The team gathered in the Calvary Chapel parking lot at 4:00am on Tuesday morning, July 26th. There are 10 of us on the team this year: 4 women and 6 men. After loading everyone's bags into the Peatfield's van we left for the airport. 3 hour's later we were all on an American Airlines flight, headed for Miami. From Miami we flew to Managua, Nicaragua. We arrived here at the church (Calvary Chapel, Managua) safely at 4:00pm on (2:00pm Managua time). Michaela was so happy to be here that she gave me a big hug when we arrived. Everything made it except for one of my checked bags. It got left in Miami. The airlines located the bag and delivered it here to the church yesterday.

After eating a late lunch and then sitting through a 1 hour orientation I had to go to bed because I couldn't keep my eyes open. I was really tired. I slept about 10 hours, until about 6:00 am on (4:00am Managua time) on Wednesday. I think this is because I was up until 1:00am the night before and only got about 3 hours of sleep.

While I slept, the rest of the team attended the Tuesday night prayer meeting and socialized with the members of the congregation. The amazing thing about prayer is: you can do it in any language. Some of us pray in english, and some pray in spanish... we don't always understand each other, but God understands it all. He's the person we're praying to so nothing else matters.

The following day (Wednesday) was a work day. Everyone broke up into teams and did different work projects around the church. This included painting and cleaning. Lynn and Victor did some home visits to see some of the elderly and disabled in the church. Lynn is a physical therapist and Victor speaks fluent spanish, so the two of them make a good team.

VICTOR

I was hoping to spend some time doing other things while I am here this year but Cal already has a list of computer problems he want me to solve. I spent Wednesday installing a new wireless access point, fixing a broken ethernet drop, and configuring and installing Ubuntu on some laptops.

Oh well... that's what I'm here for, to serve others. That's all for now. Other members of the team will update this blog as the week goes by.

Thanks for reading.

John Meneghini