All those years of dull high school classes of Spanish conjugations finally came to a reality when I stepped foot into the country of Ecuador. Something I checked off my list of required school credits became my one way to connection, conservation and understanding, and I was terrified. 

I am awful at Spanish, the basic vocabulary I learned in high school served me poorly as I entered into my new home as a complete foreigner. 

I was anxious and scared, anxious that my incompetence in speaking and understanding would convey a poor representation of my character, anxious that the language barrier would hinder any sort of meaningful conservation, anxious that my lack of language would fail to show Christ.

It’s funny how I continue to put Jesus in my small box of understanding. 

At our new home in El Refugio, Ecuador, our days are spent in dirty jeans on rooftops or in the forest with machetes. To accompany a clan of 13 teenage women, the camp has four maintenance guys that direct us, help us and instruct us. 

O’hare: a driven and intelligent man. He is respectful and honorable, he puts everything he has into his work and always does a job well. He is observant and kind and thoughtful and strong. 

Jorge: a quiet but secretly silly man. He has kind eyes, the kind that only have wrinkles stretching from the edge of his eyes to his hairline, resembling years of smiling joy. He is dedicated and hard-working but always makes time to make us laugh. 

Aurelio: one of the sweetest souls I’ve ever encountered.  I can always tell he is smiling under his mask because his eyes get slender and radiate purity. He never fails respond with a genuine, “esta bien” and a smile whenever I apologize for doing a job wrong.

Enrique: a man of passion and laughter. He gets to the camp before we wake up to do extra work in the fields and then leaves as we sit down for dinner. He never fails to crack jokes with us and make the ordinary especially extraordinary. 

All of them don’t speak a word of English and the majority of us don’t speak much Spanish. Two groups of unlikely compatibility have become the sweetest community of friendship. 

Our conservations mostly consist of pointing and motioning to convey ideas or holding up different objects and saying, “¿Cómo se dice ______?”. Sometimes Jorge or Enrique will pretend we hit his finger with the hammer and he’ll put on a scene that makes us all laugh. We exchange the phrase, “¡cuidado!”, which means “careful!”, quite often when they dance around the roof like it’s nothing. We repeat it so often, actually, that it has become a sort of inside joke that we share and yell at each other frequently, always followed by a chuckle. 

In these moments of joy and understanding I am reminded a quote Mother Teresa once said, “Spread the love of God through your love, and only use words when absolutely necessary”. 

I am always humbled by the vastness of the love of God. A love that surpasses all boundaries and all differences. A love that is so much bigger than any language barrier. A love that has the ability to see past the roadblocks to reconciliation.  

I am forever thankful to the maintenance men of El Refugio, for helping me understand the depth and power of the love of Christ.