Many of our staff were down in Nicaragua in early January visiting our partners, serving our kids, and excitedly scouting out a new year of ministry opportunities and new horizons for ORPHANetwork. I was with the team for a week, visiting a couple of our orphanages, and a whole lot of our feeding programs. One of my absolute favorite places to visit is a partner feeding program in small suburb of Tipi Tapa named Cristo Rey – Christ the King. It is a sprawling suburb. Not particularly large, actually, but sprawling in the sense that the houses are well spaced, the gridded dirt roads seem to carry on into endless plains of dust (it always seems to be dusty there), and once you’re into the community, it’s easy to get turned around and feel like you’re surrounded.
You enter into the community via a small access road off the Northern Highway, past the airport going away from Managua. Tipi Tapa’s garbage dump is on your right-hand side as you drive towards the feeding program, and like any garbage dump in Nicaragua, you can usually find families, or just young children, working through the trash.
Passing the Garbage Dump on the way In.
You can park your car practically anywhere within a couple of blocks of El Faro: Tipi Tapa, our partner church in the community, and walk in the blaring sun (as there are few trees in the entire suburb) past tin house after tin house, to get there. Generations of mothers sit outside their houses and greet you warmly as you pass by, and when you ask to take a photo, they primp their hair and smile and then demand to see the photo, demand it be retaken because they weren’t smiling perfectly, and then laugh gleefully at the final product. Little kids who should be, but aren’t in school, peer at you over the hedge of their tin fences, or run behind you and duck for cover if you stop to talk to them.
The feeding program itself is fantastic. Mothers from the community have been cooking all morning, and the children have lined up and entered the church in an orderly fashion under the direction of Pastor Marcos and his wife. They sit down at the ludicrously bright tables that are a hallmark of at least 20-30% of our feeding programs across the country, and are served a steaming bowl of tortilla soup with bread and a protein drink.
The family of little kids I know and look forward to seeing are scattered today. Jennifer is sitting next to Heydi, the oldest sister and the youngest together, but Sharon and her brother are scattered elsewhere throughout the crowd. An obviously malnourished young boy is being fed by the most patient older sister in the world, and a few moms have shown up with their youngest babies in strollers, knowing that today the food is soft and their little ones can eat.
Jennifer and her little sister Heydi.
A young girl feeds her little brother during the feeding program.
The children learned a new worship song this morning at the feeding program, and they leave with the words stuck in their head. Each child or family of kids heads back home to their own tin shack, some to put on school uniforms for the afternoon session of classes, and others to take off the uniforms for the day. Others to work, or play. It’s a simple rural community feeding program, but by far one of my absolute favorite places to visit.
