Yes, Yes, Yes, playgrounds are amazing! The thing is, down here we don’t have access to the incredible playgrounds that are in just about every school in the United States. So, when our friends from Hope Rising Church in Pennsylvania made the trip down earlier this month to install new playgrounds there was sooooo much excitement, and it did not disappoint!

God orchestrates things in interesting ways. Our friend Pastor Randy and Feed the Hungry organized an amazing blessing to our ministry. They worked stateside with Kids Around The World to get two playgrounds donated and shipped to Nicaragua for Open Hearts, such a huge blessing. Then COVID hit and the playgrounds sat disassembled…for two years! That made the arrival of Pastor Harry’s team from Pennsylvania even more exciting! As I said, playgrounds are amazing!!!!

Assembling the playground at Club Esperanza was quite the endeavor. Sometimes you have to improvise and we used that tree branch you see up there to get the roof up and on to the four poles! It was amazing and maybe just a little not so OSHA approved LOL! Even more amazing was that the team was able to do miraculous work and finish this playgrounds installation in only two days!

Once we had everything assembled the hard part came….keeping the kids off the playground while the cement dried. The timing was perfect and we only had to wait one half day of school before we let all of the kiddos onto the playground and you can see in the video below that it was an incredibly fun inauguration party!!!

Ok, so the real reason that playgrounds are amazing came to me yesterday when I was talking with Perla who is one of our long time teacher’s assistants at Club Esperanza. Sure a playground like this is incredibly fun, but Perla told me something even more amazing. She said…

“Chachi you know what…I think some of the kids have been coming to school just so they can go on the playground, it is so funny. That is all they talk about. Even better is when the classroom is loud and I am yelling silencio silencio silencio…all I have to do is say, If you don’t quite down you don’t get to go on the playground. Immediately everyone is quite! Or when our room is a mess I just tell the kids, we can’t go to the playground until we pick up all the trash in the classroom. Immediately the floor is spotless!”

How awesome is that?!? This play area is going to be such a blessing for so many kids who could never have imagined having something like this at their little school outside the dump in Managua, Nicaragua. We are so very thankful for this amazing team and amazing partners in ministry.

Playgrounds are amazing! Thank you Jesus!

And if you didn’t think that playground installation at the Club was amazing…this team of folks from Pennsylvania also installed a HUGE playground out at Ruby Ranch. Click the picture below to link to the story about that great adventure…and a huge shot out to Pastor Ramon and his son Ray for their expertise and experience that got us to the finish line. Without Ramon’s knowledge from building parks all around the world we may not have made it!