By Dan Romano, Brady Swinehart, and Maddie McCreery
Today we began with an American favorite for breakfast, pancakes and bacon. Perfect fuel to dive into our devotionals and go help paint a house for the GO Ministry summer interns. The cool morning quickly turned into a hot day, and we learned some were not completely prepared for the Dominican heat. Bachata tunes and new dance moves were learned during our morning, Dan especially picked up some good moves to bring home to the states. Our artistic skills were finely tuned, and we left with plenty of paint chips and splatters for souvenirs. After painting, we left with mangoes from kind neighbors and headed back to the GO Ministry’s church for lunch.
For lunch we had rice, fried chicken, yuka, mangoes, pineapple and watermelon. After lunch, we spent some time hanging out, playing touch football, catch with a frisbee, volleying a volleyball, and walked around the neighborhood exploring some of downtown Santiago before heading to the GO Ministries Leadership Development Complex (LDC). The bus trip was entertaining as always with jokes from Jake and a great reenactment of the movie “Miracle”. Once at the GO LDC we sat in and interacted with an English class. The kid’s English speaking abilities varied, but it was beneficial for all of them to have conversations in English and for us to try out our Spanish. From there, we all went out to the basketball courts due to rain and played group games of lightning (Brady got a win before Chad), and scrimmaged against their 10-12 year old team. We then got some insight on future GO Sports projects and their operations from a beautiful rooftop with some amazing scenery before a short down pour happened again. We saw busloads of children coming to the sport complex to play baseball, basketball, soccer, and volleyball; because of the rain however, all of the baseball practices were cancelled for the afternoon. Each of our team members were assigned to a sport to play with the kids. For basketball, we rotated players between 4 drills and then a couple drills with all of the kids. After, we played a couple 5v5 games where we were mixed in with the Dominicans.
For volleyball, Ali spoke about empowering women through sports and then led some passing drills. For soccer, a big scrimmage was played where everyone was able to contribute. The rain made the field very slippery, so many people wiped out and fell but it was all in good fun, and everyone was laughing and having a good time. Our time at the sports complex came to and end, and we lived out the saying, “time flies when you’re having fun”. Fortunately for us, we have the opportunity to go back to the sports complex tomorrow and scrimmage their older boys basketball team, Go Roosters! (Our team mascot for the week).
We returned to the GO Ministry’s church for dinner where we had mashed potatoes, peas, chicken, and more delicious fruit. Kyle, our new leader for the week, took us to a grocery store (similar to Walmart) for us to buy snacks, souvenirs, and ice cream. We got to see more of downtown Santiago and experience more crazy Dominican driving. We finished the night with another debrief of our God sightings for the day and Brady and Maddie shared their stories with the group. We had an amazing conversation about how this group has really come together and we believe God brought everyone in this group together for a reason. We had an awesome day today and we’re ready for a great rest of the week.