EL TRIUNFO, Nicaragua -- I'm not fluent in Spanish, despite two years in high school and a low-level conversational class last fall at Motlow College. When native speakers go at their normal pace, my eyes glaze over and I can't understand anything. Even so, my mission trip roommate Frank Schroer claimed that I knew more words and phrases than he.

In any case, both of us together were able to communicate sufficiently with the Teresa Sanches family during the hours when we were in our makeshift home, a small shed just a few miles out of El Triunfo. Frank and I were among 16 team members in a mission trip through LEAMIS in partnership with Christ For The City International.

"Comer, Frank," the family would call when it was meal time. I joked about this; they never called "Comer, John" or "Comer, Frank y John" or even "Comer, Juan." Of course, the family surely noticed that Frank ate all of his food while I often left food on the plate, so maybe they figured he was more excited about meal time.

We ate by ourselves, which we were told was not unusual. It's not like there was a big family supper table that we could have gathered around; the two of us ate at a small table which was usually parked up against the wall of the living room. In some cases, missionary Amanda Van Deman told us, families might not even have enough plates to feed the entire family, much less two guests, at the same time.

A part of our CFCI camper fee was given to each of our host families as reimbursement, so we didn't have to feel that our meals were a burden to them. But the hospitality and affection shown by our host families went far beyond monetary issues, and it could be incredibly humbling if you allowed yourself to think about your own economic situation and about theirs.

Frank and I were never, ever without a place to sit down. If we were ever seen standing by an adult member of the family, anywhere on the property, plastic stacking chairs would be produced. Similar hospitality was shown during our visitation throughout El Triunfo.

One evening, Frank and I had finished our supper and Frank had walked next door, to the shed in which we were staying, to retrieve some UNO cards. The family, which had already eaten, was gathered around the small black-and-white television watching a comedy program. This is a family with a dirt floor shed, a fire to cook over, a small refrigerator and a total of about two or three bare lightbulbs between the two sheds. And yet, they had a television and a boombox. Who am I to judge? The nightly telenovelas (prime-time soap operas) were, no doubt, a pleasant diversion from their dirt-poor existence. El Triunfo receives its TV signals from Costa Rica instead of Managua. Costa Rica is generally more prosperous than Managua, and the commercials included things like Papa John's Pizza. I wondered sometimes what the family must have thought of some of the messages.

Anyway, as soon as I sat down next to the family one of the children got up, walked over and pointed the television towards me. Never mind that I'm the only person in the room who couldn't understand the program. I was the honored guest, and the television must point towards me.

Luckily, at about that point Frank showed up with the UNO cards.

Ocho rojo

At our training in Germantown last November, we were advised to bring the card game UNO and the stacking game Jenga with us to play with our host families. Both games are relatively language-free and relatively easy to teach and to learn.

"Solamente un mano," I said, holding up only one hand, after setting up a Jenga tower on the table Tuesday night. Then, I showed them how to carefully remove a block from the middle of the tower and place it on the top. They were instantly hooked, and kept playing long after Frank and I gave up and went to bed. Lying in our cots next door, we could hear squeals of delight every few minutes when someone knocked the tower over.

We had similar success with UNO the next night. UNO is actually a little more complex to explain in a foreign language than you might think at first, and we never got around to explaining one or two of the rules -- for example, that you can only play a "Wild Draw Four" card if you don't have the current color in your hand. We also explained one of the rules wrong by mistake, and had everyone drawing two cards (instead of one) when unable to play. But if we weren't according to Hoyle, no one seemed to mind. Pretty soon, the members of the Sanches family were playing "Draw Four" and "Skip" cards on each other (and on Frank and me) with reckless abandon. Once again, Frank and I had sabotaged our chance for some early shuteye, as we heard the family playing long after we had thrown in the towel.

One night a day or two later, I got to play some with the family by myself. I forget whether Frank was showering or had gone on to bed. It was somehow fun to be the only English speaker, and it forced me to work harder at relating to the family.

Both Frank and I had brought UNO with us, but it was Frank's UNO cards and Frank's Jenga set that we ended up using. Frank left both of them with the family as part of his host gift at the end of the week.

By the way, I was a little hesitant about bringing out the UNO cards the first night. Rural Nicaragua, like a lot of places where there is poverty, has a problem with gambling. After we arrived in town we were told that the church people of El Triunfo associate playing cards with gambling. I never asked about it, but I noticed a ripped-up deck of cards in the dirt outside the church where we were working. But Amanda told us that a game with non-standard playing cards would probably be acceptable to the church folk, and in fact it was.

Laundry

In the mornings, before Frank and I would head off to do construction, one of the Sanches daughters would ask us if we had any laundry.

On the one hand, we felt dirty, we needed clean clothes, and we needed to be presentable for our visitation and worship services in the evening. But there's something very humbling about asking someone to do your laundry when doing your laundry means kneeling down in the dirt and rubbing your clothing against a rock. The laundry would be hung on barbed wire to dry.

For the record, my socks and underwear have never, ever been so white. But it still bothered me to ask someone to do that.

We had been told to bring a small gift for our hosts, possibly something representing our home state or community. I had brought three jars of Bell Buckle Country Store jelly, an in-kind gift from one of my contributors. The team leaders suggested we give our gifts on Saturday, the night before we left El Triunfo. I had actually planned to wait until Sunday morning, because otherwise I was afraid Teresa would feel compelled to serve the jellies to us at breakfast Sunday, and they were meant for her, not us. Frank wanted to go ahead and give his gifts. He was getting ready to do so when Teresa and her daughters showed up at our door with a hand-written letter, in Spanish, for each of us. As best I've been able to get it translated, it wishes us health and peace in Christ and asks us to write and send photos.

The level of education in El Triunfo is not high, and some of the letters received by various members of our team turned out to be somewhat similar, leading us to believe that a few persons may have written letters for their neighbors who couldn't. But the sentiment was real in any case.

I decided not to wait and pulled out the jelly. I'm not sure if Teresa will enjoy it any more than I enjoyed Nicaraguan food, but she seemed pleased by the gesture. Frank had wisely chosen several smaller items, including a few dime-store jewelry items his mother had in her attic. The girls were delighted.

This was all a very simple, small-scale exchange of pleasantries, but somehow it made me feel all warm and tingly, like we had made a real connection with our families.

In case you're wondering, we were specifically asked not to make monetary gifts to our individual host families, because that could lead to jealousies and hard feelings from one home to another. Instead, we were given the option of contributing some money that Amanda would give to Pastor Luis Gutierrez for the church's benevolence fund. That fund will allow children to attend school who might otherwise not be able to do so, and take care of other urgent needs in the community. School can cost $6 per year in tuition, plus the cost of blue pants, white shirts and books. That sounds like a pittance to you or me, but it's out of reach of many of the families in El Triunfo. In fact, more than 750,000 children in Nicaragua can't afford to attend school.

Looking back, I probably spent $6 on bottled water from the pulperia over the course of our week there.

Amanda plans to report back to us on how Pastor Gutierrez uses the funds we left in El Triunfo.

Departure

On Sunday morning, our team members and many members of the church in El Triunfo packed onto the Nissan bus. There must have been 40 or more on the bus, which is designed for about 18. People were literally hanging out the open door. We traveled a few miles down the road to Carasito. The pastor from Carasito, unlike Pastor Gutierrez, had lived briefly in the U.S. and spoke pretty fair English. He had visited us several times during the week and was fond of asking me if I knew the song "Are You Sleeping, Are You Sleeping, Brother John?" We would attend our last worship service at his church, instead of the church where we had worked all week. We then crowded back onto the bus and returned to El Triunfo. The locals got off the bus, and our luggage was put on. We boarded the bus and headed off into the midday sun.

Just as LEAMIS likes to have two days of training at the beginning of a trip, they like a day or two of debriefing at the end of the trip. This allows participants to think about what they've learned from their experience and to gradually re-acclimatize themselves to civilization. Our debrief was held in the neglected Nicaraguan resort town of Granada. (It's no relation to the Caribbean island of Grenada, which the U.S. invaded in the 1980s.) I felt almost guilty staying in a hotel after the conditions in El Triunfo, but I sure didn't turn down the hot shower.

Granada has fallen from its glory days, but the buildings are interesting and colorful and there's intriguing potential there if it can be exploited. The city is on the shores of Lake Nicaragua, and one day we got to ride a boat to one of the islands in the lake for a lovely meal at a rustic open-air restaurant.

After our relaxed sojourn in Granada, we returned to La Cantera, the retreat in Managua where we had done our training, for our final evening in Nicaragua. We shared stories of our trip and then celebrated Holy Communion.

We loaded into the Nissan bus one last time at 6 a.m. Wednesday, headed for the airport and home.

Into all the world

On Monday, I asked why anyone would want to live for a week in a shed in El Triunfo. As I look back on the trip, I have no doubt that I would do it all over again. (In fact, I'd like to do it all over again.)

Part of it is the intense Christian community, the bonding I felt with my remarkable teammates. Part of it is the relationship I felt with my host family. Part of it is the sense that I pushed myself out of my comfort zone. I did something I'm not really capable of doing, and to God be the glory.

People sometimes ask me why I would go and work in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee when there are needs here at home. The answer is that it's not an either-or situation. There's a peculiar kind of intense Christian community that I think only comes from getting away from your normal surroundings. Spending a short period in that kind of service can help motivate you to be a different person back home, even after you return to the humdrum and hassle of everyday life.

At our debrief, we talked about ways in which the trip, and our exposure to the poverty of El Triunfo, might influence us to change our lifestyle. Will I be less consumeristic in the weeks and months to come? I hope so, but I can't promise yet. We were told at debrief that people who promise "I'll never go to a shopping mall again" or other such broad statements never keep them. I hope, however, that what I saw of poverty in the Third World will shape my attitudes in some subtler, more permanent way.

Unfortunately, the first thing you want to do on coming back from a trip is consume -- whether it's hamburgers, or television, or what have you.

Many of you reading these words feel that you have no ability, or no inclination, to go on a short-term foreign mission trip. I used to feel the same way. But God did things through me in El Triunfo that I couldn't have done by myself. And, just as I knew from my domestic mission trips, I got a lot more in return than I could possibly have given.

Matthew 28:19-20 says "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." (NRSV)

Pack your bags.