Ecuador Jungle Mission 2014

I've been on many mission trips over the past couple of years and every single mission trip has been different in so many ways. I'm so encouraged to see the way that God uses people and how the gospel is reached to the masses.

This summer, I had the opportunity to visit Ecuador, specifically the oriente region of Ecuador, about four hours away from Quito with my current church. We lived in a newly built mission home in Tena, Ecuador and traveled to three different villages over the course of ten days, all of which are quite a distance from each other and all of which are located in the amazonian rain forest.

1. Ila-Yaku
2. CampaCocha (the people of this village spoke both Spanish and Kichwa)
3. Cuni-pare (most people of this village spoke Huaorani)

I traveled on this missions trip with a Korean church who worked with a Korean missionary that has been living there for five years and who is being supported by five small local churches in NY. It was quite difficult to communicate with everyone there because my brother and I were the only Chinese people there and every else either spoke Korean or Spanish. Fortunately, there were a handful of people who spoke a little bit of English and I was able to converse with. I was able to understand a little more about the culture, the missionaries, the things they were doing there. 

As a short-term missionary, I acknowledge that I cannot do much there, especially because I did not speak the language well and half the time, I had to rely on my handy dandy Spanish English dictionary which helped me converse the locals there. So in my mind, I was there to just love on the members in the areas that the missionary has already established a church family at. The great thing about missions is that we get to share lives with so many brothers and sisters in Christ around the world, the sad thing about it is that we develop a relationship with them but it's not likely that we will see them again, or merely just a couple of times in our lives. The only thing we can do is pray for them and possibly support in any way we can. 

I learned so much about the missionary and his heart and passion and drive and it made me look at missions and life calling in a different perspective. The missionary we worked with lived a complete life, he was a teacher in Korea. Only after he retired did he move to Ecuador to become a full time missionary and he is living off of his pension. Every dollar used to support the missions goes straight to mission work and not to his own pocket. When I heard his story, I learned that he was impacted by a missionary, David Ross, who had a heart to missions in Korea when he in high school. I learned that the missionary we were working with had a very hard life as a kid. His father ran away from home when he was young and his mother was too stressed to take care him so she went on to marry someone else. This missionary was left alone to fend for himself for all of his life. He was exposed to church because the people there made it fun for him to learn the Bible but none of the teachings sank into his heart until one day he met David Ross, the missionary. Since then, God transformed his life and gave him a heart for missions. Today, he serves full time in Ecuador. Throughout the trip, he hosted not just us, the NY team in the mission home but also some members to help throughout the whole mission trip, about ten of them, all of them were between the ages 14-18 and seems like he has been helping them develop in their faith. He's been training them, doing daily devotionals with them, teaching them christian songs, loving them, teaching them, showing them what it means to be a Christian. I was very encouraged by what he was doing and the impact that he was making on these youth. 

He is one of the few missionaries that we met in Ecuador, we met a handful of other Korean missionaries that moved to Ecuador full time. I was only able to hear one testimony of another couple there because they had time to spend with us during parts of the trip, and they spoke just enough English to converse. It's encouraging to see these older folks live up their calling and go where God calls them and leads them. They learned the language of the people, live amongst the people, and pours into the lives amongst all these people. I pray that God would use my family and I in this capacity or a different capacity as we continuously walk in Him whether its in my hometown or elsewhere. It's just amazing to see how God uses people and how unique it is for every single person. I've encountered so many different people and all of them are used by God in such inspiring ways. People who serve God get mistreated, taken advantage of, misunderstood, but all in all, that does not stop them from the calling God has for them.

This is a link of a glimpse of what we did there. There were a lot of other things we did but this was the bulk of our mission: http://youtu.be/oTr7Hzw3Y5E