Reflections on my time in the jungle...

When I think of the teaching time we had in the jungle, it is definitely different than I expected. It's probably different from what you're picturing too. We didn't have monkeys all around us in the trees, in fact, it didn't really feel like we were in the jungle at all-until we looked past the little school we were in and saw we were surrounded by jungle. I guess I'm not exactly sure what I was thinking it would be like. I wasn't expecting to have a dry erase board or desks or a projector, but we had all of those. There was loud latin music playing across the street, and kids in the dirt street playing soccer outside the school doors. There were 5 kids and 1 teacher that showed up for the disabilities teaching. One of the activities I did was to assign different disabilities to kids in the group and then have them work together to build something out of straws. Not so easy. The objective was to see if those who were blind or couldn't speak were left out. It was interesting to me that ALL of those involved in the activity were involved! The others helped out those who couldn't work in the exact same way. Isn't that how the body of Christ should be? All of us working together with our strengths AND our weaknesses? God can use our weaknesses, sometimes in more ways at times than our strengths. As I mentioned in the previous post, one of the girls said something about my lack of Spanish as being a disability and indeed it can be and is. But hopefully God can use me in spite of it! I challenge you to not be afraid to show your weaknesses. Sometimes God can use those to touch others around us in ways we don't even know.

P.S. The students told us that the 2 weeks before when we were supposed to be there, one of the girls in the class got bitten by a snake...an X is what it is called. She was rushed to the hospital and they said she is doing OK. I am SO thankful I wasn't there to see that-I'm not sure how much help I would have been after seeing a snake!