Living in Onzole are 500 descendants of African slaves whose ship crashed on the shore of Ecuador many generations ago.  There is no running water or indoor plumbing. Showers are just a bucket of rain water and toilets a bucket of water poured in for the gravity flush. We spent the week sleeping on Thermarests on the concrete floor. After the 35 hours of transit from my home, the accommodations almost felt comfortable.

How do you describe an experience that stretched you physically, mentally, socially, and spiritually? An experience that required your very best effort and still seemed to be asking for more? Perhaps the best way is to break it down and provide just a few highlights in each area. It doesn’t come close to doing it justice, but it’s a start.

Physically
Going into this trip I was feeling pretty good about my fitness and strength. In September, I joined the YMCA and had access to a personal trainer once a week. I knew that rebuilding a school in Ecuador would be physically demanding. Swinging a pick axe (when the sun was beating down on me I could only do about 10 swings before needing a break!) and mixing concrete with shovels all day pushed my back to the limit. What I didn’t know was that I would see seventy year old men with abs of steel and muscles to match in this tiny village. Hard physical work on the land around their homes and a diet of rice, plantain, and fish gave them incredible physiques.

Mentally
I spent most of the trip wishing my limited Spanish vocabulary was more robust.  On two occasions, a small group of us were invited into the home of one of the teachers to share dinner with them. We had a few gifts for the family and I was trying to figure out how to explain it to them and express my gratitude.  All I could manage in my tired stupor was to say “familia” over and over again as I placed the gifts on the table.

Socially
One of our students on the trip, a recent graduate from Queens, remarked that we have a big personal space bubble in North America. We can find ourselves uncomfortable just sitting on the same park bench as someone else. While in church on our first day, a few of the kids slipped under the bench and sat beside me. At one point, I felt a prickling sensation in my left shoulder, only to discover one of the little boys pulling my shoulder hair! This progressed to include my underarm hair as well, and over the course of the week I had kids poking my innie belly button (another novelty) and rubbing my chest to see if there was any skin beneath the hair on my chest. Talk about having your personal space invaded!

Spiritually
My role on the trip was to work alongside Nikki Horne (who can usually be found running the sponsorship program for the school in Bastion) to help the participants in this trip learn from their experience and to make spiritual/life applications. We were there to make sure that this wasn’t just a cool trip to help some people, but a life changing experience for all. We wanted to help them figure out how to apply what they had learned here to their situations back home. We sought to come alongside the participants personally, to get to know them and help them process what they were experiencing.

To Sum up
We mixed and poured a lot of concrete to fix the school foundation, built huge dividers for the classrooms, painted others, and parged walls. We worked with the people to fix up a school that was falling apart and didn’t have the funding to continue. Life Change Adventures, along with Nikki Horne and Dale Horst, will be continuing this work with the next group to put on a tin roof and finish what we started. They have made a commitment to see the school completed and to decide with the community what the priorities are in terms of health care, water systems, education, and work skills.

Just before we left one of the mothers stood up, and shared the following with us through a translator:

“What you have done for us is bigger than huge.  It is enormous. We are an isolated community and the government has forgotten us. But you Canadians have remembered us. As you go away please, please, please, please don’t forget us.”

Those words are a little haunting to me as I return home to the busyness of my life. I am glad to say that Life Change Adventures has made an ongoing commitment to the community, and who knows maybe I will return someday to help further their efforts.

Thanks for being part of the community of support we so desperately need around us. We can do so little alone.

Sincerely,
Dan

We were finally able to sleep after unloading the bus, going to our assigned rooms, getting acquainted with our Ecuadorian roommates, and setting up, with much frustration and confusion in some cases, our protective bug nets. The next few days were spent in getting acquainted with the ridiculously hot sun, getting to know the Ecuadorians through fun games and playing “a la playas” (at the beach), and learning how to effectively show God’s love and share the gospel with the campers who would be coming in a few short days.

These sessions proved to be incredibly interesting as half of the sessions were not translated. God has blessed our team with teammates who are fluent enough in Spanish to help the rest of the team out when situations prove to be incredibly difficult regarding our understanding of the Spanish language. It’s safe to say that our Spanish-English dictionaries have been put to many, many uses! Others, including myself, have found the language barrier to be quite overwhelming as most of the Ecuadorians speak very little English and communication is extremely difficult. But the Ecuadorians are most understanding and they love to help us with our pronunciation and understanding of the language. 1

As the days have passed, I have seen many team members reaching out and really trying to work the language. Sure, a few laughs are most certainly sure to follow, but trying to understand and experiment with the language really helps to make relationships with these beautiful people. Ecuadorians are absolutely hilarious! They love to have fun, make jokes, and laugh! Everywhere you look our Ecuadorian friends are always accompanied with a smile, which is incredibly refreshing for those of us who are extremely tired! It is so humbling to see the way these people are so open to new comers, how they welcome you with open arms, and how they accept you no matter what. They are truly inspiring and God has challenged me many, many times in the past few days with regards to my behaviour, my thoughts, my actions and anything else that could be challenged.

Participating in this mission’s trip has already been amazingly full of blessings of all types and sizes. Blessings in the form of health concerns (colds, mosquitoes, voices being lost etc. to help us rely more on God and his amazing power), relationships being formed with Ecuadorian campers and leaders, and unity within our own team. God is really amazing and his presence is definitely apparent in this beautiful country.

I feel like this letter does no justice for our actual experience. It is so hard to express in words everything that is going on and it’s also extremely hard to pinpoint all the emotions we are all experiencing through this mission’s trip. But I know for sure, we are all having a blast and learning more about ourselves, God, and this beautiful and unique culture.

Thank you so much for all your support and prayers as we have embarked on this incredible journey – we appreciate it very much!

Mucho gracias! Ciao!

-Alex Smyth

It comes in waves, this longing to write home about my life and all that is happening here, but truth be told, I’m not very good at writing these newsletters. That’s no excuse – it’s just the truth – but I’ve managed to get this one out and that’s a start!

Over the past year I have felt tremendously privileged to have the role I do in the lives of so many adults and children and daily I am learning how to trust and let go, allowing God to freely use my hands to accomplish the good things He wants for this community. I am learning how to help carry the burdens of others but, even more than that, how to entrust those lives and those struggles, along with my own, into God’s careful and mighty hands.

Living in the middle of physical poverty breaks your heart and steals pieces of any hope you have that tomorrow can be better, that change can happen, that I can help write a new story. I have felt lost in God’s plan to bring about restoration for the poor and to bring healing for those that suffer. My head reels with all I have learned in the past year. I have searched frantically for God in the children’s cancer ward, in homes where parents threaten and intimidate their kids, and in the fears of kids that come to school with bruises and blank stares. I do not doubt that God is here, but I can’t always feel Him and that is perhaps the most paralyzing feeling of all. It is in those moments that I am learning to step back and wait, to try to be patient, because beating deep within me is God’s peace and a reminder that He is very present here in Bastion. Amidst the suffering and fear, He walks before me on these dirty streets.

This year has been such a whirlwind that I have so many stories I could tell! I am still trying to process all the highs and lows of what has happened. It is extremely difficult to capture everything in a few brief paragraphs, but I have chosen two stories that I think best paint a picture of life in Ecuador and the work that I do here.

Michelle & Narcisa

Michelle and Narcisa are two special people from my community here that I have gotten to know well this year. Michelle, a grade two student at Hope of Bastion School, was diagnosed with leukemia six months ago. Narcisa, the mother of a couple of our students, has a hole in her heart and needs heart surgery. For families with limited resources who are living in a squatter community like Bastion, the possibility of treatment for either of these two ailments is unlikely. Poverty and sickness is a very scary combination. Thankfully funds continue to arrive at the right time and chemotherapy treatments can continue and an open heart surgery can be scheduled.

The Ecuadorian medical system, with which I have become intimately acquainted, suffers from a great deal of confusion and inefficiency. Patients are restricted to their ward, while family and friends run up and down flights of stairs from secretary, to doctor, to blood bank, to nurse, to surgeon and back again booking the x-rays and operating rooms, buying rubber gloves and IVs, all the while crossing their fingers they haven’t missed anything in the flurry of paperwork. I will never again complain about the healthcare I am privileged to just by being born in a country like Canada.

With next to no medical knowledge (other then being the daughter of a wise and experienced nurse) I have found myself intensely involved with both Michelle and Narcisa’s treatment; from enduring the lame pickup lines of medical professionals to being dressed from head to toe in medical scrubs reading storybooks in the cancer ward. In the beginning it was hard to know what to say to Michelle, to this frightened girl with tubes coming out of her little body and loose hairs all over her pillow. Waiting can be a dark place sometimes, when your mind gets stuck on the “what ifs” and starts to panic. Sometimes Narcisa will ask me what will happen to her children if she doesn’t make it and I just don’t know. Holding the hand of somebody who is fighting for their life is pretty life-altering itself. Emotions run high … one minute you’re laughing, and the next you’re weeping. The reality is we never know what the outcome will be and there are no right words to say. All you can do is hold that hand a little bit tighter and wait.

Onzole River

I have been, and continue to be, involved in a small river community in the northern jungles of Ecuador called Santo Domingo de Onzole. In August, a group of us piled into a canoe and splashed our way down the river for 3 hours until we arrived in Onzole. Kids in tattered clothing and oversized rain boots stood watching us climb up the muddy slope that leads to their community. It was such a joy to be welcomed back to this familiar place, to play with the kids on the river’s edge and catch up with friends on their front porches. In Onzole you are surrounded by natural beauty, fruits and exotic flowers spilling from trees and bushes all under the deepest blue skies.

We went to Onzole hoping to spend time in the two elementary schools we have been involved with. The government has, until recently, all but ignored these kids, leaving them with no chance of receiving an education. Several months ago, a group of us began to help provide financial support for the schools. We sat down with some of the teachers, parents and leaders of the Onzole community to talk about their hopes and dreams for their school. They shared their desire to see kids from Onzole receive a quality education equal to other public schools, an education that would enable the kids to compete for future jobs and opportunities. They talked openly about the struggle of convincing parents that an education would indeed open doors to all kinds of future possibilities. In Onzole, just like many remote areas in the world, education isn’t always a high priority. Many parents are still not convinced that sending their children to school is better than having them work farming the fields.

The school building itself (a decrepit shell held up by drab cement bricks and splintering wood planks) is in dire need of repair. Wasp nests hang from the ceilings, handmade pictures adorn the walls, and old wooden and rusty metal desks fill the classrooms. Yet, every morning from Monday to Friday, 109 kids dressed in clean blue uniforms file through those doors brimming with creativity and untapped potential.

The challenges faced by school staff are numerous. In addition to the lack of government assistance, they are ill equipped to handle the medical and physical needs of their students. Many kids have learning disabilities, problems with hearing and vision, or psychological issues. The kids come to school lacking proper nutrition, so the staff members do the best they can to provide some sort of breakfast. They need more classrooms and more teachers. They dream that these humble little schools that sit atop muddy hills will empower and equip kids to go places they otherwise never could.

Evolving roles & future opportunities

I have been living in Ecuador for almost two years now and my role here has changed a lot over that time. I came to work in Hope of Bastion School as the child sponsorship program coordinator and to help grow the program. I continue to maintain that role, working with 140 elementary aged students and 50 high school students. Along with the overall administration of the program, I visit kids in their homes to gain a better understanding of their family situation and struggles and work with them to write letters to their sponsors. My job has also involved advocating on behalf of kids when there is violence in the home or medical needs. I am currently considering (and really excited about) becoming involved with a school sponsorship program in Onzole.

Outside of the Hope of Bastion sponsorship program, I spend a lot of time mentoring and counseling young girls or spending time with mothers. Every year we have work teams come from Canada and I, along with the other missionaries here, help plan and run those trips to camp, Bastion or Onzole. Though we are all involved in different ministries, I am so thankful to be working alongside our team of missionaries here.

I am planning to be back in Canada for a month over Christmas. I will return to Ecuador in the New Year and jump straight into the coordination and organization of the short term Canadian work teams coming in February and March. In February ’09 I will be helping to lead two teams of Canadian volunteers into the Onzole community to help the staff and parents repair one of the elementary schools.

Feel free to write me! I love getting news from home and if you would like to hear more about how our community is doing down here I’d be happy to write you more!

Sincerely,
Nikki

Dear friends and supporters,

We are doing it! Together we are making a difference in the lives and futures of the children along the Onzole River of Ecuador. My heart swells whenever I think of each one of you, pulling together to make such an impact.

As I look back on the journey of these last few months, all I can say is; nothing is too hard for God!! I have been most surprised when some of you have thanked me for providing the opportunity to give your money in this way. It has been one of the things that keeps me going.

We all want to be apart of something bigger than just ourselves and our world. And so, we are! The good news is that together we have already raised $13,000. Isn’t that incredible?! Can you hear the excitement in my voice?

Thank-you!!!!

God bless you all,
Lisa

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Article by: Brian Stubbs

Summer of ’08 has been an exciting time for Crane Lake Discovery Camp.  This is the first year that CLDC has developed, funded, and carried out a program entirely as an independent camp. At the on-set of 2008 there was no camp insurance, policy and procedures, staff team, or completed registrations. What an accomplishment 2008 has been for Crane Lake. CLDC ’08 offered support to four-teen young individuals who came to camp ready to have fun but also put forth the effort to do self development. Six youth bustled into the Crane Lake property for the July session. The August session brought the campsite up to capacity with eight campers.

Added to the August session were eight young adult men who worked with Jeremy Horne for a week developing leadership skills and doing self reflection while helping CLDC with some campsite development projects. These young men became part of the Crane Lake program when they ventured on a three day canoe trip with the eight younger campers. Serving as role models, the older group brought a mature dynamic to camp.