Sunday, August 17, 2008

Nicaragua Accomodations

I wanted to provide a glimpse into how we lived while we were in Nicaragua. As I have mentioned in previous posts, we take so much for granted in the US...clean running water, indoor bathrooms with toilets that flush and showers, electricity and appliances. We had none of these things while ministering in the country's mountainous villages. And believe it or not, we survived.
It's amazing how we tend to complain in the United States. We're so easy to tell others how awful our circumstances are, yet we live in such a privileged country. Once you've seen how meek some lives are lived, it makes it pretty hard to complain about anything we may have to endure in our wealthy country.
When we were in Ocotal, where we stayed at the beginning and end of our time in Nicaragua, we stayed at a church/house. The church and house were connected by an open 'courtyard' where the family hung their laundry to dry, which of course had been washed by hand, and where you could see garbage collected on the ground. It was typical to see garbage lying anywhere and everywhere in the country.


Below is the sink in the home. All I can say is, we have a very different standard of clean in the United States. I wished I would have brought my Clorox clean-up from home!

The girls stayed in this small room big enough to fit four sets of bunk beds and that's about it.

While in the village of Santa Maria, we stayed in this small three-room home at the right side of the photo below.

We slept in this large open room of the house. There were two cots set up, but we stayed on the concrete floor in our sleeping bags.

Adjacent to our 'bedroom' was this 'living room.' This is where we sat for our meals of pre-packaged food. Our two main meals were tuna fish and rumen noodles, which wasn't bad at first but quickly got to be a little too routine.
It wasn't unusual to see cockroaches and other pests in the house, and the outhouse was their breeding grounds. You definitely learned to drink only the minimum so that you had to use the outhouse as little as possible!

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