At first, I had a hard time making the “30-second description” of our trip sound any different than that of any other mission trip. “It was awesome, breathtaking, powerful, and life-changing,” or some combination of those words, were usually what came out of my mouth. But what could I say that people here at home would relate to if they’ve never had similar experiences?
Our trip had many different tasks lined up, which really helped diversify the people on it. For the first half of the trip, we rode in the back of a pickup two kilometers to the hike point, and then continued up the mountain for another two kilometers, wearing knee-high rubber boots and trekking through mud and across log bridges to a grassy field on the side of a mountain. There we were able to help with the construction of a church building for the congregation at El Balsamo, a member of the ACIBEN association of churches in Nicaragua.
I am very conscious of the idea of using a mission trip as a sponsored vacation, and can assure you this was not one of those trips. We stayed in a house that had two 10’ x 10’ cinder block rooms and a hallway to connect them. The guys slept five-wide with two more sleeping head to foot at the bottom. Needless to say there wasn’t a single morning I didn’t wake up with somebody else’s head on my shoulders or an arm across my chest. We ate the same meal three times a day, for the duration of the trip, which included arroz (rice), pinta (beans), pina (pineapple), and sandia (watermelon). The only thing that would change is the way they fixed the pollo (chicken). We “bathed” in the river, which became quite the adventure after the afternoon rains had washed massive amounts of mud downstream with the current. We had to walk through a muddy field to even get there, usually negating any level of cleanliness we could achieve from the river. Mosquitoes would nearly carry some of the smaller group members away at night, and we quickly exhausted our supply of both insect repellant and itch cream.
The first half of the trip was quite daunting, physically speaking, but it went a long way towards establishing some great team chemistry. We had lots of time to bond, especially when it would get dark early (Nicaragua doesn’t believe in daylight savings time) and the electricity would go out (for three days at a time). There were safety concerns while hiking and walking around, and there were many people who didn’t know each other very well before the trip (especially guy/girl friendships) so we decided that we should try to implement a “buddy system”. Your buddy was your seat partner on the bus and in charge of getting to know you, while assisting you up the mountain and watching your back when wandering about the neighborhood. Every night at our debriefing/devo time, we were to share something about our partner that nobody else knew that we picked up through our conversations or observation, and also to give each other a “put-up” or a comment of encouragement or affirmation. This single activity added a whole new level of depth to the conversations, and really helped us develop from the start a relationship oriented attitude towards our teammates and increased the enjoyability of the long bus trips through the mountains.
The second half of the trip was spent taking two- or three-day trips out of the base house in Sebaco, which was where the headquarters of ACIBEN were located. There were stretches when the group would experience 4 Spanish church services in a 24-hour period. For as grueling as the first part of the trip was physically, the second half was equally as grueling spiritually and emotionally. We discovered how hard it is to stay focused on the moment after the congregation just sang the ninth verse of the only song that the churches know. The clapping gave us blisters and the singing gave us migraines.
There were rewards, though. There wasn’t a single service that we sat through that members of our group weren’t able to bless their congregation in various ways. Several members helped lead worship, with some of it in Spanish, while others shared powerful testimonies as to the work of God in their lives. We were able to leave money or supplies at a lot of the churches to help complete lingering construction projects. The most encouraging part of the whole experience though, was listening to the testimonies of members of the congregation (through our translators) of how God is working in their lives and churches as well. It is so neat to see yourselves as part of something larger than ourselves, our school, and even our home church bodies.
Thanks largely to the discussions and readings from this class, I felt I was more prepared than most to face the challenges of cross-cultural ministry and communication. I thought it was interesting that after completing the surveys, most members of our class entertained some of the traits more prevalent in majority-world cultures. If my notes are correct, the majority of the class exhibited a time orientation, holistic thinking, non-crisis orientation, and relationship orientation, which are all non-western-world values. Those of us in the class expected to encounter much more non-western culture than we actually did, so in some ways we were disappointed. Part of this has to do with America (and the rest of the “western world”) and their proximity to Nicaragua, not to mention the omnipotence displayed in our foreign policies towards Latin America generally. It was a unique exchange, because it seemed that they wanted to learn and imitate so much about our culture, while we were more impressed with theirs and longed for some of the simplicity they took for granted.
Even though we were in-country for nearly three weeks, in some ways, we would always be a short-term team no matter how long we stayed. As long as we were living out of a suitcase and travelling in a large group while carrying our cameras, we would always be outsiders. As much as we tried, until we were fluent and stopped taking our cameras everywhere, we wouldn’t ever really fit in. But in thinking about time-event orientation, I was incredibly disappointed in how well we were able to maintain our American culture while in most other ways being submersed in another. Our goals were a little bit different on a short-term trip than a hypothetical permanent assignment, and we tried to go as many places and get as much done as possible. We were on a pretty tight timetable for many of our excursions and even our everyday life. As an “event person”, and a college student, I find it hard to wake up to an alarm clock, and equally difficult to go to bed early. I also require some kind of down time during the day to recharge my batteries for a few minutes. The average Nicaraguan wakes up at around 4am and gets to sleep around 9pm. These numbers are a little skewed because they do not participate in daylight savings time, but they still get up and go to bed much earlier than we were used to. This made it a little more squeezed because our group and our host had a shorter window to accomplish things together. They were always ready for bed when we were ready to go to town and buy some ice cream to enjoy during our devotional/de-briefing time. They were always ready to leave and begin travelling or working while we were just waking up.
Another interesting dynamic was the conflict between making good friends with the locals and helping build them a church (relation/task orientation). This is another way that our team worked together to balance out each other’s weaknesses. Several on the team had in mind that we were actually going to complete the entire church building while we were there. We could tell it was hard on them on the days that our afternoons were rained out. Several other people on the trip were painfully awkward doing physical labor, and scared the rest of us when they tried to swing a hammer. While we were working on the church building, I thought it was great how everyone seemed to find a role that suited them, and somehow every gap had someone there to fill it (literally). Everyone was able to spend some time doing different jobs, from the girls laying bricks to Jordan and Scott playing soccer with the children. We were able to get much farther on the church than the pastors had expected, but we got to spend a lot of time with the children and the others in the community who would help on the church, help prepare us lunch, or just come and see what we were doing.
In visiting so many churches, we were able to grasp a pretty good picture of the typical Nicaraguan church service and were able to draw some interesting conclusions about their worship style. In many ways, it was quite similar to ours in America. The church services always began with a greeting, followed by singing, concluding with a message and another song. Actually, we heard the same three or four songs at every church service, but when they don’t have hymnals or song books, everything is done from memorization, so I can understand the lack of variety. Also, when we didn’t speak Spanish, it was understandable that all the songs would sound the same.
One thing that stuck out to me immediately was how every group associated with the church had their contribution to the worship. In many of the services, several different groups would lead us in another (or the same) song. There would be a group of young boys, a group of young girls, the teenage youth group, a group of women, a group of men, and an ensemble of all the pastors that were in attendance. Usually in America, the children especially are usually herded off to children’s church, where here they were given the spotlight to sing the song they had been learning this week. The one song the children sang that we did recognize (only by the motions) was the old familiar children’s’ song “I’m in the Lord’s Army.” At first we were a little disturbed by the boys in the choir mowing down the congregation with a machine gun, but I found it quite ironic considering the Latin American history of the revolutionary church through Liberation Theology.
Another thing that I found unique was the prayers during church. In every church I’ve ever been to in the United States, the pastor, or one person in the congregation is asked to pray and the rest of the church remains silent while listening to the prayer. In all the churches we visited, the pastor would always say something like, “Let’s ask the Lord’s blessing,” or something similar. We are used to everyone asking the Lord’s blessing vicariously through the one person praying, but there it meant that everyone should individually pray aloud for the Lord’s blessing. I caught us off guard the first time we were asked to pray. I remember Zack leading a prayer during one of the Spanish worship sets that he played. He told us afterwards that he had found praying in Spanish was easier than in English, because after he got through the “Dear Lord, we thank you...” everyone else’s prayers drowned him out and he didn’t have to worry about mispronouncing something in Spanish.
We also had some unique experiences with cross-cultural relationships in our time there. We found it was slightly weird that the young men of the church were incredibly quick to be ready to profess their love to the girls in our group. Considering the obvious language barriers to interpersonal communication, we had two different men use flowery language to acknowledge their affections for our girls, while another described Stacey as a “Goddess.” Reflecting on this, I’m not exactly sure what prompts this. Of course they see marriage to an American woman as a ticket into another lifestyle that they only see on television, but I’m not sure what else goes into this culturally. I’m not exactly sure how things are done in their culture as far as young dating relationships, but we did notice a huge number of young, single mothers.
Melissa and I had a “critical de-briefing” on the trip home to see if there were things we thought we could have done better or wish we could have done differently. Overall, we felt like the trip had gone about as well as possible, but there were a couple of things that we would do differently. First of all, we felt that it should almost be a requirement to take RP 107, Cross-Cultural Ministries, before going on a trip through the college. We had a couple of cases of insensitive comments that could have been alleviated just by a little more cultural awareness. (My favorite was said while taking the trash out, “Just look around you, this whole country is a trash can.”) It would have been helpful for everyone to have the same context of trying to understand the other culture as well as in dealing with situations within the group.
The one other thing that I wish we had done differently was to spend one of our training sessions learning about the culture and history of Nicaragua. I think it would have been very helpful for everyone to understand the state of politics in the country. The majority of the group had no idea who the Sandinistas even were, much less who President Ortega was. Information like that would have made our “tourist day” in Leon much more interesting for the rest of the group (other than Melissa and I), not to mention give them a better understanding of the reasons that we never met any men in their 50’s.
The trip was “awesome, breathtaking, powerful, and life-changing,” and I will never be able to translate that fully to anyone who hasn’t had similar experiences, but I will never be the same.

Thanks again for everything,
Ben Swihart