As far as the...

upcoming year goes, I have pretty much made the decision not to return to teaching. I have spoken with both the principal at my school and the director. Both were understanding and supportive of me in the decision. It was definitely not an easy decision to come to. I will have to turn in the co-worker status with many good friends at the school, I will also be leaving many students that I have grown to love. The Lord is doing a great work in and through NCA Nejapa, and I am excited for the next teacher to be jumping into my shoes.

I wanted to share with you another potential opportunity, which is to work at/with the Nehemiah Center. I know several people who work there now. It's a very cool organization that is actually a smattering of many organizations working together to train and empower Nicaraguans as community leaders, pastors, business people, etc. Teaching a biblical worldview is foundational in their work. It's an organization that is growing rapidly and making a great impact. I'd likely be filling some kind of projects-based job, helping various organizations complete projects as they need help. It would give me a lot of exposure to various areas of development and types of work. I'm going to hopefully be talking with the director in a few weeks to basically hear about how they need help. I've already spoken informally with a few people who work there now. One brought up the idea of working both with the Nehemiah Center and in Santa Lucia (see the last article). I'm not sure what that would look like, but that's what the upcoming meeting will develop.

A couple of things that excite me about the possibility of working there. First, it allows me to stay in close proximity to the friends I've made at Nejapa (and at NCA), and possibly stay involved with some of the students whose lives I've grown a part of (through tutoring or big-brother type thing). Second, because I wouldn't leave Managua, I could continue living where I live and being a part of things that I've been a part of outside of school.

There have been a few other people with other suggestions, as well. For sure there are a lot of opportunities and needs here in Managua. But I'm going to need to feel the Lord pulling me one way or another in order to make any decisions about next year.

In other news, my hard drive failed this last weekend! And me without a backup external hard drive. Nuts! Fortunately I had saved a lot of my school files to a flash drive and much of my music to a friend's computer. But I still lost a great deal of information including photos and videos from the last couple years. I hope I can get someone to recover that information. Good thing is that I have an extended warranty to replace the bad hard drive at no cost.

If you know anyone who would make a great ESL teacher here at Nejapa, I would love for you to put me in touch with them. I want to see a good person take my place because it really is a great opportunity to be invovled with what God is doing here in Nicaragua.

Have a good one! Caio.

Prayer Items

- continued prayer for faith as I approach a major decision
- data recovery. :)
- an excited and capable and ready new teacher