at a funeral

Last Wednesday, I (Chase) went to my first Nicaraguan funeral. For obvious reasons, this wasn’t something I had really been hoping to experience as soon as possible. Culturally speaking, the biggest difference between it and an American funeral is its immediacy. The boy had died around 1am and the funeral was at about 4pm the same day. This is pretty common.

The boy was the brother of one of the youth kids at Camino de Vida, and was about 17 years old. There are a few stories circulating about how he died: some say he was walking drunk in the street and was hit by a car; others say that he was beaten and stabbed. From my experience with hearing about bad events secondhand, I recognize that at least one of these stories was fabricated to either add meaning to or subtract it from his death.

Kids’ Ministry Conference

Since we moved to Nicaragua to work with One by One, Chase and I have been wanting to go to a conference to learn more about how to do kid’s ministry well. After 2 years, we finally got the opportunity this past weekend. We arrived in Chicago on Thursday and have been attending “Kidmin 2011” from Friday through today (Monday). We went to the general sessions each morning and evening, and during the day we were able to choose from several different workshops. Every class we attended was extremely helpful and relevant to ministry in Nicaragua. We learned about how to develop kids as leaders, how to teach all types of learners and involve kids in a more active learning process, and about the spiritual formation of children. We also met some really amazing people that we plan to keep in touch with to bounce ideas off of in the future.