Daily Concern

We got a good night’s rest in our hotel. We were on the 3rd floor of this small hotel, so Mercedes and I decided to take the stairs to the lobby. Melissa and Colton took the elevator. Five or ten minutes passed by and we hadn’t seen Melissa and Colton, turns out they were stuck in the elevator! The elevator is on the outside of the building so the pedestrians could see them helplessly stuck. The owner of the hotel took an ink pen and jammed it into a slot and the elevator finally opened up.

Allen Williams (our host) and his wife Rocio arrived to pick us up. We took a quick one hour tour of Guayaquil. We first visited a small park right in the middle of the city where hundreds of iguanas lived. They all loved to lay in the trees, you see them here, here and here. Next, we stopped by to see some turtles from the Galapagos. The city was crowded, lots of traffic, and high unemployment. We soon headed south to the Quizas Hoy camp which was about 50 miles away (I'm not sure the kids enjoyed riding 50 miles on a wooden plank in the back of a truck). We passed by miles and miles of plantations. Scattered along the road were small homes (huts), fruit stands, and livestock tied up next to the road for grazing. The fruit was amazing, we could by tons of fresh fruit for just a dollar or two.
We finally made it to Quizas Hoy, our home for the next 4 days. The camp is 40 acres, cut into the edge of the jungle, right off the highway to Cuenca. The camp was very beautiful, you can see many of pics of it here. Our dorm room was sparse, no hot water, no air conditioning. Thankfully, during our stay it wasn’t unreasonably warm.

We got to work right away, helping to put water sealant on one of the new dorms they were building (8+ years in the making). The food was simple but good, I think we had plantains with every meal, prepared a different way each time. By the end of the day we were all tired but very thankful for the experience.I think all of us, especially the kids, will learn a great deal about how other parts of the world live and our role in helping others.

On Monday, March 16th, my family and I traveled to Guayaquil, Ecuador via Miami, FL. Thankfully the flights were uneventful. We landed in Guayaquil at 9:30pm and it took another hour to get through customs. Waiting for us outside the airport was Allen Williams, a gentleman I had only previously met over the Internet. He was easy to spot, he was a foot taller than anyone else around him. Allen runs the Perhaps Today Church Camp, where we were to serve the next few days.

Allen had told me he was picking us up in his truck and that our kids (ages 17 and 13) would need to ride in the back. While I was prepared for that I was completely unprepared for the condition of his truck. It was only a slightly newer model than the truck in Sanford & Son. So here we are in a foreign country, with a strange man, who wants me to load up my family in the back of this truck at nearly 11pm to drive us to a local hotel. I thought “Why not?”

Allen drove us to a nearby hotel, along the way we passed through some pretty sketchy neighborhoods, eventually arriving at our hotel whose doors were already locked. Thankfully, someone was there to let us in and lead us to our 3rd floor room. It was no bigger than a college dorm room with four small beds and a small bath. It didn’t matter, we had made it to Ecuador safe and sound, the room was clean, we were tired and all soon fast asleep. I thanked God for our safety and asked for wisdom as we prepared for our adventure the next day.

In the fall of 2008 my wife Melissa and I were making plans for our 2009 family vacation. Our son is a senior at Faith Christian School so we wanted to make it a memorable trip since this would likely be his last year at home. We quickly decided upon Hawaii, specifically Maui. Melissa and I went there for our tenth anniversary and I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful place.

However, as I thought and prayed about it I felt that just going to yet another tourist location, no matter how beautiful, would not have the lasting impression that I was seeking. I’ve stated this before, but the words of Donald Miller haunt me – many of us live in Christian glass houses. We live with Christians, we work with Christians, we worship with Christians, many of our neighbors are Christian, and we even eat at Chik-fil-a. We become too comfortable in our way of life and our routine, we rarely interact with those outside our Christian holy huddles. I wanted to shake things up.

Well as luck, or God’s providence, would have it, I work for Fellowship Technologies and we’re blessed to count Centro Cristiano de Guayaquil in Ecuador among the churches using Fellowship One. Several members of our staff had traveled down there to train the church and they came back telling amazing stories of need there. As I prayed and pondered about where God was leading us I just kept coming back to Ecuador.

So with a leap of faith I booked four round trip tickets to Ecuador for March 16th – 24th. Our 17 yr old son and 13 yr old daughter were not thrilled to hear Ecuador had replaced Maui as our destination. So now we had transportation to/from Ecuador but no plan for what to do during the 8 day trip. We had no where to stay and no specific itinerary. This is exactly opposite of my God-given nature. Our prior trips, including the one to Disney World, were entirely pre-planned, with an hour-by-hour plan for each day.

We decided not to burden our client church and instead emailed a list of various mission organizations we found on the Internet. We connected with several and prayerfully decided upon the Quizas Hoy (Perhaps Today) Church Camp. The plan began to take shape, we were to work with Allen and Rocio Willams at their camp for the first four days and then tour the country for the remaining four. That was as detailed as our itinerary would become before we departed for Ecuador. We knew God had a plan for us there, we just weren’t sure what it was at the time…