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I wanted to serve in the mission field from the time I started university. But for some reason I think I'm beginning to understand now, the way this year has gone, this has been my opportunity to work with One Year in Mission here. The program didn't exist when I started university in the States, but I always felt that I needed to finish my program there first. So I think God was asking me to wait for this time to serve here with the One Year in Mission team.

But ultimately I started thinking in earnest about serving after my third year of university. I started speaking with my professor. I worked for the Professor of New Testament, who is Chilean, and he told me about this project. It's a closed call. They choose recommended people. Not everyone can apply. And so I received the call and prayed for about a year. And here I am.

So I have a wide range of responsibilities here. I am here primarily as an English teacher and also to work in youth evangelism and with the church when possible. I teach English classes in the Mission Central. I also teach an English workshop for parents and the Adventist school here. I support the English classes as a resource for the students. There is an English teacher here in the Adventist school, but I am his assistant more or less. I work with Pathfinders, and I also work with the One Year in Mission volunteers in various outreach activities in the community and here in the Espacio Nuevo Tiempo, the center of influence. I teach English classes here and support other activities.

I'm originally from Maryland. My father is a pastor in the Chesapeake conference. So that's where I hail from. And it's been interesting adapting to the culture here. I love it. It's great. It's extremely open, extremely caring. But again, because Chile is a more modernized country, this isn't the mission experience that a lot of people expect from short term mission trips to Central America per se. It's more modernized, more secularized. People are not immediately open to sharing directly about faith.

The majority of the population lives in the cities here. So there's a lot of indirect evangelism that happens. And, of course, the people are very friendly, very accepting, but they also take some convincing. So you have to work around the question of Are they accepting what I'm saying simply because they're trying to be polite, because this is the culture? Or, are we really making a connection here? So that's the struggle. That's what we have to learn to do evangelism cross culturally.

I spoke a little bit of Spanish before I arrived. I had the foundation at least from having studied before. But it is a completely new experience to speak Spanish in a country where it is the native language because we don't realize when we speak English, or our own language, how much slang we use, how many sayings, how many phrases we have. We don't realize how quickly we ourselves speak. So when we enter another culture, and we try to learn that language, it’s completely different. Book knowledge doesn't cover everything. It took me about two months, even speaking a little Spanish the whole time, to become conversationally fluent at this point. I am capable of improvisation, capable of preaching in Spanish also, but it hasn't been easy. You wander around a lot of time feeling a little lost, not knowing exactly what all is going on every moment. But the people here are very patient, and it means so much in another culture when you honestly make the effort to communicate with people. One of the things that I've made a point to do, and that I would recommend for anyone serving in a foreign country, is not to speak your own language to an extreme in front of everyone. Not to go out of your way to speak English. There are English speakers in the high school where I work, but I speak to them in Spanish when I can. It makes a huge difference in developing relationships with people.

It's incredible because I feel like it is preparing me better for a life in ministry, which is what I studied for, which is what I trained for. One of the reasons I came here was to work directly with the church, to work directly with an administration that is actively involved in outreach ministries in the community and to learn from that and to study from that. So I am working directly with several different pastors here. I have a lot of mentors so to speak. I'm learning how to use different methods of ministry. And also it's an incredible blessing to be able to be in ministry and to have a second language.