Summer Recap Pt. 1…

Blessings on the beginning of your Fall Season amigos! It is such a beautiful time back home and we pray the Lord pours out onto you and your families in abundant ways. Down here we are just praying for rain because it has been the driest rainy season we can remember! All the same, we worship the Lord and are thankful for His blessings in our ministry here, rain or no rain. We had a great summer and will catch up on all the action in a two part blog. Celebrate God’s good things in Nicaragua with us!

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We had the funnest visit this summer with families from our home Church in Miami. Christ Journey is family for us, so it was really fun to run around Nicaragua together serving Jesus! After gathering for church on Sunday at La Iglesia Hashem Addonai we went out into homes and delivered food packs to families in need from the church. Sometimes it can be an eye opener to visit the homes of families we serve, honestly the poverty level of Nicaragua can be overwhelming. But through the eyes of a child it is beautiful, there is no reservation, no pausing and being overwhelmed…we are just visiting some friends and hooking them up with a food pack! Praise Jesus! And for us adults it was just a sweet time because we could be the hands of Jesus providing, and at the same time connect with new friends and pray for them. We really had a beautiful time in the homes we visited!

Back at Club Esperanza it was vacation week for all of our students, so we got to help put on VBS for the kiddos! When Club Esperanza closes for school vacations we never really close the doors. The club is a center of hope and refuge for hundreds of kiddos who live in very difficult circumstances. So for this week we brought the fun and the joy and the JESUS!!!

We also worked together at Club Esperanza this summer with our good friends at ACAC church from Pennsylvania. Some new friends and some old friends from past years. That is what is so fun about this group picture. In the center you can see Judy who is a cancer survivor with her family! During the churches last visit Judy was going through chemotherapy while she was pregnant with her little boy. This church family got behind her, prayed for her and blessed her and her family in so many supportive ways. And as you can see in the picture her baby boy was born big and healthy and Praise the Lord Judy is doing well. Their visit just so happened to be the same Sunday that Judy and her husband were dedicating their babies at Church. God is so good and encouraging!

We spent the week together at the school ministering with the kiddos and having a great time. We took over Bible Class for the week and did some teaching with fun illustrations and crafts. And of course what Bible Class isn’t perfectly concluded with a water balloon fight?!?! Not sure how Bible Class goes back home but this is how we roll at Club Esperanza. We had fun with the older classes too, taking them on a field trips. And when you are in Nicaragua, the field trip is to a volcano!!!!

Out at Ruby Ranch we had many fun activities happening all summer long. One of the funnest for the Buzbee family was to have a visit from Waukeenah Methodist Church. This church, just outside Tallahassee, is one that the Buzbee family has been a part of for generations. The history is rich and so the visit was fun not just for the ministry we did together but Krista and her siblings seeing some of the cousins they grew up next door to before leaving for the missions field to Colombia. They hadn’t seen each other in years and it was fun for second cousins to meet for the first time. And the ministry time was great too! Nothing quite compares to a fun day out at Ruby Ranch for kids from Club Esperanza…the kiddos are always asking if they can have a fun day! Well praise the Lord, fun day for sixth grade was a huge success!!!

The church was so generous and jumped right into one of our ongoing minsitry projects. They purchased bunk beds for families from Club Esperanza! It is very common for families to share a bed either with parents when they are small and very often with other siblings. So, when we deliver bunk beds to homes it is all smiles and the house fills up with joy. It isn’t just the children either, you can imagine for a father who is fighting to provide for his family to receive a gift like this is such a HUGE hug from God!

Don’t get confused by all this fun we have with VBS, water slide, balloon fights, and field trips to the volcano….we do some HARD WORK TOO!!! Our friends from Princeton, NC came to visit again this summer. Coach opens up a missions trip to his football team and these young men come down and bust their tails working to bless families out in Los Brasiles. If you have ever lived on a dirt floor (which most Americans haven’t) to be gifted a brand new concrete floor is the blessing of a lifetime. The work was hard, the concrete mixer helped a good bit, the sun was out, but the Lord always provided a cloud for shade…and the work got done! Just as important as the hard work was the way the Lord joined us all together in prayer and encouragement…we had some awesome and powerful times with Jesus at Miss Ruby’s House of Prayer over the years and this summer was no different!

We also had tons of fun watching the World Cup this summer! We watched a number of games with the boys from Casa Robles. It was a huge event down here and everyone here seemed to be wearing a Messi jersey, which we don’t mind because he plays for Inter Miami FC. Our American boyz fell out pretty hard, we watched with our Brazilian friends as their run ended, were saddened when our Canadian friends went out, heck we even sort of were cheering for Mexico (not really!). Aliyah, Mason and I had the invite of a lifetime from some dear friends and actually got to go to a game live! It was absolutely insane…what a summer of futbol! In the end were were cheering for Argentina but weren’t totally sad Spain won.

One of our favorite things is when we get to see old friends! The Duncans were our neighbors in seminary at Golden Gate and some of our best friends from that amazing time of our lives. We spent time together in Nicaragua when our babies were little, then we got to see each other in Oklahoma when our kiddos were medium size, and this summer we got together again and all of a sudden all these children are HUGE! We had so much fun together, we are always so encouraged by them and as always so blessed and impressed by the way they serve the Lord all over the world…God is so good and it is so cool to serve the Lord with great friends. Even cooler is that when they went home they had VBS at their church and made Nicaragua part of their week…the children raised over $1,000 for the feeding program at Club Esperanza…wow and amen!!! Love you Duncans, so thankful for your friendship!

Thanks for reading part 1 of our Summer Newsletter. We hope to see you for part 2 soon. Thank you for all of your prayers and support for our family! To be continued….