Pastor: Care for Your Home

“But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, 

he would not have let his house be broken into.” Luke 12:39.

Hultner Estrada / Bethany Beachum

Luke 12:39 carries a possibly uncomfortable warning: “Care for your home because someone has plans to plunder it.” It is an imperative that puts us on vulnerable terrain and emphasizes our duty to be diligent in guarding and protecting our homes. “This is a sensitive subject,” explains Manuel Largaespada, volunteer facilitator of the Families program, and he confesses it causes him some fear each time he addresses this subject with the pastoral couples in the program.

Fears notwithstanding, however, “Care for Your Home” has been the continuous challenge that they have brought to the pastoral couples of the Northern region of Nicaragua who have participated in the Families program in the last year.  “It is about a call to action that doesn’t exactly sound like the theme of a motivational conference.  It is, however, a warning that we cannot ignore in these times in which The Thief is trying to force the door,” adds Manuel.

“Our proposition was that the pastors know a lot about how to take care of their homes in the spiritual sense, but they needed to grow in the understanding of the importance of other areas such as the emotional and physical health of their homes,” shares Luz Urania Largaespada, coordinator of this program.

The Families program has developed a series of workshops and materials that focus on the necessity of caring for the home and practical ways to do so.  Among other ideas, “Caring for Your Home” consists of:

- Modifying our patterns of living and practicing “good treatment” as a lifestyle.

- Recognizing that God wants us to have good health and wants for us to be attentive to our habits of exercise and eating.

- Making the decision to break some heavy and unnecessary yokes that produce exhaustion in the pastoral family, such as the yoke of concern for self-image, the yoke of legalism, and the yoke of over-commitment.

Pastors Ileana and Miguel Castillo have participated in and replicated the workshops with their congregation and share their experience in these words:

Ileana: “The families we work with are not always well cared for, beginning with their marriage and then with the raising of their children. But we are seeing many changes from negative to positive.  For example, families are learning to express issues in a constructive manner instead of destructive within their family unit.”

Miguel: “We are very busy working in the church and sometimes we fail to take care of our own home. But we have improved in our communication – we haven’t always been good listeners, but we have improved in this within our marriage and with our children. This has helped us to be better listeners to others who are under our care as well.”

Pastors Ileana & Miguel Castillo

God cares for the birds, the flowers, the fields, and our homes.  He desires for us to be sacred guards of the family he has given us.  He wants us to know how to care for our own homes in such a way that The Thief cannot plunder it.  Care for Your Home!

Digital Literacy

Hultner Estrada & Bethany Beachum

The statistics for “digital illiteracy” in Nicaragua still remain very high.  According to the report “Economy of Knowledge in Central America,” our country ranks 131^st out of 148 countries in regards to education and access to Information and Communication Technologies.  Honduras is in the 99^th position on the list and Costa Rica the 58^th.

Experts from the Science Academy of Nicaragua say that this country is a straggler in the competition of a global economy sustained by knowledge because so many people still do not have access to the internet.  Hardly 5% of the schools in the nation own a computer.

The factor of access is key.  A computer in Nicaragua can cost up to 40% more than in the United States or Panama.  Internet service – that is somewhat functional – costs 10% of what it takes for a family to eat for a month.

Despite all of this, many Christian schools are making an extraordinary effort to reduce these statistics of digital illiteracy, helping the next generation to develop the ability to use technological tools.  Even so they have to overcome many difficulties.

“The computer labs in our schools end up becoming “museums,” because we use donated computers that are turning obsolete,” explains Rafael Castro, facilitator of a network of Christian computer teachers that have formed precisely with the purpose of supporting schools in the mission to produce digitally literate youth for the benefit of the country.  This network goes by the name REDPROCOM.

“We are dedicated to providing technical assistance, academic planning, maintenance, and software and hardware repair, but most importantly, we provide training in the use of “Libre” software which is completely free and is very functional for Christian schools,” shares Rafael Castro, a licensed English and computer teacher.

REDPROCOM, a collaboration with ACECEN (Association for Evangelical Christian Educational Centers in Nicaragua), has succeeded in providing this type of key support to more than 30 Christian schools.  “We are a small team – for now – but we are very united,” adds Castro, who sums up the dream of REDPROCOM in the following words:

-“We dream that our computer labs are going to be the best of the future, we are going to work so that our program works and then, when it has been established and is strong, we are going to share it with the government so that teachers at the national level can also benefit from it.”

Learn more about REDPROCOM and ACECEN

The Nehemiah Center in the Informal Sector

Hultner Estrada & Bethany Beachum

According to the most recent poverty survey in Nicaragua*, 70% of employed Nicaraguans work in the informal sector.  This is to say two million people work either for themselves or are sub-employed.

The lack of formal, well-paying Jobs (those which offer a contract, fixed salary, benefits, and social security) has caused the majority of Nicaraguans to create their own businesses or go to the streets to be able to support themselves.

For this reason, the cities of Nicaragua are characterized by an abundance of small businesses, corner convenience stores, food stands, small pharmacies, tortilla stands, bakeries, used clothing stores, not to mention countless vehicles and bicycles that offer transportation services.  On the streets, too, you can buy everything: juices, fruit, hammocks, car parts, exotic dogs, and on special occasions, artificial roses, Christmas decorations, flags, and political symbols.

“The Nicaraguan doesn’t die of hunger,” goes a saying that describes the ingenuity of this people who never cease to generate ideas and create all variety of micro-business that are the motor of our economy.

Even so, although informal employment has been the alternative for surviving day to day, it still doesn’t hold a guarantee for long-term economic improvement.  The informal employee is someone with few possibilities for training to improve their business and pay off credit and loans.

According to the same survey, few self-employed workers have received support in their work.  At the national level, around 6% declare to have participated in some type of training and only 2% report having received technical assistance.

 “That 2% is where we enter, thanks to God!  That is our little grain of sand!” says Freddy Méndez, coordinator of the program “Kingdom Businesses.”  The program focuses on providing technical assistance, accompaniment, and training in Biblical principles to a growing number of Christians who earn their living from running a small business.

One of those Christians is Taylor Chávez, a dedicated pastor and chicken salesman in the city of Chinandega who has been participating in the business network for three years now.  “The workshop titled ‘The Accounting of the Orange Seller’ challenged me greatly,” says Taylor, “That practical and simple study helped to open my accounting mind more for my business.”

The topic of accounting is a difficult one for the majority of self-employed workers.  They are used to doing the numbers for their business “in their head” or in a small, informal notebook.  This is principally because they consider their business to be small and therefore, accounting isn’t necessary.  Or it may just be that they don’t know how or they don’t see the value in it.

But the practical workshops on accounting offered by the “Kingdom Businesses” network are expanding minds and equipping small businesspeople with some tools to grow.  “The next thing I would like to learn,” says Taylor, “Is how to audit my business – even though I’m not an auditor.”