The First Quarter

The first quarter of the Nicaragua trip was great.  We were able to go to the church service there on the site.  Here's a little background about the site.  Back in the early 2000s, Ketly and Vital contacted EMI to have a church/school built there in Bluefields.  They were so eager to begin on this project that several EMI volunteers dug trenches for the foundation before the volunteers left to go back home.  This is not normal for an EMI trip but it is still a huge blessing. After that, Ketly and Vital had the vision to expand the site to also include guest housing and a safe house for young children.  EMI came back to design those as well. Here is a picture of the site taken from in front of the church looking towards the guest house on the left and the safe house on the right. 

A few years after that, there was a vision to build a church/school in Kukra Hill.  This vision was very similar to the vision for Bluefields so they wanted a similar type building as in Bluefields.  Here is a picture of the building in Kukra Hill.

Monday was spent traveling to the Kurka Hill site and doing some investigative work as to what was going well for this building and what improvements could be made for the building in Rama.  We got to Kukra Hill by this type of boat.

We used the boats in the foreground, not the big ones farther away.  It was an experience that not many people will forget.  While at Kukra Hill, lots of great information was shared.
On Tuesday we went to Rama to see the site on the same types of boats that we used to get to Kukra Hill.  Eventually we got to the site and this is what we saw.

It's somewhat difficult to tell from this picture but the site slopes downward dramatically.  This makes for a challenge in locating buildings because buildings need to be built on flat spots.  Lots of grading was going to happen but we just didn't know how much until the end of the week.