I woke up with the jungle birds singing like crazy to the rising sun.
I awkwardly descended the ladder on my bed and went outside. The air was cool and moist and earthy on my cheeks and shoulders.
It had rained hard in the night.
In front of me was a pile of light grey blocks. The jungle had its light green arms around them.
The blocks sat organized in both their vertical and horizontal obediences. Yesterday we order 200 of them off the ground. Now they sit on each other as part of the rising school.
Last evening, Past Vital and I stood and admired them. “It’s good,” he said. “It’s very good,” I thought. I looked ahead. I could hear the voices of los ninos, the ones yet to come, the children in Rama who don’t have a good place to learn.
It is all in Pastor Vital”s head, a school,a church, a clinic.
He has already done this kind of thing in Kukra Hill and Bluefields.
“How many more do you have in mind?” I ask him.
“Fifty” he says and we both laugh. It can’t be fifty, but it won’t be three.
He has it in mind to fill up spaces around him. . He will not be put off. The rough concrete blocks mind him. Yesterday I saw it. Today I will see it again. They mind his vision.
I like it, this big dream, to push back a jungle and line up some blocks, to push back more ignorance and poverty and sadness and bring order and love.
Yesterday some of the boys in the neighborhood came and helped us. Two of them stuck a stick through two concrete blocks and carried them around to the back of the building.
They are the future builders of this community.
Yesterday about fifty children showed up for our team’s presentation of Noah’s ark. When we broke out the parachute one of the littlest girls cried. The big billowing
red and yellow and blue sheet overcame her.
Someone carried her to the side and looked for her mother. No mother came forward. Then a slightly older girl came rushing to her to hold and comfort her.
This is what the blocks will do. The blocks will make a place where one will rise up and become a leader or a pastor or a teacher and care for another.
Visions work. The blocks in the jungle will work.
Life is hard here in Nicaragua.
But we have been able to be a small part of making it better.
Thrive! 