Painting the Sede

A few weeks ago, we had a Fraternidad (fellowship) event to paint one of the rooms in our new sede (headquarters). The sede is a huge blessing because the team here has been praying to get a new one for awhile. Last year I think it was mostly the students on the servant team who wanted it, not our staff team, but it is nice to have a building to meet in and hold our activities instead of renting out a classroom. Vida in Venezuela has partnered with a church, Cenfol (pronounced Sinful....haha) for a long time, and now (again) we share a building with them. The unfortunate thing about our partnership is that even though we each pay half the rent, they gave us a bunch of rules, which we did not have a say in. We are hoping to make it more of an equivalent partnership.

Anyways the servant team leaders had decided to paint one of the walls in one of our rooms. They didn't want to purchase paint, and we only had a little bit of paint leftover from our apartment, so that's why they only wanted to do one wall. So I thought this was gonna be kind of lame...just one little wall, which was on the side the door is on, so when you glance in you can't even see it. There were 2 much larger walls that actually needed painting. On one of those walls they wanted to paint the Vida logo. Since there wasn't much to paint, only a couple of students could go at a time. The first two guys started and I was watching them, and bless their hearts they had NO idea how to paint! Not like I am an expert painter or anything, but I showed them to roll ALL sides of the roller in the paint instead of just dipping it, to go over the wall until the paint filled in, and to stop about an inch from the wall so a more precise painter could fill in. They were also experiencing a lot of difficulty drawing the logo on the wall - especially the letters. I don't know how anyone could do that freehanded. One guy finally finished it up, and it's a little low and kind of off-centered, but otherwise it's great and now all we have to do is go back and paint it!

Most of the English speakers left to go get more supplies, so for awhile I was noticing problems and trying to communicate with the people. It was the first time I really got to practice my Spanish! It was really fun :) I like communicating because you don't have to know the entire language to get your point across, especially when you can use environmental clues. When I was painting part of the logo, I looked over and noticed that the students had started painting the opposite wall! (the one you see first when you enter). It made me so happy that we wouldn't just have one awkward painted wall by itself, and also really happy that the students took the initiative to do something without waiting for approval from us. One of my goals is for the students and nationals to take the movement into their own hands and not need us.