earlier in the day, when we'd taken some of the children to a nearby playground. I looked around to see if I saw a mother or sibling nearby, but I didn't. I picked him up and walked across to the pulperia, assuming that the mother would probably be right behind me somewhere looking for her baby.

I sat there on the porch of the pulperia, with my little boy in my lap. He sat quietly, tired from a long day of activity, and then fell asleep in my arms, and I started to think about his prospects in El Triunfo. I'm a single guy, and it's beginning to look like I don't have any prospects for progeny of my own, so it was fun for a moment to imagine taking him home to los Estados Unidos. Eventually, of course, a girl -- probably an older sister -- came and got the boy and took him over to the church, where I presume his mother must have been all along. She'd probably sent the boy across the street with the girl.

I looked to see if I could find the mother and the little boy as they left the church at the end of the evening, but I must have missed them.

TOMORROW: My new heroes